FIRST CLASS: GETTING STARTED

     "You've known there was something special about you for a long time, haven't you?"

      Arabella lets the question hover over the classroom for just a moment. Eleven pairs of eye stare back at her warily. This is the first day of class, and they're not sure if she is mocking them. But she's not; she's absolutely serious.

      "Ever since the third grade," she goes on, because for some reason it always is the third grade, "ever since the teacher chose your story to read aloud on Parents' Day. She was so excited by your facility with words. Facility! She even used that word in the letter she sent home to your parents inviting them to be guests of honor at the reading, although in my own particular case, my father couldn't come because he was in the hospital, and my mother didn't make it because she fainted in the school hallway and banged her head on the water fountain and had to be taken by ambulance to the Nassau County Medical Center. If my mother let me down, there was always an ambulance involved; no lame scheduling conflicts for her.

      "But anyway."

       Arabella pauses for a moment and surveys the class: eleven people staring down at their notebooks, terrified that if they make eye contact, she might call on them. She recognizes Conrad from last semester, and she is touched that he reenrolled even though,  especially though, she never felt as if they connected. Everything he wrote was about transsexuals--transsexual nursery school teachers, transsexual police officers, and so on. The obvious explanation was that Conrad himself was a transsexual. Not that Arabella would ever suggest such a thing; the etiquette of a writing class requires that everyone act as though what the author is writing is an absolute fiction.