Nora, Nora by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Romance, Adult
ISBN: 9780061874925
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2000-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Nora met her substitute English class on Thursday morning, and by lunchtime it had passed into legend. Word leapt from Lytton High to Lytton Grammar like wildfire, and Peyton, eating her sandwich and reading Little Women alone in the lunchroom, looked up to find herself encircled by other students like a gazelle ringed by jackals.

“Hear your cousin’s over at the high school teaching nigger stuff,” Wesley Cato said. Wesley was fifteen and had repeated the seventh grade three times. Peyton merely looked at him.

“She’s reading some kind of book about a nigger who raped a white girl and got shot by the police,” LeeAnne McGahee said. LeeAnne was twelve and looked eighteen, and was much admired for her immobile blond bouffant and her projectile breasts. Peyton had pointed her out to Nora in town the day they went grocery shopping, and Nora had said LeeAnne looked like the front bumper of a 1953 Studebaker. Peyton did not know what one of those looked like, but the tone of Nora’s voice had shattered LeeAnne’s Circe-like aura for good and all, at least in Peyton’s mind. She was able, now, to regard LeeAnne with something approaching contempt.

“That’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” Peyton said loftily. “It’s won all kinds of prizes. Nora gave it to me to read but I haven’t yet.”

They stared at her, uncertain after this unexpected reaction.

“Well, it must be a good book if they shot the nigger,” Wesley said.

“It’s about intolerance and prejudice in a little southern town,” Peyton said. “You really ought to like it, Wesley.”

“I hear there’s a retard in it, too,” LeeAnne said.

“Yep. So you’d like it, too.”

Shorn of their weapons, they smirked at her and sidled away. Peyton’s heart was hammering in her chest, but she was also elated. She had stood down two of Lytton Grammar’s most treasured icons and had actually come out the better for it. A flame of pure power leapt in her blood.

Maybe that’s the power Nana was talking about, she thought. Maybe I have power in my words.

By the end of the day the rumors were a conflagration. Nora Findlay was reading tenth-graders a story about niggers raping people and about other people killing them. No, she was reading a story about two little kids who were afraid of a retard. No, the story was about a lawyer and his two motherless children who grew up loving nigger.

And it was the gospel truth that three of the boys—football players all, repeating the tenth grade for the second time—had offered in graphic terms to service Nora right there on her desk, and she had looked at them and laughed and said, “Not on your best day, you horny little bastards,” whereupon the rest of the class had broken into cheers. And it was also gospel that when the class was over she had walked out lighting a cigarette, and looked back and grinned and made a circle of her thumb and forefinger at the remaining students in the classroom. The

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