Free The English Teacher by Lily King

interest to allow teenagers to ogle each other’s bodies. She directed the newcomers to the back and had them make three new, albeit tight, rows. Peter was the last to come in, and put himself at the end of the back row, the farthest point possible from her. The only thing she had ever asked of Brick was that she never have to have authority over Peter, not even for forty minutes, not even for a study hall. How do you break your leg in the tub? She was careful not to look directly at him and yet she was aware of his every movement. He leaned down and tugged a notebook impatiently out of his bag, then the book. He hadn’t even started it; the binding was unbroken. He got a pencil out of a side pocket, then slumped even farther down in his seat. They were equally miserable that he was here.
“What page are you all on, Caroline?” Vida asked one of her best students from last year.
“Forty-six.”
She couldn’t resist. “And what have you been discussing?”
“We talked about upward mobility and downward mobility, how some families are on their way up, like a lot of ours, and howthe Durbeyfields were on their way down, having once been rich d’Urbervilles.”
“I see,” she said, chastened. Maybe there was more teaching happening in Lydia’s classroom than she had realized. “Well then, you’ll be able to help us. We were just talking about the parallels between Tess and the Vale of Blakemore, the way she emerges as a sort of living doppelganger, if you will, to the land itself. The Vale is sheltered and set apart, constructed on a more delicate scale, and—this is where we left off—not dry but green and fertile. Kristina, you’ve had a few extra minutes to think about that, what say you?” She didn’t know if it was Peter or a sudden sense of competition with Lydia that was making her show off a bit.
Kristina peered into her book.
“Let’s hear one of Hardy’s descriptions of her.”
She tussled with a few pages but came up with nothing. Here was an intelligent girl who’d let her boobs grow bigger than her brain.
Vida glanced at the clock. Half the period was over. She hadn’t taught them a thing. “Here. Page twenty-six. ‘As she walked along today, for all her bouncing, handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.’” She looked up from the passage to see if there were signs of comprehension anywhere. A piece of her hair had fallen across her cheek and she pushed it away. By mistake she caught eyes with Peter, who seemed to be not just looking at her but seeing her, seeing through her taut face to one of her own younger selves, the seven-year-old who lost her two front teeth at the same time and never stopped smiling about it. She remembered exactly how it felt, the two tender pockets in her gums and the noises she could get her tongue to make with them. She forgot where she was going with this. “Can anyone find anything else about Tess? Mark?”
“It says, ‘She was a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to color and shape.’”
“How old is Tess?” There. That’s where she was going.
“It doesn’t say,” Michael said.
“Take a guess,” Vida said. She was aware of speaking only to the side of the room Peter was not on. It was utterly unnerving, having him in her classroom. Without saying a word, he seemed to bring a sort of skepticism to the place, the only place where she was truly comfortable.
“Sixteen?”
“Why?”
“You said guess.”
“She’s part woman and part girl,” Helen said.
“Good. And her mouth is a peony. Know what a peony is?”
“A flower?”
“Yes, a fat red flower. This girl is blossoming. She’s ripe. She’s fresh. She’s like those green fields of Marlott.” She was trying to look past them all, out the window,