Unforgettable Summer by Catherine Clark

Author:Catherine Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

En français, s’il vous plaît

On the blackboard there’s a sentence: C’est le premier jour de la plus de votre vie.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Or something like that. En français.

Actually I think it’s the first day of Intermediate Semi-Accelerated-Because-It’s-Summer French. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, 12:30–2:00.

I take a seat, and right away a girl who was walking across the school lawn beside me takes a seat next to me. We exchange awkward smiles. She has perfectly straight, long reddish hair and is wearing a purple tank top with a washed-out silver crown on it. I don’t know her, and I’m guessing she goes to Franklin. This is a combination summer school at Edison High, for students from all over the region. The teacher from Franklin, Monsieur LeFleur, is supposed to be excellent. Everyone raves about him, about how he makes crepes and teaches the geography of France with travel videos.

I glance up at the clock. It’s 12:30. Where’s Steve Gropher?

To take French—or any foreign language—in Lindville in the summer seems very bizarre. This feels about as far away from France as you can get. We’re sitting in a hot classroom with the windows open, it’s ninety degrees outside, and the hot wind is blowing smells from the rendering plant into the room. If you’ve never smelled a rendering plant, it’s sort of like spoiled, canned cat food that’s been left out in the sun to bake. Not that I’ve ever had a cat, but that’s what other people say.

This kind of situation isn’t exactly covered in phrase books. Comment est-ce qu’on dit?: “It smells like death today”?

I glance at the clock again. Now it’s 12:35. Where’s Steve? And where’s Monsieur LeFleur?

A woman enters the classroom a few minutes later and quickly takes roll. This doesn’t make sense, unless Monsieur LeFleur is running late, or unless he is too brilliant to take roll and has someone else do it for him—a French secretary. Except that she doesn’t sound or look French. She’s wearing an American-flag T-shirt with a styleless khaki skirt and blue sandals.

I look around the classroom as I hear names called. Steve said he was going to take French this summer, too. I could have sworn he said he’d be in this class. We talked about it a couple of times. But he’s a no-show. He’s not even on the class list. I can’t believe he blew it off. I recognize a few other people in the room from Edison, but I only know them vaguely.

“Good news, class,” the woman says after finishing roll. “Your teacher, Monsieur LeFleur, is ill today.”

People around me start high-fiving each other, and then the woman says, “Therefore, you will be doing quiet reading of your textbook for one hour, and then I will give you a quiz.”

“So what was the good news?” the red-haired girl next to me asks. “Did I miss something?”

The woman frowns at her. “The good news is that you might have gotten out earlier than usual if you hadn’t just been so rude.

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