The End of School
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4744785 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Akhim Y Cabey (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 404-413 |
| Publication date | 2003-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Callaloo (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/cal.2003.0035 |
| OpenAlex | W2085384009 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him—I had been silently, perhaps frantically, memorizing Mark Anthony's lines the morning Victoria's face appeared at the back window of my Biology class. I folded the corner of the page and closed the book. Without getting a bathroom pass from the teacher, I left the room and met my girl at the end of the hall near the broken water fountain, where we would make out every day before the bells parted us for class. "Tracelyn's gonna catch a beat down today," she said, heaved her foot on the fountain's edge and tightened the laces of her small, black sneaker. Normally, Victoria wore red lipstick, tight blue jeans, and long sweaters that draped over her wide hips and behind, and made her breasts look like bumps. That day, she wore baggy gray sweats. Her lips were their ordinary brown. The long, oily strands of hair, which had veiled a scar at the center of her forehead, were fastened in a tight bun behind her head. The mark actually curved down from her hairline into a crescent, and seeing her like this suddenly disgusted me, and I could feel the distaste rising in my face, and so could she. Her eyes said, this is who I am, but Victoria was also a dramatic girl, an actress, given to fits of outrageous, wet kisses and multiple-paged love letters, and I believed I loved her. The drama between she and Tracelyn had finally come to fruition for all of us: if Victoria lost the fight, a kid named Bruce—her sworn guardian—whose hands looked like they were made for palming basketballs and choking tree trunks, would somehow blame me, and take it out on my bony ass. A sighing fuck shot through my gut. I had to recite a Shakespearean monologue later in the day and this ghetto nonsense was the last thing I needed on my mind
Art · Art history · Chorus · Fountain · Girl · Literature · Praise · Visual arts · Historical and modern epidemiology studies · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.09 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2004 - 2004 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |