Lemon by Cordelia Strube Page B

has this idea that he’s sexy. He wears shirts unbuttoned to his chest and wraparound shades even when it’s raining. The girls think he’s hysterical and call him Cockwrong.
    I finished The Mayor of Casterbridge . It ended with a wedding. Somebody had to kick off, of course. In this case it was Elizabeth-Jane’s fake father, who’d figured out he loved her even though she wasn’t his daughter. She continued to think he was her real father, but her real father showed up and the fake father told him that Elizabeth-Jane was dead. Then the Scottish guy bumped into her real father and sent for her. This caused the fake father to take off in shame with a couple of farm implements. Meanwhile the Scottish guy and Elizabeth-Jane started rutting because his wife died. The fake father returned for Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding to the Scottish guy, but chickened out when he saw how happy she was with her real father, and left a bird in a cage for her. The bird died, of course, because no one fed it. A servant told Elizabeth-Jane that her fake father had left it for her, so she ran around looking for him. She found him dead in some old barn, but didn’t sweat it because she was so happy with the wedding and her real father and all that. Happy happy happy. Meanwhile old Thomas was beating his wife.
    Speaking of the Underground Railroad, Mrs. Freeman is descended from slaves. Her great-great-grandfather had to choose a last name when he showed up in New Brunswick so he called himself Free Man. She goes to church on Sundays and sings. She says all ancient cultures involved singing, which was why people didn’t kill each other all the time. She tried to get us to sing ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken,’ which has a nice melody. I enjoyed singing it, especially the part about there’s a better home a-waiting in the sky, Lord, in the sky. Which is pretty outrageous considering I don’t believe in heaven and all that. I was just about the only one singing. Me and an Italian guy called Rudi who’s auditioned for Canadian Idol about five thousand times.
    Anyway, Mrs. Freeman actually gives me decent marks so I don’t mind helping her out once in a while by singing or answering questions. Today she’s talking about the Holocaust, a subject on which I’m an expert. ‘Did you know,’ I ask, ‘that the Nazis ordered all the Jewish boys in Berlin to change their name to Israel and all the Jewish girls to change their name to Sara?’ Mrs. Freeman looks
as though she doesn’t know, which surprises me since she’s the teacher. ‘Also,’ I elaborate, ‘after they banned Jewish kids from school, they killed their pets. Nazis showed up and took the kids’ pets from them and killed them.’
    This gets a reaction from the simpletons, which is unusual. Normally it takes the sound of gunshot to get their attention. Even Kirsten stops painting her nails. ‘No way,’ she says.
    â€˜You mean like,’ Nicole clarifies, ‘Nazis just showed up and like, took their pets?’
    â€˜Before they took their parents,’ I say. ‘And before they took them. Just about every Jew in Berlin ended up in death camps. There were about fifty thousand of them.’
    The bedlamites’ eyes glaze over again at the mention of death camps. They’re not too interested in dead Jews, just their pets.
    â€˜What have we learned from the Holocaust?’ Mrs. Freeman sings out.
    Nobody’s got an answer for that one. Most of them go back to gaming on their cells. Somebody’s blares Beyoncé.
    â€˜Turn that thing off!’ Mrs. Freeman bellows.
    â€˜We learned that hatred is taught,’ I say. ‘Little Aryan boys and girls didn’t hate Jews. They were taught to hate them in school. They had these picture books about poisonous mushrooms, how you could tell the poisonous ones from the edible ones. The poisonous ones were supposed to