Free Short Century by David Burr Gerrard Page B

my mouth and struck a match against the matchbook, but to no avail. Two more matches failed to light. I could feel Paul laughing at me, both for failing to light a match and for worrying so much about becoming a traitor to my class or to my family. The fact that I was even worried about betraying my class or my family showed that I was much more beholden to Paul than I wanted to think.
    I stood there for another ten minutes. Burned children jerked and spun as people shifted their feet and let their placards fall to their sides.
    Fingering my cigarette pack, still needing a smoke, I looked around this stretch of Connecticut and wondered whether any of my ancestors had ever killed an Indian where the school’s buildings now stood. Doubtful, but it was almost certain that my ancestors were responsible for many deaths.
    There was a boisterous couple a few feet from me, the guy with his hands on the girl’s waist and both of them laughing. Without noticing it until now, I had been dipping in and out of eavesdropping on their conversation. They had been talking about movies and music and occasionally they shouted slogans. The girl reached behind and scratched the back of her boyfriend’s head. Her sunglasses and her dark, curving bangs made her impossibly attractive to me. There would be something wonderful about a world where everyone was equal and everyone shared and no one owned anything or anyone, where I could walk up to this girl and kiss her. Where she could scratch the back of my head.
    Paul would have known what to say to this girl. He had probably picked up a lot of girls right where I was standing. I could feel him taunting me for not being bolder.
    It was important that I start dating someone immediately—someone as far from a WASP, and certainly as far from Emily, as I could find.
    I reached into my pocket for another cigarette, and as I fumbled with the pack I noticed a girl with long black hair. There was something about her mouth that intrigued me—was it that it was wide or that it was narrow? I put the pack back in my pocket and walked over to her.
    â€œCan I bum a cigarette?”
    She examined me from head to toe, making no effort to hide that she was doing so.
    â€œYou look like you went to Eton.”
    â€œWrong side of the pond.”
    â€œI think bluebloods are parasites.”
    â€œWe are. That’s why I’m bumming a cigarette.”
    She tilted her head and smiled faintly. I was impressed with myself; this was the sort of line I usually came up with only after the moment was over. I tried to smile slyly, in a way that acknowledged our mutual attraction as an oblique, private joke. She gave me a cigarette and a light. I took a drag and felt wonderful.
    f
    After the protest dispersed with a long silence, I took her to an agreeably scummy New Haven diner, where she insisted on ordering only toast.
    She told me that she was a sophomore at Smith on scholarship—“my mother wouldn’t pay even if she could”—and that she wanted to be a painter. It turned out that we had both seen a production of Julius Caesar several weekends earlier, so we talked about that.
    â€œThe play was pretty conservative,” Miranda said. “They didn’t make any effort to connect the play to our time. They could have dressed Caesar up as General Westmoreland. Or maybe they could have dressed Cassius up as General Westmoreland, depending on how they interpret the play.”
    I took an unpleasant bite from my burger. The burgers were good at this diner but they were ruined by the damp buns. I usually ate the burgers with a fork and knife but I didn’t want to do that now.
    â€œI think it was about our time,” I said. “It was subtle.”
    â€œSubtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht taught us that when he popped drama’s cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore. Don’t tell me