RED: A Love Story [Featured List]

Part 1: White 2 - Hobbits & sexual deviations from A to Z

"The Germans are here!"

That was precisely the sentence to shake off the rust from the wheel of fortune and bump it into motion in that unstable August of 2012, triggering the events until the paths of Marisa and Marco crossed. In order to understand what the line had to do with them, first it is necessary to meet its author: Aecio Palamedes, the school's former literature teacher. A ruin of flabbiness, he was almost ninety and had become a local folk character. Despite being retired, he insisted on teaching. The old man just lingered in the high school, the years went by and no one ever questioned his permanence there.

It should be noted that in his youth-a long, long, long time ago, before he even discovered his inclination for teaching-Palamedes had fought the Germans in Italy during the Second World War. That fact scarred him for life, and lately brought back memories that were more vivid than the cloudy present tense. During class, with a trembling hand and one pointy finger, he would get lost in digression that inexplicably circumnavigated the Parnassian poetic to land, with a pyrotechnical grenade explosion, amid the Battle of Monte Castello.

So one morning earlier that year, in the end of August, a couple of cars collided in front of the school. Hearing the loud crash, Aecio brayed:

"The Germans are here!" And entrenched himself under his desk, until two janitors managed to extract him one hour later.

The school administration finally released him from his duties for an indefinite period. Hired to replace him, Marco Aurélio stepped into the scene three weeks later. It was a dry Thursday-the students wrote one another little notes, yawned, dreamed of the weekend-and it didn't take long for the buzz to spread throughout the corridors like a shot (to use his predecessor's favorite terminology).

"Did you see the new literature teacher, Val?" Marisa asked her friend Valentina during intermission.

"Not yet. But I'm sure I'm gonna love him. I couldn't take another word about the Battle of Monte Castello."

"Well, I just saw him going inside the teachers' office. The school did the full upgrade: he's hot!" Marisa said.

"As long as he doesn't talk about the war nor show me grenade injuries on his foot, I'll find him hot too," was her friend's reply.

Marco certainly brought a breath of fresh air to the school's strict environment. The institution's physical space alone spoke volumes. Built like a prison surrounded by tall walls, it was pure cement. For the circulation between the three floors in the main building, there were two stairways: in the past, one was used by the girls and the other by the boys. Decades and decades of traditionalism were ingrained in the walls and floors of the institution.

The progressive aura of the new literature teacher, paired with his privileged intellect, irradiated an irresistible brilliance there. During his very first class, nine out of ten high school girls began lusting for him. Marco was exactly twenty-nine years old and had a disconcertingly charming dimple on his square chin. Tall and well-proportioned, with charismatic eyes rimmed by black eyelashes, he was the deus ex machina appearing onstage with his educational methods (and other extracurricular endowments) to save the girls from endless boredom.

There he was on the podium, a Clark Kent with long legs and emphatic hands opening his shirt to reveal the Man of Steel with a dab of the Dark Knight's tormented sensuality, the God of Thunder's Olympian majesty and... (here, each student would sigh and fill the blank with their own preferences, which could encompass from Johnny Depp's smirk to a juicy bowl of strawberry with cream.) In his first class, literature was reborn from the ashes of the Second World War and Marco guided the students on a journey through different periods-starting in Homer's ancient times, when words were strung together in manuscripts and set apart only by capitalized initials, until reaching the digital era, characterized by the atomization of language in unimaginable contractions.