He sat back in his chair, satisfied. A few of the other boys nodded. Oh boy. I wanted to slap him. One wise-ass like this could shut a whole class down. That’s another thing I knew from fifteen years of teaching. Instead I spoke carefully.

“Well, you’re entitled to that opinion, Max, but that doesn’t really help us see why this story has lasted so long. What it is that people love so much about it. Anybody else?”

The room was silent, and I felt the slow sinking of a failed teaching gambit. I was about to speak myself when the boy with the dreadlocks raised his hand, a bit tentatively. “Um … my name’s Rashid Bryson. Yeah, they was … I mean were hicks in that story, but that didn’t mean they deserved to die. Nobody deserves that. To get shot like that. Just out of someone else’s meanness. I thought that was good, the way the author showed that….” He trailed off and scooted back in his seat as though he had said too much.

“That’s a good point, Rashid,” I said. Turning to the rest of the class, I said, “What does the story say to us about violence?” Another boy raised his hand, and the discussion began in earnest.

I was flushed and pleased with myself by the time class ended. It turned out that not all of the students were arrogant preps with nothing of interest to say—I was going to have to keep my eye on that Max, though. But most of them, as it turned out, were just boys—naive, thoughtful, goofy insightful—just boys like the hundreds I had known. Rashid didn’t speak again after his first comment, but I could see him soaking up the content of the discussion avidly, looking around the room as though these boys held the key to a building he needed to get into but couldn’t without their help. He took a lot of notes—too many, I thought, seeming to attempt to write down everything everyone said. I bet he came from a struggling public school, a school like the ones I had left.

After the class left, I stood alone for a few moments in the empty room. The fall light spilled in with an unearthly purity, warming the backs of my legs. There was a lot of chalk in the chalk tray—five or six full pieces, in fact. All I’d had to carry with me to class was the book I was going to read from and the class list. Everything else was neatly stowed in my tastefully appointed office. It smelled clean. There was a recently vacuumed carpet under my feet. I heard a truck drive by, and in the momentary silence following, a bird sang. Cleveland seemed very far away. I supposed I should feel guilty. But I didn’t.