Chapter 63

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
—Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones

“THE TYPICAL CLIMAX of a Shakespearean play comes in the third act.” There were a few titters in class and I had to think Ms. Levy knew exactly what she’d just said. “And that is where we find the death of Caesar and Marc Antony’s rousing speech, ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.’ In a space of ten minutes, we see Marc Antony turn a crowd from fans of Brutus and Cassius to a mob bent on revenge. Who would like to compare the argument of Brutus to the argument of Marc Antony?”

The discussion was a little lame. I glanced over at Brittany and she was writing in her literary journal. I supposed I could do the same. I opened it.

“Jacob? What is your assessment of Marc Antony’s argument?” Ms. Levy asked. Damn! I need to put together a coherent thought that doesn’t include salsa dancing with Brittany yesterday.

“Oh. Well, I don’t think it was very good. In fact, it shows everything about why it is futile to argue. He has a few points that contradict what Brutus said at the beginning of the scene, but mostly he relies on tearing down Brutus and Cassius, not on refuting the arguments. He constantly uses the refrain ‘honorable men’ to cast doubt in the citizens’ eyes as to whether they are really honorable. He says he isn’t there to praise Caesar but that is what he does. He says Brutus is an honorable man and then concludes by saying judgment is fled to brutish beasts. I’d say off-hand, both Brutus and Marc Antony belong in a US Presidential election to see whose smear is most popular with the voters while neither of them actually offer any positive actions.”

“Well! That is an unexpected declaration. But not inappropriate. Even in great literature, satire and parody have been shown as means to political ends. The worst of it is seen when it simply degenerates to name-calling. However, we have seen in our own partisan politics exactly the same rabble-rousing that Jacob has pointed out from Marc Antony’s speech. This week, I want you to spend time thinking through a logical argument on a US policy that will convince your classmates you are right. In order to have a choice in the matter, you will divide into two-person teams, select an issue from those in your syllabus, and each take a different side. You are to agree on the subject and which of you will take which side, but write your argument independently. You are not to read each other’s work until read in class. We will begin readings of your argumentative writing on Monday. There’s the bell. Class dismissed.”

Brittany took my hand as soon as I stood up. I really liked having girlfriends in my different classes and walking hand-in-hand with them down the hall. And besides, both Brittany and I had nearly come while we were dancing with Sophie yesterday. It was a new dimension to salsa dancing and we were all learning how to dance in threesomes. But Sophie... le sigh.

“Well, partner? What shall we have as our topic?” she asked.

“Are you sure we want each other as opponents in this? Seems like we should have someone to argue against that we don’t care about quite as much.”

“We aren’t going to get into personal name-calling. I think that’s why Ms. Levy said we weren’t supposed to see each other’s work until we present it. That way we can only attack the subject and not each other.”

“When you put it that way, I can see the sense in it. Let’s think about it and talk at lunch,” I suggested.

“Hey, you two!” Rachel said as she caught up with us. She gave Brittany a quick kiss on the cheek and Brittany headed off to her class while Rachel and I headed for Trig holding hands.

“Maybe we could all four use the same subject and then the pros can work together and the cons can work together,” Beca said at the table. She and Desi were in a different section of Ms. Levy’s Honors English 10.

“Not sure that would be a good idea,” Brittany said. “I don’t mean the part about choosing the same subject. I mean about working together on the presentation. I’m pretty sure Ms. Levy would spot it if we came in with two similar arguments on the same topic.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t think we should try to work together that way, but maybe our opposite number could proofread for us.”

“What would happen if we worked with the opposite opinion,” Desi said. “So, we can formulate arguments against the other team’s contrary position. I mean, Brittany and Beca take the pro, Jacob and I take the con. Jacob can’t work with Brittany because she can’t see what he’s written in advance. I can’t work with Jacob because it would end up having two arguments that were too similar. So, Jacob takes the con and works with Beca on the pro. We have an opposite to argue with in advance. She might come up with a completely different argument, though, than what the other team would.”

“I think you’re onto something, sweetheart.”

“How about if I get on you?” she asked. “And ride. Forty-seven.” Desi kept counting down the days until she turns sixteen.

Not to belittle high school, but that pretty much set the tone for the next week. High school, dating, running—they all are like I’m told war is: Moments of abject terror followed by days or weeks of incessant boredom. The routine of the day didn’t allow for huge amounts of flexibility. Up at five to meet Nanette and go running. It seemed she spent a lot more of our runs actually running with me instead of ahead of me. I knew she also ran in the evening and was training herself for the Hoosier Marathon in Bloomington Thanksgiving Weekend. She’d already talked Livy and me into registering for the 10k that weekend if we could get our parents to agree to let us go. Even thinking about a weekend in Southern Indiana with Nanette and Livy made me hard.

Then it was off to school. Rachel usually swung by in her Yaris to pick me up for school and we tried to make it early enough that we could spend five minutes kissing in the car before we had to go in. From seven-forty-five till two-thirty, we endured the packing of our brains. And I don’t mean school wasn’t interesting. I felt that I had some really good teachers this year. I’d mostly shaken off my petrified eighty-year-old mind and was able to absorb new information like I had ... when I was a teenager. I’d read most of the books we would study in English, so that part went quickly. Writing the essays and papers was more time-consuming and I was focused on honing my writing skills. I had a new appreciation for grammar.

Pre-Calc/Trig was going well and Rachel and I invited the other sophomores to our Monday night study sessions so we could help them with Geometry. I thought I might stop taking the advanced math courses after this one. I could do Calculus next year, but it was taking more time the more I progressed. Since we had to have a computational component every year, I thought I might take accounting next year and perhaps statistics the following year.

Biology was the subject I had to force myself to study. Not that it was difficult, but I just wasn’t interested. I’d take Chemistry next year and finish out my senior year with Physics. Latin, on the other hand, was new and enjoyable. I was beginning to see where many of our words came from and since it was a language that was essentially classic and not conversational, I was able to focus on it more in the abstract.

AP US History with Beca was probably the class I considered most critical this year. It was my gateway into today’s culture. There were subtle differences in our history. There was still an aspect of religious freedom in the founding of the country, but far more emphasis was placed on political suppression and persecution than on religious oppression. It was the intellectual front that debated the wisdom of the Constitution and the deep south was very nearly not invited to join the new nation. The South clung to ideas of becoming nobility, setting up religious states, and maintaining slavery. Those three things continued to be the battlefield right up through the Civil War, fought as much to end religious domination and a very non-representative rule of the Gentlemen, as about ending slavery. I had a lot to learn about the alternate reality in which I lived.

My time of peace during the day was Music Theory and Composition. I downloaded new music onto my iPhone every day and spent time on the bus and even time running with my earbuds plugged in. We’d moved to classical music history and a lot of our class time was spent listening and identifying themes. I soon discovered that I could relate certain Latin words I was learning to musical phrases. Not just the musical notation, but simply that I was memorizing certain words at the same time I was memorizing musical phrases. I often spent the end of my day with my guitar, picking out the music I’d heard while reciting the day’s vocabulary.

And finally, I was learning basic business from an independent perspective in Introduction to Entrepreneurship. One of the key concepts Mr. Bryce was getting across was that being in business was not the business. We needed to develop procedures and methods that made managing the business secondary to conducting the business or we would have nothing but numbers on the paper and no product or service to sell. Desi was helpful in our Tuesday night study sessions. And motivated. She wanted to make sure we had the business concepts down so we could go to her room and get naked. It was one of my most intense study nights of the week, being entirely one-on-one with Desi.