“I have plans,” I said and rushed into Mrs. Hemlock’s class and took my usual seat in the third row, in the middle. Usually, only one or two people sat behind me, everyone else before me. I started pulling out my English textbook and my copy of the Iliad that the school had given me. We were studying it.
I looked up to see Tonya, Shelley, Veronica, Isolde, and Molly all flowing to me. They surrounded me, staring down at me. A bevy of coed beauties with big smiles on their faces. A rainbow of hair color, including Isolde’s dyed-purple. They were wiggling their hips from side to side, their eyes full of mocking fun.
“Henry,” gushed Veronica, a Black girl with wavy hair. “I really am not getting the Iliad. It’s so complicated. Why does it have to be written as a poem.”
“It’s so lame,” added Isolde, toying with one of the purple locks. “There are so many characters. Like, who is Hector again?”
“He’s Paris’s older brother,” I said. “They’re the sons of Priam, the King of Troy. Hector is one of Troy’s big rivals.”
“Mmm, all those men fighting over Helen,” purred Molly. She was a busty brunette with a wide smile. “It seems so dumb. Do you think there’s a girl that’s really hot enough to have a big war breaking out over her?”
“Like me?” asked blonde Tonya. She wore some designer dress her rich father bought her.
“Well… I…” What was going on?
“You’re not that hot, Tonya,” black-haired Shelly said. “I don’t see the boys of this school fighting over you.”
“Henry would fight over me,” she purred and then fluttered her eyes at me. They were blue like my mother’s. “I bet you would go to war to own me.”
“Why would he want a skinny bitch like you?” Veronica demanded, her hands on her hips. “You got no ass. Guys like a girl with an ass. That’s–”
“What are you girls doing?” the commanding voice of Mrs. Hemlock demanded. “Sit down right this instance. Class is about to start! Save your romantic arguments when you’re not on my time.”
The girls all froze and then they flew to their seats. Around me. They ringed me. I had Tonya on my left, Veronica on my right, Isolde before me, Molly behind me, and Tracy and Shelly sitting beside her. I glanced around, the scents of perfumes, body washes, and lotions filling the air around them, a floral sweetness.
Mrs. Hemlock stood at the front of the classroom shaking her head. She was a blonde woman, about my mother’s age though without the perfect beauty that should have made me realize there was something unearthly beautiful about my mother. Mrs. Hemlock was still a MILF with big tits that her scoop-neck blouses showed off. She usually wore tight pencil skirts with dark nylons cladding her legs, and today was no exception. She flicked her blue eyes from the girls and then turned around and started writing on the chalkboard.
It seemed we would be discussing Achilles today and his famed heel. The rest of the class filtered in. A few more girls gave me these hopeful looks. The guys were all staring at me like I was their personal hero.
“No shit, look at the pic,” Troy said. “That’s her getting out topless.”
“Did he hire a hooker?” Mark asked.
“I heard that was his mother.”
“And she did him before the school.” Mark glanced at me and flashed me a thumbs up.
This was getting surreal as I returned it, not sure what else to do.
“I have bigger tits than her,” cooed Molly.
“I don’t care if she’s your mother,” Tonya said. “I’ll still let you date me.”
“You want a girl with an–”
“I told you girls to be quiet,” Mrs. Hemlock snapped, whirling around. “We have literature to discuss. You have your entire lives to act like catty, desperate housewives drooling over a hot guy. You have this hour to learn something about our literary heritage as human beings. The Iliad is one of the great works of the ancient world, most of which were lost thanks to the sacking of the Library of Alexandria and so many other pointless wars. Two parts of Homer’s epic survived. Just two. The Iliad and the Odyssey. Now, let’s turn to page…”
She started her lecture on Achilles, who he was, how his mother had dipped him into the River Styx to give him invulnerability, but she had to hold him by the heel, leaving one small part of him vulnerable. The one part that would eventually take him down when Paris shot him there with an arrow.
“We know that he was a petulant hero,” Mrs. Hemlock lectured. “Arrogant and brash. When his favorite slave girl was taken by Agamemnon, he refused to fight for days, and the Greeks were losing. You might be surprised by that. By modern standards, Greek heroes could be positively callous and heroic. The view of women, sadly, was not held in high regard in Greek society. They were objects, for the most part, mothers, wives, and slave-girls. The former two were respected, the later used and abused. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned. Every work of fiction can have something to teach us to make us into better humans.
“And not vacuous, empty-headed, preening idiots that spend all their time on the dopamine lottery that is social media.” She flicked her gaze across the classroom. “And I can see that my words are falling on stony rocks and not fertile soil. Pity.”
She was a strange teacher. Most would praise their students, encourage them, but she despaired that we would ever bother to learn what she was trying to teach, which seemed more how to think than memorize facts. She had to give those standardized tests, of course, but she would also give us many essay questions where you had to figure out what something meant. Use your brain.