Something is rotten in Denmark

We are reading Hamlet in English class; I am Laertes. (Yes, Laertes, the one who doesn't get to die, that's him.) The reading is going along fumblingly well, as well as any high school Shakespeare reading can be expected to go, I expect. Hamlet is reading, th'occasional droppèd syllable making me wince, but my own tripsy tongue can't be bothered to keep letters straight, so it's a bit hypocritical of me.

My teacher pauses us with a hand; she is sitting down, back a week early from hysterectomy recovery, looking fairly tired but all right. My mind wanders. I think of hysteria, the archaic kind, that catch-all of female symptoms; the uterus wandering through the body, causing nervousness, illness, general distress. Hysterectomy, ancient Greek for modern surgery. I wonder somewhat tactlessly if she will now be less prone to hysteria over my constant, incorrigible use of contractions.

She is asking a question; I stop daydreaming. What is Hamlet saying here, class? Apparently, Horatio is saying nothing at all, for we are more silent than a stage as the curtain falls.

No one? No one.

I doodle on my notebook and think to myself, Hamlet is saying that one flaw in an otherwise virtuous person can be their downfall. I pause on the "their." To use the genderless plural, or not to use the genderless plural? I am torn. Grammar nut feminists have many such internal struggles. I stick with their. Thus prepared, in case I am called upon, I glance around the room.

Ashley is murmuring an answer towards her desk; I poke her and jerk my head. Go on, then. The silence is pregnant and awkward; someone must take the plunge and quick if we want to finish Act 1 (and I do). She gives a half-shake of her head. Why don't you? I give a shrug and lift my right hand slightly. I answered the last one. I will bite off my tongue before I answer two in a row, I have solemnly sworn to myself a thousand, thousand times. It's best not to attract that know-it-all label more than one has to.

I glance around the room. This is ridiculous; they know the answer to this one, I see it in them. A dozen faces, just like mine, answer firmly in place if, despite the decent odds, they are called upon, nervously hunched in their desks. No one is making eye contact; I know that trick. That trick has gotten me through four years of French class participation points with flying colors. If you know how to use eye contact, you can practically call on yourself.

Right now the aura of not me not me oh please not me is thick in the room like too-heavy perfume. We are AP kids, "the best and the brightest;" we know how the system works and we play it. Quiet, polite, answer if called upon. We all are wary of becoming that kid, the kid whose hand the teacher doesn't see anymore, who sticks an eager arm up and the teacher sighs slightly, anyone else?

That is not to say that we are all secretly avoiding answering because, conversely, we want to answer. We are caught in an odd conflict of our culture and our society's, our school's. We want to be correct, we don't want to be the teacher's pet. It is a strange culture we have built for ourselves--not even the entire school's culture, just us thirty, just us "smart kids," just us here--a culture of quiet understatement and self-deprecation, a culture of envy and mediocrity. We have adopted a third nature, a loud comical shunning of skill and productivity, a voiced envy; it is grafted gently over our second nature, a soulless, hollow, amoral desire for that which is supposed to be our goal, for that victory we pretend not to want; this is bolted solidly over our first. We cannot help but sit here, timid, unwilling to take the risks and fall and fail.

The time drags on. "Do I have to call on someone?" My teacher asks; she sounds weary. Every question is like this, this battle to squeeze blood from a stone.

I think of last year's English class, everybody talking at once, four different conversations; our teacher explaining orphanages in Haiti while I argued fiercely over the merits of genderless pronouns and the kids in the back found ways to apply ethos, pathos, and logos to everything.

Oh, hell; I give up. I always lose this game. "Hamlet is saying that one flaw in an otherwise virtuous person can be their downfall."

My teacher, who I don't think likes me, perhaps likes me a little more, now. "Wonderful, exactly! Hamlet is saying--oh, say it again, you said it better than I would."

"Hamlet," I repeat verbatim, "is saying that one flaw in an otherwise virtuous person can be their downfall."

I hide back behind the person in front of me, glancing around at my classmates' little half-nods of half-gratitude.

I always lose this game.