“Specifically, Cress, what are some concrete examples of that flame of life?”
“The coal mine for Walter,” she says. “For William, I think it’s probably Gyp and her superficiality. Maybe even the city, too.”
“Yes, London! Absolutely,” Mrs. Fithern agrees, whipping her tissue out of her shirtsleeve and blowing her nose again. “What about for Paul?”
“Nature,” Cressida answers. “Mrs. Morel suppresses his life-force by making him work in the factory and separating him from nature.”
“And how would you characterize their relationship? Someone other than Cress?”
“Smothering,” Kersti calls out.
“Suffocating.”
“Incestuous,” Cressida adds.
“Incestuous,” Mrs. Fithern considers aloud, followed by three short sneezes. “I would say lacks boundaries, though I wonder if their relationship doesn’t fall just shy of incestuous?”
Cressida reads out loud. “He had come back to his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in his life . . . And nobody else mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was . . . It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not escape, was his mother.”
Cressida closes her book and looks up. “Sounds incestuous to me.”
“Sounds like what a mother is supposed to be,” Kersti chimes in, surprising herself.
“You have a pretty twisted view of motherhood,” Cressida says.
Mrs. Fithern smiles, the way a mother might smile at her daughter if she was proud or impressed by her, or felt she was an extension of herself, as most mothers do. Kersti feels excluded.
The door opens then and Mr. Fithern appears in the classroom.
“Hello, luv,” she exclaims, looking genuinely delighted to see him.
Charles Fithern is a bit of a legend at the Lycée. He’s in his late twenties, tall and lanky, with buzzed black hair and a thick brow. He speaks with the same heavy northern accent as his wife and usually wears scuffed Doc Martens, jeans, and a button-down shirt with tie. He has a faded red, black, and yellow tattoo of the Worcester City Football Club on his forearm, and possibly, Kersti imagines, a history involving the punk subculture in England. He reminds Kersti of Sid Vicious, if Sid had been a schoolteacher. She occasionally pictures him wearing a black Sex Pistols T-shirt under his starched button-downs.
Kersti has always viewed the world from a writer’s perspective, like it’s an unfolding story and the people in it are characters. When she doesn’t know their stories, she makes them up. When she does know them, she embellishes. At the back of her mind, she’s always writing a book about everyone. The Lycée is full of characters—Mr. and Mrs. Fithern being two of the most interesting. Kersti frequently imagines their private life when they’re away from the Lycée—watching Coronation Street together; having afternoon tea in their small English garden, which he planted for her to remind her of home; watching football at the local pub. She pictures their relationship as being quite chaste. Mrs. Fithern doesn’t strike her as a sexual type. She’s girlish and matronly at the same time, slightly frumpy with bouncy curls and a chipper disposition. She’s clever and wry, but not sexy the way Mr. Fithern is sexy.
Everyone at the Lycée knows their story—they met at a teachers’ college in Worcester, England. Her maiden name was Brains—Annie Brains—and true to her name, he thought she was the smartest, wittiest girl he’d ever met. He proposed after they’d been dating just six weeks. A year after their wedding, they left England to teach together at the Lycée.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Mr. Fithern says, approaching his wife with a small white paper bag. “Sounds like you’re havin’ an interesting discussion about Paul Morel and his mum.” He looks out into the tittering class and winks. Some of the girls giggle out loud. It’s like he’s Eddie Vedder or something. “Ye forgot your medicine, milady,” he says, handing her the bag.
“Oh, thank you, luv. You could’ve given it to me at lunch.”
“And miss my chance to see all these lovely ladies?”
More giggles. Mrs. Fithern looks inside the bag. “Penicillin,” she says, frowning.
He blows her a kiss and the entire class goes, “Awwwwwww!” and he leaves.
“All right,” Mrs. Fithern says, her cheeks still flushed. “Let’s talk about Miriam. Someone other than Cressida tell me how she fits into our love triangle.”
Next class is French 2 with M. Feuilly. Cressida has Model United Nations with Mr. Fithern and rushes off, not wanting to be late.
“Hey, Kuusk,” Magnus Foley says, as Kersti takes her seat beside him.
“Hey, Foley.”
She isn’t very good at grammar and she speaks French with an unmelodious Estonian accent, which is why she’s still in French 2. Magnus is also terrible at grammar, although he can speak it fluently. The moment she sits down, he shoves a note her way. It’s a caricature of M. Feuilly wearing a mosquito headnet and a red button that says stop sida, which is the French acronym for AIDS. M. Feuilly is worried he caught the disease from mosquitoes on a recent safari in Africa and he discusses his concerns at great length with the class on a regular basis.
Magnus is an excellent cartoonist and Kersti bursts out laughing as soon as she opens the note and sees M. Feuilly’s large hawk nose, thin mustache, and wiry bifocals.
“Mademoiselle Kuusk?”
Kersti looks up and M. Feuilly is watching her. “Please recite the verb ‘to laugh’ in pluperfect,” he says.
She can hear Magnus snickering.
“Je riais, tu riais—”
“That’s the imperfect,” he says, annoyed. “Perhaps less actual laughing, Mademoiselle Kuusk, and more practicing your verb conjugations. It’s: J’avais ri, tu avais ri, elle avait ri . . .”
After he’s done humiliating her, M. Feuilly tells them to open Camus’ L’étranger. They start reading out loud from the beginning.
Magnus stretches out his legs so that they’re touching Kersti’s. He’s always moving around like that, unable to sit still. He stretches his legs, shifts in his seat, leans this way and that, bounces his knee, chews his pen, draws pictures. Whenever he moves, he somehow winds up brushing up against her. Her crush on him has grown exponentially since last year and she thinks he might like her, too. Although there’s no concrete evidence of this other than their classroom banter, his restless legs, and their Saturday night flirtations, Kersti feels there’s something burgeoning between them.
Feuilly reads the opening sentence from the book out loud and then looks up. “Is Meursault amoral?” he asks the class.
“He lives by his own truth,” Magnus responds. “That’s not amoral.”