Cody Marby

As I stole into the lecture theatre, I heard the headmaster’s voice.

“Virginia? “Virginia!” it echoed.

Not again.

“And what precisely is the excuse this time?”

I halted in the main aisle, at the crossroads that separates the east gallery from the west. I banished the commute’s wrinkles from my skirt and repositioned my tie before grasping my rucksack’s straps with both hands. One hundred and ninety-two pairs of eyes watched me silently, like the first constellations that appear at dusk in time to witness the blood-red battle that grips the horizon each night. I lowered my chin and waited. I saw my knuckles were white and my knees were locked.

“And?”

“Sir, I’m real sorry,” I said quietly. “It won’t happen again.”

“Really. You are really sorry. Please speak proper English, Virginia. Unfortunately, that did not answer my question.”

I exhaled sharply.

“Right, sorry,” I said. “Well, sir, I had to take a taxi again this morning because my babysitter slept in.”

“Am I right in assuming your family simply cannot afford the more, shall we say, competent caretakers?” he said with a grin. “I need not remind you that you are, after all, on reduced tuition.”

I said nothing.

“You see, the rest of the children were born in this country to parents who work respectable jobs and must therefore pay full price. Yet they seem to have no problems arriving on time.”

“I—”

“But you? You feel neither the burden nor responsibility.”

“But sir—”

“You have exactly sixty seconds until we begin,” he interrupted.

I made a desperate, tear-soaked dash for the nearest seat. On my way, I passed sharpened glances and amused whispers, covered mouths and raised eyebrows, laughs, scoffs, pointed fingers. I felt unwelcome. Out-of-place. Illegal.

I put down my bag on a table in the back row of the last column, in a seat so far west that it felt like the very edge of the world.

Please, let my notebook not be full. I hope he talks slowly this time. Did I bring my pencils or is this pen all I have? Of course I forgot my lunch voucher.

“Class, in light of certain unfolding international affairs, today I have selected a passage from an infamous yet influential essay. I encourage each of you to use the tools of your ethics and the instruments of your heart to measure the depth and breadth of the statements contained therein—to use your knowledge of history to trace the erosions they have left, the canyons they have carved—to investigate the circumstances that have led to their sudden resurgence in our contemporary landscape. I implore you all to determine with your own faculties if what is unfolding on our Western stage is paltry or perilous, isolated or infectious, history or tragedy.”

I opened my notebook just in time.

“I shall begin.”

He put on his wire-framed glasses and cleared his throat.

“The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State—”

Do I capitalize ‘Fascist?’ What about ‘State?’ Would a Fascist use language the same way as we do?

“—which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as an historic entity.”

I always mix up conscience and conscious. Which one is it? Am I the only one who gets this wrong?

“It is opposed to classical liberalism—”

Again, is this term important enough to capitalize?

 “—which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people.”

Did I hear that right? He’s going too fast.

“Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts.”

Is that a semicolon? This is becoming hard to write.

“Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number—”

I think I’m falling behind.

“—but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation is considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one.”

Oh no, I’m out of ink.