"Mary A. Turzillo - Mirandas Monster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turzillo Mary A)

MARY A. TURZILLO

MIRANDA'S MONSTER

Fairchild hall looked like a castle, but Miranda Perletier thought the cool
echoes and damp stone odor suggested a water-monster's cave. It was September
1968, Buckeye State University, and Miranda was hurrying to teach her very
first
class.

She twisted the key and streaked her office door open. On the cracked linoleum
lay a big envelope. She slid her granny glasses up the bridge of her nose,
sleeked her long hair back, and ripped it open. Inside was a drawing in black,
black ink: a gravestone, lettered PROFESSOR PERLETIER, R.I.P. 1968.

Chilled, she turned the drawing over. On the back was: SORRY YOU GAVE ME THAT
F!
It was signed KANE.

An F? Never! Failing a student was too cruel. She had never even taught a
class
all her own before. The note must be for a former occupant. She grabbed her
gradebook and dashed upstairs.

She had wanted to be a professor since age twelve. Her impractical,
intellectual
father, who had swept floors at a teacher's college in Iowa, had given his
children literary names: Miranda, Dulcinea, Caedmon. From him she got her love
of stories, her dreams of inspiring students with the magic of literature.

A crowd waited on the landing. Girls in miniskirts with teased hair and black
eye makeup, girls with long, wild hair and daisies painted on their cheeks.
Guys
bearded, with shaggy manes and bell-bottom jeans belted so low you could see
tendrils of pubic hair. A few ROTC types, too, with button-down collars and
naked, vulnerable skulls. Her freshmen. Her very first students. Their faces
were so trusting. Their minds would be like sponges for her lessons of beauty.
She wanted to hug them all.

"Door's locked," said a girl in elephant bell-bottoms.

A wiry old lady in tweed raced up the worn stairs: Dr. Fable. "Not locked.
It's
those blasted Lilliputians. They did this last year, too." She shook her
iron-gray locks like a goddess from Blake's Prophetic Books. Students
scrambled
out of her way. To Miranda she said, "Get back in line, child."

Miranda wanted to pull her miniskirt down to make it longer. "But Dr. Fable,
I'm