Beet Read Free Page B

walking away.
    â€œIdeals. They’re so important,” said Bollovate. “Don’t you think so?” He gave Peace his I’m-very-concerned look. “I’d like to say think it over, Professor. But there’s no time. Yes or no? In or out?”
    Afterward, Peace phoned Livi at the hospital.
    â€œSo it wasn’t bad news. It was worse,” she said. “By the way, we’re having goose for dinner. How do you like it cooked?”

CHAPTER 2
    â€œSHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT!” SAID THE POET MATHA POLITE (pron. “Pole-eet”) when she learned of the trustees’ decision and of Professor Porterfield’s assignment to save Beet from extinction. This knowledge came to her approximately two minutes after it had come to Peace himself, since nothing moves faster than a rumor in a college, even when the rumor proves true and is not about sex.
    Matha first shouted her reaction to herself, then to the group of her fellow student radicals gathered in her dorm room in Chillingworth. (All the dorms had names that froze the blood—Chillingworth, Fordyce, Snowe, Coldenham, Sleeting, and Frost.) They lolled on the floor and on the bed, under posters of Che, Dr. Dre, Oprah, and Simon Cowell, and listened to their leader. “Shitshitshitshitshit!” she said again. This turn of affairs represented a catastrophe.
    â€œOkay.” She rubbed her hands together. “If they’re not going to close the college, then we’ll do it for them!”—met with murmurs of assent and one or two yeahs.
    If ambition had a face, it would be Matha’s. It was small and tight about the skull, masked by an expression blending mere competence with want. Her hair was the color of mixed nuts, wornshort and close like a helmet. Her eyes were brown and burned like coals in ash, but without light until she had need of it. Her mouth looked poised and loaded like a crossbow; the whole head pushed forward as if about to fire. It was her stridency that accounted for her appeal, both sexual and political, and her gift of fury. In high school she tried out for Lady Macbeth but lost the role because she was too ruthless.
    â€œMatha! Did you hear? Profesor Porterfield is going to save the college”—a shout from outside the dorm, directly below her window.
    â€œIs that Akim?” asked Peter Bagtoothian, the one bona fide thug in Matha’s group. “May I go down and kill him?”
    â€œHe’s just hot for me. We have more important business.”
    Matha was a transfer student from Magnolia Blossom College in Balloo, Virginia, her hometown, and reigned as Queen of the May Flowers, the highest honor Magnolia Blossom bestowed. At her coronation she’d worn a pale blue antebellum ball gown with yellow rosettes at the breasts and spread her hoop skirts on the college green like Arabian tents, as ladies-in-waiting dried the beads of perspiration on her brow, waving wide white pleated fans. In those days, she was a different Matha Polite. She kept horses, owned an impressive collection of expensive pearls given her by various beaus of excellent if profligate local breeding, was elected social chairperson of her sorority, and looked forward to a life in a big white pillared Georgian house in Balloo similar to that of her mama and daddy, where she would decorate dinner party invitations with floret embossments, prance to church on the arm of her handsome chosen husband-to-be, Dawb Dubelle, and primp her daughters for their comings-out at the Balloo Cotton Cotillion, where she too came out, as had her older sister Kathy, her mama Luelle, and her grandmamma Bluelle before her.
    At the time, she also spoke with a thick-as-custard southern alto, with which, it was said, she could coax the male birds from their nests, and often did. “A girl like you could sell a man anything, honey,” her father, Beaulieu Polite, the most successful real estatebroker in Virginia, told her more