Free The School of Beauty and Charm by Melanie Sumner

speed, he went easy on the brake pads, gathering speed after each hairpin curve, flying down the straightaways.F ALLING ROCK signs and waterfalls flew past our heads. A deer jumped for his life.
    Florida prayed, “Oh Lord help us,” and I began to compose my obituary.
    M Y DEATH WAS for my English teacher, Mr. Samuel Rutherford III. I loved him. In my school locker, away from Roderick’s prying fingers, I kept a notebook of love letters addressed to My Darling Mr. Rutherford (I couldn’t bring myself to call him Samuel). How painful it was, each week when I scribbled out the five-hundred-word essay he required, to erase the concluding sentence, “I love you, Mr. Rutherford.”
    He did not look like an English teacher. He drove an orange VW bug that seemed comically too small for him, like Charlie Chaplin’s hat. When he wasn’t teaching, he coached football, and he often came to class in a pair of long tight gym shorts and a jersey, clacking his cleats across the concrete floor. He was short and wide, barrel-chested, with thick hairy arms and legs, and a lion’s mane of yellow hair. A scar ran down one side of his face, inciting rumors. He had a booming coach’s voice, and when he was angry, he threw chalk so hard against the wall that it shattered into a puff of dust. Once, when Celeste Humphreys tried to hide in the broom closet, he locked the door and left her in there for forty-five minutes. I wished it had been me so that we could have looked at each other when he finally opened the door. When he was happy, he whistled.
    He had a fondness for the dingbat and the aardvark. “When the aardvark ate the dingbat’s new shoes,” he’d write on the board, a stub of chalk clenched in his fist, “she threw her Danishon the floor and called the fire department.” Then he diagramed the sentence, making it look like a rocket ship. He taught us compound sentences: nose-to-nose rocket ships, and compound-complex sentences, nose-to-nose rocket ships with shuttles riding on their wings. Nouns, verbs, and prepositional phrases became part of a twinkling galaxy filled with blue moons and shooting stars.
    It was Mr. Rutherford’s job to introduce us to literature. He did this simply. “Shakespeare,” he informed us, “is a great writer. You may have another opinion, but that opinion is wrong. Shakespeare is great.” To my embarrassment, he made us read
Romeo and Juliet
aloud. No one dared to snicker. Shakespeare was great.
    â€œPoetry,” he told us one day, “is not for sissies.” Then, sitting on the edge of his desk, clenching a stub of chalk in his fist, scowling, he recited, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” by Randall Jarell.
    Under his eyes, I began to blush. It was a violent, spastic thing, starting in my chest and rushing up to the tips of my ears. My eyes watered. If anyone spoke to me, if he spoke— Rhoda, he called me for some reason, lips curving over his strong white teeth—a strangled laugh-cry sputtered from my aching mouth, and I’d stop breathing for a few seconds. He enjoyed it. Passing me in the hallway, he’d turn suddenly on one foot and sing out “Rhoda!” just to watch me go through the whole gruesome business.
    He was not married, but I knew that the chances he’d ask a seventh-grader for a date were slim. In order to get his attention, without being obnoxious, I sat about thirteen inches from his desk and absorbed every word he uttered.Consequently, I learned English grammar, but being recognized as a good student fell far short of my mark. Then I switched strategies. I wrote papers with my left hand, so that they were illegible, and when called on in class, I gaped, mouth open, eyes wide, as if struck dumb by a sudden brain tumor.
    This worked. One day, after a particularly fine performance of amnesia, I was asked to stay after class. As the other students filed out the door,