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and the dative case, surely?
Natalie starts nodding so convulsively she looks defective, like a toy they ll have to recall before the head comes off.
 Well, show me next time!
Mrs. Fisher drops the paper on Natalie s desk rather than handing it to her. Oh dear.
 Susan! Lovely use of the iambic pentameter! Top marks!
Susan, a pretty girl with very pale skin, blushes so hard her entire face floods with red color, like blood poured into milk. She takes her paper back from Mrs. Fisher
with a huge smile.
 Scarlett   Mrs. Fisher turns to me.
I smile in anticipation. I ve always been pretty good at Latin.
 A lot more work is going to be needed here, I m afraid,  Mrs. Fisher says. She doesn t drop the paper on my desk: she stands there, holding it, a horrible indication
that there is more criticism to come.
 Very sketchy work. We re really going to have to concentrate on your written Latin. I can see that this has not been a priority for you.
I wait for the paper to fall on my desk so this public humiliation can finally be over, but she still doesn t let it go.
Eventually I realize that she s waiting for an answer.
 Um, no,  I manage.  We didn t have to do any written Latin for the GCSE exam, so . . . um . . .
Mrs. Fisher sniffs.
 So your teacher didn t bother drilling you in it? Very shortsighted! And now we have to pick up her pieces, don t we?
I nod humbly.
Finally she drops the paper on my desk.
 See me after class, Scarlett,  she says.  We might want to downgrade your choice of Latin to an AS Level. That ll be much easier for you. I m afraid that our choice
of exam board is rather more rigorous than the one you ve been used to.
I stagger out of Latin class a bleeding, broken girl. My pride is in tatters. I have been torn and shredded in front of an entire group of girls for whom translating
Shakespeare into Latin iambic pentameter is a light intellectual warm-up before breakfast. Mrs. Fisher clearly thinks I should drop Latin. She as good as told me so.
Bloody hell, I think I should drop Latin. I had no idea it was going to be this hard.
But now I have an awful feeling that I ve been so humiliated that I have to stick with Latin, just to prove that I can do it. My pride won t let me drop it, even though in
class just now I couldn t answer one question right. I was so demoralized I couldn t have managed a sentence as simple as  Sextus has six slaves and Decimus has a
big dog.
I check my timetable. Oh, thank God. It s the last period of the morning, and Lower Sixth C has PE. Wakefield Hall is so old-school that they still call it physical
education and make it compulsory till you re eighteen at St. Tabby s it was gym, and you could drop it at fourteen in favor of just starving yourself to fit into size XS
instead. Great, some exercise to take the edge off. I m all wound up from being made to look a fool in front of eight Latin swots.
The changing rooms smell, as always, of feet and armpits. Eeww. I wind my hair into a tight ponytail, pull on the regulation white T-shirt and brown gym shorts, and jog
into the gym. Wakefield Hall doesn t have anything like what we had at St. Tabby s, our huge gymnasium with its spring-loaded floors and its long tumble track. This is
as big, but the floors are wood much less bounce no bars, no beams, let alone a tumble pit, and the trampoline isn t even set up all the time.
The girls are all filing in, looking, for the most part, extremely dispirited at having to be here apart from the hockey/lacrosse contingent, a bunch of hard-edged tough
chicks with thighs the size of hams and faces pink and weather-beaten from being outdoors in the cool autumn air, trying to kill each other with big sticks of wood. Still,
they don t intimidate me. I know they haven t trained as hard as I have for the past nine years.
I know I sound obnoxious. But honestly, these last few days at Wakefield Hall have been pretty rough. Latin was just the worst of a long series of classes that made me
realize not only that I have a long way to go to catch up to Wakefield Hall s academic standards, but that I m in for a really bad time from my teachers, because they re
bending over backward not to show me any favoritism.
So it s understandable, isn t it, that I m jumping with joy at finally getting to show off a bit at something I actually know I m going to be better at than anyone here?
 Lower Sixth! Hello!  says a bright, metallic voice.  I am Miss Carter! And we re all here to get fit and learn good habits that will keep us fit for the rest of our lives,
aren t we?
 Yes, Miss Carter,  the girls chorus dully, staring miserably at their shoes.
This is not a sporty school.
 So let s start with a nice warm-up, shall we? Get the blood flowing!
Miss Carter is one of those jolly-hockey-stick types. She looks like one of the field-sport girls, all grown up and happily settled down with another ex-field-sport girl in
a cozy little cottage on the school grounds. Her hair is short and blond, her skin looks like it s never seen a makeup wand, and her thighs and arms are as pink and
hamlike as those of the hockey/lacrosse toughs. She makes us do jumping jacks and knee-ups in series. It s unintentionally hilarious. There are more bosoms bouncing
around in the gym than in an R&B music video. These girls are totally not wearing decent sports bras. (I worked out my problem over the summer, by the way. You
get a minimizer bra from Marks and Spencer s and wear a pull-on sports bra over that. Two layers. Squash  em down.) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]