Excerpt: 365 Monsters

My head feels like there’s a Frenchman living in it.

She scribbled her favorite quote rather appropriately next to notes on la voix passive and les verbes pronominaux, merely pretending to faire attention au professeur. The Algerian woman at the chalkboard was speaking a language that Marcie knew fairly well, but today the words were more foreign than a foreign language usually is. The headache that had been brewing behind her eyes was apparently angered by the fact that she had entered the classroom, and for the past thirty minutes pressure had been building and building. Marcie blamed the sparkling tables, which had been delivered the day before and infused the room with the horrifying odors of varnish and plastic. She also blamed the nap she had taken just before class, and she blamed the nap on the fact that she had stayed up too late the night before. And that she blamed, as she always did, on Garret.

Marcie glanced to her right just as Cameron had withdrawn his hand from the vicinity of her notebook. Underneath the quote from her favorite British TV show he had added, “Why?” in such poor penmanship that she had to read it several times to grasp its meaning. Picking up her pen again from where she had tossed it in aggravation (drawing the attention of poor Thérèse, who was trying so hard to make her students understand that reflexive verbs in the past tense are always used with a form of être), Marcie responded silently, “The tables.” Cameron sniffed the air, bringing a rare smile to Marcie’s face, then wrote, “Good point,” underneath. She hesitated before scrawling, “I’m leaving.” After giving Cameron enough time to read what she wrote, Marcie closed her notebook and raised her hand.

“Désolée, Thérèse,” she began, using her most proper French while succeeding in looking terminally ill, “je suis malade. Je ne peux pas rester.”

The little woman smiled forlornly and replied, “Repose-toi bien,” before returning to her beloved chalkboard. Marcie shot a look at Cameron, who gave her a thumbs up (his signature greeting or farewell), gathered her books together (two text books were far too many to drag to class), and left the room. As she filled her lungs with cool, varnishless air, a vibrating in her pocket caused her to shuffle her books and search for her cell phone. Pressing what she knew without looking was the correct button, a text flashed up on the screen: “um, carter’s dead.”