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foreign.
    My stomach hurt.
    And to top it off, Ms Benda didn’t show up for English. A stranger stood at the door, wearing a substitute teacher badge, checking off names as we entered the room. There was a line. He looked up when I stepped behind Carmen Tripp, and then did a double take, before looking away. He didn’t meet my eyes when he asked, “Do you know who you are?”
    I said, “Olivia Langdon.”
    “Of course.” He studied the clipboard and made a mark.
    He wrote his name on the board before the bell, Mr. Herbert. Thirtyish. Bad complexion. Black tie. Shirt untucked in back. One gray sock and one blue one peeking out from pants an inch too short. He carefully put his briefcase on the desk, patted it twice, like it was a pet dog, then stepped behind the podium. The school district scrapes the bottom of the barrel for subs. Latasha texted me before the bell rang. “wrdo.” I sent back, “no kdng.”
    To open class, he said, “You’re all dead.” He glanced at his briefcase. “But two of you will be famous. Hey, nonny, nonny.”
    This is going to be interesting, I thought. Ms Benda had spent the last week discussing symbolism in Steinbeck’s The Pearl , a book that had taken me all of a half hour to finish. Her idea of an entertaining class was to move onto a grammar lesson after fifteen minutes of spirited defense of Steinbeck’s contribution to American literature. The week before she’d done the same routine, except the author was Sherwood Anderson. She practically collapsed with joy while reading “I’m a Fool” out loud.
    Mr. Herbert said, “In the future, I mean, you’re dead. A hundred years from now, high school students will be reading the classics, maybe some of the same books you are studying today, but you will be long gone, so how are you going to spend your days now?”
    Latasha, sitting near the front, said, “Doing college applications.” A couple of kids laughed.
    “Thank you, Latasha.” He didn’t consult the seating chart, but stared at her intensely. I wondered if he’d memorized everyone’s name at the door. My phone buzzed. Latasha texted, “& drnkng beer.”
    “Of course, maybe they will be reading what one of you has written. Mark Twain was your age once, you know, and so was Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if they knew they would be literary legends when they were seventeen. If they could feel it.” He paced slowly from the podium to the desk, looking out at us. “I wonder what the rest of the class would think if they had known they were in the presence of greatness.”
    Latasha texted, “17 yr old Hmngwy on a date—yum.”
    I sent back, “perv.”
    Tyler what’s-his-name, from the golf team, raised his hand, and then said before Mr. Herbert could call on him, “We’re studying The Pearl . Are we going to have a quiz on yesterday’s reading?”
    Somebody groaned. Depend on Tyler to bring up the quiz. I texted to Latasha, “a-hole.”
    She snickered. Like me, she palmed her phone in her lap, out of sight. She typed with her thumb without looking. Beneath the desks where the teacher couldn’t see, a whole other conversation was taking place. I’ll bet half the kids were texting at any time. I once had an argument with my boyfriend, broke up with him, made up and broke up again before the end of a lesson on Emily Dickinson’s “Twas Just This Time, Last Year, When I Died.”
    Mr. Herbert touched a pile of papers on Ms Benda’s desk. Undoubtedly the quizzes. “Nobody reads Steinbeck anymore.” He looked mournful. When I think back on the incident, this is where I started creeping out. I thought for a moment he was going to cry in that way a street person will just start crying for no reason, or have an argument with himself.
    “What do you mean?” said Tyler. “We started on Monday. It was The Pearl or The Red Pony . We got to vote.”
    Mr. Herbert gathered himself and shrugged. “Literary reputations wax and wane. How many of you read