Read The Radio Magician and Other Stories for Free Online Page B

Rudyard Kipling now?”
    Nobody raised their hand. I looked around. The class was sitting up, watching Herbert warily. They caught the same vibe I did.
    He moved up and down the rows, then stopped at my desk. “How about you, Olivia? Have you read ‘The Man Who Would be King’? How about The Story of the Gadsbys ?”
    “You mean The Great Gatsby ?”
    He leaned too close too me, and his hands were on my desk. The little hairs on his knuckles caught the light. Definite boundary issues. Hospital breath. “No, that was Fitzgerald, another fading star.”
    I wanted to bolt.
    Somebody whispered to someone else on the other side of the room. Their heads bent together in my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t look away. Mr. Herbert’s face moved a half foot from my own. “Even you might be famous in the future.” His shoulders scrunched up, and his tongue clicked against the back of his teeth twice. Then he straightened. My heart pounded in relief as he moved away.
    “Wouldn’t that be something, to teach in the class where a young William Shakespeare listened to your words, where you could observe the child on his way to becoming . . . a shaper of culture?”
    Latasha texted, “bghs ntfk,” which translated as “bughouse nutfuck.”
    What Latasha said out loud was, “If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t want to teach Sylvia Plath. I’d go back and kill Hitler when he was in high school.”
    Mr. Herbert jumped like he’d been shocked. “Interesting example, Latasha. Almost prescient. But how would you know him? Hitler, I mean. When he was seventeen, he wanted to be an artist.”
    He sidled to the front of the class. I’d never actually seen anyone “sidle” before. Peculiar looking.
    The class watched, all of them. Something wasn’t right with his voice; it quivered, and when he reached the desk and actually stroked his briefcase, I could almost hear the goosebumps rising on the other kids’ skin.
    Latasha seemed unperturbed, but that’s the way she has always been, utterly confident. She called it detachment. She’d told me once that you had to be able to step back from what was going on or you couldn’t judge it. When she burned her leg so badly on a motorcycle exhaust pipe last summer (who hops on a motorcyle with a guy she just met while wearing a short skirt anyway?), she said that she smelled the burning skin before she felt it, and it was like it was happening to someone else.
    “I’d have a picture of him, of course. Even Hitler didn’t know he was Hitler at seventeen.”
    “Yes.” Mr. Herbert laughed, and by then everyone had to have been convinced he was not right. “Hitler didn’t know. Mark Twain didn’t know. Twain thought he would be a riverboat captain.”
    He toyed with his briefcase’s latch. Suddenly, I pictured a gun in it, or a bomb.
    “Now here’s an interesting thought.” His finger popped the latch, then he pressed it closed with a click. “What if Adolf Hitler and Sylvia Plath were in the same high school class? Wouldn’t that be an incredible coincidence? Don’t you think a historian would love to see their interactions, if he could?” The latch popped open again. He snapped it shut.
    Mr. Herbert looked out at us, waiting for an answer. Finally, Taylor said in a shaky voice, “They couldn’t be classmates, could they? He was in Germany, and she was American?”
    I texted Latasha, “911?”
    “Did you know that Plath’s epitaph on her tombstone reads, ‘Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.’ If she and Hitler had been classmates, wouldn’t that have been an appropriate message? He would have destroyed and she would have created. But Plath isn’t influential enough. No, imagine William Shakespeare and Adolf Hitler in the same class. The bright and dark, side by side, maybe drinking buddies when they were young.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t have much time. Hey, nonny.”
    No one said anything to that. I wondered if I could text