Free The Man Without a Face by ALEXANDER_

apologetic or guilt-ridden. All I could summon up was that chilling stare that left me in no doubt as to who would shortly be behind the eight ball, and the dry half smile that vanished so quickly that day in the stable. No, I decided, he couldn’t like me. In fact, he must hate me. The thought made me oddly unhappy.
    I must have been thinking about it the next day as we struggled through some awful diatribe by Wordsworth drooling over a half-witted child named Lucy, because McLeod put down the books and said, “If my face bothers you that much you can sit at the table over there by the window.” I realized then that I had been staring at him, and I could feel my own face get hot.
    “I—it doesn’t b-bother me. I mean—I’m s-sorry. . . . I d-didn’t—” Embarrassment won out. I couldn’t go on.
    He got up and ambled over to the window, his hands in his pockets. There was an awful silence. Here I go, I thought. Out. But it just goes to show that you should never say never, or think that just because your imagination boggles at something it can’t happen.
    McLeod said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Finish your comment about the poem.”
    I must have been really unstrung. What I wanted to do was to tell him somehow that I wasn’t even thinking about his face, although I could see, with me looking at him and away again, off and on like that, why he would think so. I tried to get my thoughts back to Lucy, hardly a mind-
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    gripper under the best of circumstances. But I couldn’t concentrate.
    “Well?”
    “Your face doesn’t bother me,” I blurted out, and realized as I said it that it was true. I hadn’t even thought about his disfigurement since that day in the stable. “I don’t think about it that way any more.”
    He was sitting on the sill of the window, staring down at his crossed feet. “Then what were you thinking?”
    I wanted to tell him but I didn’t know how. I mean, I have pretty well perfected the techniques of how to put somebody down or off or out. But I didn’t even know how to begin to tell him that I was wondering whether or not he liked me, because that was like telling him that I liked him. It’s disconcerting, making important discoveries like that in the middle of a conversation. Everything stops while I sort things out. One thing was certain: I’d never before tried to tell anyone—least of all a grown-up—that I liked him. The words were piling up in the back of my throat until I could almost feel my eyes bulge. But nothing came out.
    “Never mind. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy. Continue with Lucy.” He came back to the table and stood looking down at his copy.
    I was really in a turmoil, as though somebody had switched on a propeller somewhere in my midriff. Not knowing what to say, or rather, not knowing how to say what I wanted to say, I looked down at the book and grumbled, “The way he goes on about Lucy, it’s worse than Humbert Humbert over Lolita. I mean—”
    But I never got to what I meant.
    There was an explosion of laughter. “Oh, my God,” McLeod said and put his hand up to his eyes.
    I felt rather clever. “It’s crap, isn’t it?”
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    I knew right away I’d gone too far, even though I could tell he still wanted to laugh. I said hastily, “I mean—the whole Lucy thing’s silly, don’t you think?”
    “No. But it’s a bad choice for you now at this age. They should know better. By the way, try for a word other than * »»
    crap.
    “It’s a legitimate expression of authentic feeling,” I quoted The Hairball piously.
    “It’s also laziness. When you have found ten synonyms or reasonable substitutes then you may use it. In the meantime, as part of your assignment tomorrow, you can look up the Latin equivalents—there are several—and decline them; then you can see how many times each of them is used, and how they are used, in the Vergil.’’
    I was furious. “That’s a lot of work. Besides, you’ve already set