Hemingway Man

CHAPTER IV

My English teacher, Perry as he liked to be called, wasn't teaching us anything cool about any dead authors. I usually didn't mind his class at all, because I was such a fan of reading and his class was made up of mostly reading. Sometimes we had to do grammar. This was one of those times.

I hated grammar. Periods, semi-colons, parentheses, brackets, and making sure tenses agreed in your sentences were all part of the delicious bouquet of suffering that Perry had laid out for us to start off grammar. I went along for a while, but a nagging itch at the back of my mind kept me from becoming fully enrobed in the thrill that was Grade Ten grammar. Perry was asking Stupid Bobby all about the semi-colon when my impatient hand shot into the air. I rarely raised my hand, so it took Perry a moment or two to register the anomaly.

"Will?" he said. "Will! Yes, what is your question?"

"What do you know about Ernest Hemingway?"

Perry smiled and waggled his finger at me. His finger was all loose and wiggly, and it looked like a noodle had grafted itself to his hand. It was actually kind of gross.

"You've been talking to Viktor," he said.

It was fairly common knowledge throughout our little town that Viktor and I were all but inseparable. There had even been a widespread rumour back in Grade Eight or Nine that we were gay lovers. We didn't do much to try and quell the rumour. We thought it was funny. If people were so scared of two dudes spending time together, let them boil up their little conspiracies so they could go about their protected, ill-informed little lives.

"Yes, I have. He says that Ernest Hemingway was very manly. What are your thoughts?"

Perry chuckled.

"All right, everyone. Put away your grammar books. It's clear that Mr. Charles isn't about to let us get back on to the importance of the dash or the semi-colon."

There was a rush of bags unzipping, phones being checked, and a quick rush of murmuring as the grammar books were gratefully stowed. I couldn't help but feel a slight wave of glee, knowing that I had been the one to ruin the grammar lesson, or at least postpone it. Perry waited until everyone had more or less settled down. He was good that way. Most teachers tried to drone on while the class was still in an uproar, but Perry waited, and I had managed to maintain a decent grade in English because I actually heard what the teacher had to say. I wished more teachers would have taken a page out of Perry's book and just waited that second or two longer before ploughing forward.

"Who here has heard of Ernest Hemingway?" Perry asked.

Pretty much every hand in the room went up. Charlie from Laos was the only one that had left his hand down.

Perry looked around the room with a satisfied smile.

"Good, good. Okay, put your hands down," he said. "Another show of hands...who here has read any Ernest Hemingway?"

Two hands went up. One was Perry's, and the other belonged to Henrietta Ferguson. It wasn't surprising that it was Henrietta's hand. The rest of her, nose and all, was ninety percent of the time ensconced in one book or another. It wasn't until last year when Martin Roy had set the book she was holding on fire that I'd even seen her face. I hadn't known that books could fly that far, nor had I known that Martin Roy could run and shriek at the same time with such piercing and graceful elegance.

"There it is," said Perry, sweeping his arm at the room in a grand gesture.

"There what is?" I asked, following his hand and wondering what I was supposed to be looking at.