The Mars Project, Julie Steimle [read aloud txt] 📗

he were any other Irishman he would have slit my throat.”

Jeff grimaced. “Point.”

“Rule five: No late papers. You can, however, drive up to my house just before midnight to drop it off—if you are that desperate for extra time, but I only allow this for the final paper. Anything later than midnight is an automatic fail. No marked down papers if late. It is simply an automatic F. Don’t test me on this.” Mr. Humphries’s voice boomed over their whispers like a deep foghorn. The class murmured. No one dared protest the rules as he laid them out. It was like facing a general.

“Maybe you can get an earlier shift at the burger place so you don’t come home so late,” Jeff suggested.

Zormna shook her head. “My shift really isn’t that late. They don’t even need me that much.”

“I could just talk to Mr. McLenna for you. He still only knows me as Todd’s friend. I would just be helping out a friend—helping them keep their promise while he is off at college,” Jeff suggested.

Zormna shook her head. “Don’t be stupid. The McLennas think you are trouble. Maybe it is instinctive.”

“Very funny.” Now a little irritated, Jeff replied under the masculine rumble of his teacher’s voice as he laid out another rule, “You could always quit and sell that stupid car.”

Zormna scowled. She opened her mouth retort.  

“You two! Rule number seven: No whispering! Haven’t you been listening?” Mr. Humphries bellowed across the room.

“Well—” Jeff started, sitting up straighter in his seat as his face colored.

“Rule number two:” Mr. Humphries cut him off. “Stand when I call on you! You haven’t been listening! You have been talking this ENTIRE TIME!”

Their teacher’s voice carried into the nearby classrooms as he shouted. They could feel the school still around them.

Brian looked up from his rule list, blinking toward Jeff. And Joy turned around in her seat and stared at them.

Both Jeff and Zormna leaned back from the teacher in surprise.

Mr. Humphries marched to their back half of the room like some kind of educated grizzly, fully in suit and tie. He folded his arms.

“WELL?” He tapped his foot impatiently.

Jeff slowly rose out of his seat, staring at the man who now seemed like didn’t belong in his nicely white, pressed shirt, but a lumberjack outfit. Looking around the room once, Jeff shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes, sir…I was sort of listening.”

“Sort of listening? Either you are or you aren’t listening.” Mr. Humphries’ scowl deepened. “What’s your name?”         

“Jeff Streigle, sir,” Jeff said. Taking a breath while peeking once more to the others around him who fearfully hoped their famous wrestler wouldn’t attack the teacher (as Jeff’s pretended reputation let on), he added to show he had no intentions to be violent, “I was trying to listen.”

“You were talking,” Mr. Humphries replied curtly, his eyes taking in Jeff’s face. They traced the scar across Jeff’s nose and his right cheek, then flickered to the faint scars peeking out from under his shirt at the base of his neck and on the back of his arms.

Zormna bit her lip with a glance up at Jeff then her teacher. Brian winced for his friend. They both knew what their teacher was probably thinking about him.

“It takes two to talk. Who is your accomplice?” the teacher asked, glancing down at Zormna’s pale face. Zormna stared up at the teacher then closed her eyes. In occasions such as these, being so singled out by an instructor, Zormna would have assumed he was an FBI plant. Thing was she knew he was a Pennington High school old timer on tenure—one of the few that did not give tenure a bad name. It was one of the reasons why she had chosen his class. She briskly stood up.

Several people jumped, as she had done it fast.

“Zormna Clendar, sir,” she said.

Her teacher gazed down at her and disdainfully replied, “I wasn’t talking to you. I was addressing the boy.”

Zormna nodded, peeking quickly at Jeff. “I know sir, but he was only asking about my health, sir. He noticed that I didn’t sleep well, and he simply tried to—”

“Shut up and sit down, Xena,” he abruptly cut her off. “I said I was talking to this boy here.”

“It’s Zormna,” she put in flatly.

Her teacher didn’t react.

“It is Zormna, sir,” Jeff added, leaning toward him with a degree of warning.

“Irrelevant. Sit down, young lady.” Turning to Jeff, Mr. Humphries said, “And you—”

“He goes by Jeff.” Zormna remained standing, her fists clenching. This time everyone stared at her, hoping she would not attack the teacher as her short temper was almost more famous than Jeff’s made-up history.

Jeff smiled faintly at her gesture. She had struggled with calling him by his assumed name for some time, but at least he knew she was trying.

Their teacher was not amused. “I said sit down.”

People expected a fight. But Zormna sat down immediately—looking put off…but obedient. That moment they remembered that she had been raised a soldier and responded well to orders.

Jeff, of course, remained standing. He was rocking on his heels and waiting for the ‘other shoe to fall’ as it were, though could tell he really didn’t care. Brian was stunned by the notion, actually. Jeff seemed like he was just biding his time. And for Brian, that feeling was little unnerving.

Yet, while gazing at the two, Mr. Humphries took a step back. He stared at them for a long moment, drawing in his own understanding of what and who he was seeing. In fact, he stepped back again to get another look.

Jeff and Zormna watched him as he backed farther, almost to the chalkboard, both growing puzzled. They could see the cogs in their teacher’s mind shift as he slowly smiled. What he knew about them, they didn’t know, but that was enough to make them both worry.

“Let the punishment fit the crime, as I like to say,” their teacher finally declared. “Open your books to page twenty-three.”

Jeff sat down as the class opened up their textbooks. He quickly flipped his to the page entitled Romeo and Juliet. Jeff glanced sideways at his teacher and wondered what he was up to. Then he peeked at Zormna who had merely glanced at the title. She plopped the book open on her desk looking neither pleased nor otherwise about it. But then why would it make an impression on her since her experience with Earth culture was still so minimal?

Mr. Humphries gazed toward Brian and Joy then the other students who sat around them. He nodded confidently to himself as he said, “You’re that wrestler that consorts with Jonathan Baker and Todd McLenna aren’t you?”

Brian peeked at Jeff to see his reaction.

Jeff nodded apprehensively, wondering why Jonathan and Todd were mentioned. Then again, he realized, that they probably had Mr. Humphries the last year.  

“And you’re that girl that embarrassed him last year in the tug-of-war pit, aren’t you?” the teacher continued with a steady gaze toward Zormna.

Jeff closed his eyes with an internal moan. His cheeks grew hot at the reminder of last year’s Olympic events. Of course, this event had been immortalized in last year’s Yearbook with a photo and a caption “Other Wars in the Pit.” In the picture, Jeff had been covered in mud while Zormna stood triumphantly over him, half her head coated in the muck along with most of clothes. She had just wrestled and pinned him in that mucky pick a few seconds before. And he was last year’s state champ in wrestling.

Eyes turned on Zormna, staring though Brian and Joy waited for how she would respond. At first, she had verted her gaze toward the ceiling, pretending she didn’t hear. Though, in the waiting silence she finally nodded so the teacher would finish with the questions.

Mr. Humphries grinned darkly, watching the pair of them. “Good. Then you two are perfect for playing our Romeo and Juliet. That way you can talk in class constructively.”

Jeff groaned and hit his head on his desktop.

Zormna looked ahead at the teacher, nonplussed. She glanced back at Jeff a moment, growing more puzzled by his reaction, which seemed entirely illogical. With a glance to her open book, she finally raised her hand.

“Yes?” their teacher innocently asked, waiting for a protest.

Zormna stood up, per the rules, and flatly inquired, “And how is this supposed to be punishment?”

Mr. Humphries nearly laughed. He could see she did not understand, but he found it ridiculous that their professed Irishwoman did not know about the Shakespeare play.

Jeff tugged the hem of her shirt to make her sit down. “No, Zormna. It’s bad. He knows we don’t get along.”

Zormna looked down at him, slowing sitting back in her seat. “So?”

Jeff rolled his eyes. “Romeo and Juliet were…” He groaned wishing he didn’t have to explain every embarrassing thing. “Zormna, they were…oh, roach…they were lovers.”

While the teacher smugly watched, Zormna’s face immediately contorted into disgust.

But their friends broke into laughter. This was the Zormna they knew. She hated romance. And the idea of being paired with Jeff (let alone any boy) made her revolt. The rest of the class joined in the laughter, finding her reaction incredibly amusing.

“Do we have to do this?” Zormna asked, turning to her teacher with what seemed to the others the inclination to drop to her knees to beg for mercy.

Mr. Humphries nodded, still smiling.

But instead of begging, or protesting, Zormna folded her arms and sulkily dropped into her chair.

They didn’t talk for the rest of the class period.

 

When the first hour let out, Jeff gathered up his things and slipped out of the aisles with Brian to go to their next class, which was Economics. Mr. Humphries nodded to him as he departed, still enjoying his solution to his minor discipline problem. Jeff could hear other students commenting as he stepped out the door, “I wouldn’t mind playing Romeo with that chick. She’s hot.”

“Yeah, but if you tell her that she’ll clobber you,” Brian warned the boy.

“No way! That tiny—?” his classmate exclaimed.

“Super ninja,” Joy cut in, shaking his head as she walked through them. “Raised in a military school.”

But the boys shot Joy looks as if her opinion was obviously ‘illogical’ and therefore not worth the attention.

“I’d still play opposite her. Maybe get in a kiss before she knows what hit her,” the first guy replied.

Jeff rolled his eyes. Idiots like that deserved what was coming to them. He knew Zormna’s temperament, as did most of the kids at the school. She hated boys hitting on her. It was her first pet peeve. He had heard her once say: “Boys are stupid. They only like me for my looks. How shallow is that? None of them want me. They want the image of me.” It was lucky for them Zormna didn’t over hear their conversation. If she had, they’d be bloody welts on the wall. But no—Mr. Humphries had stopped Zormna before she could leave the room, so she had not overheard it.  

“Mrs. Ryant talked to me about you. She wanted me to help you continue your study program from last year. She said you’d get bored otherwise.” Her teacher looked amused as he handed her a pile of books, all from her former teacher’s private stash, including, Of Mice and Men, The Moon is Down, Red Badge of Courage, The Jungle Book, and Vanity Fair.

Zormna picked up the pile, loading them in her already textbook-filled arms. She then painfully smiled at him.

“Thank you,” she said, “and please tell Mrs. Ryant thank you for me also.”

“Why don’t you tell her yourself? She wants to have you join the English club after school when you aren’t cheerleading so she can check up on your progress.” Mr. Humphries gazed at her as if he was feeling a mixture of annoyed and amused. “What are you, some kind of child prodigy?”

“Something like that,” Zormna said. She delivered another practiced smile while balancing her books.

Rubbing his temple, Mr. Humphries laughed in disbelief.

“Well, Mrs. Ryant certainly has