The Gladiator Read Free

did. She wasn’t sure about a couple of things, but she thought she’d done well.
    Analytic geometry next. It was interesting, in a way. Annarita didn’t know what she’d ever do with it, but it made her think. Her father kept telling her that was good all by itself. Of course, he didn’t have to do the homework and the studying. (He’d done them years before, but Annarita didn’t think about that.)
    She settled into her chair in the new classroom. Analytic geometry had one thing going for it. No matter what happened, no matter which Party faction rose and which one fell, the answers wouldn’t change. Ideology could change history. It could change literature. It could even change biology. But math? Math didn’t change. In a world where everything else might, that was reassuring.
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    Gianfranco bombed an algebra quiz. He’d studied. He’d even had Annarita help him get ready for it, though she was rushed—she had her own Russian test to worry about. He’d thought he knew what was coming and how to do it. But when he looked at the questions, his brain turned to polenta.

    And when his father found out, he probably would get pounded into cornmeal mush. Not that his old man had been any great shakes in school. He would be something better, something more interesting , than a mid-level paper shuffler if he had. He wanted Gianfranco to do what he hadn’t been able to.
    No matter what he wanted, chances were he wouldn’t get it. Gianfranco cared more about basketball and soccer than he did about schoolwork. He was better at them than he was at schoolwork, too. He wasn’t great or anything, even if he wished he were. He wasn’t tall enough to be anything special as a basketball player, either. He enjoyed the games, though, where he felt like a caged animal in the classroom.
    He was shaking his head and muttering to himself when he trudged off to history. He knew he would have trouble paying attention. He was still worrying about that stupid quiz, and about why he was too stupid to get things right. And who cared what happened back in the twentieth century, anyway? It seemed as far from his own life as Julius Caesar did.
    Besides, Comrade Pontevecchio was a bore.
    â€œLet’s get to work!” the history teacher barked as soon as the bell rang. “Let’s all be Stakhanovites in our quest for knowledge!”
    He said the same thing every morning. Gianfranco didn’t yawn—you got in trouble if you showed you wanted to go to sleep. But he thought this particular Party slogan was dumb. Doing more than your assigned quota made sense if you worked in a factory and made bricks or brushes or something like that. How could you learn more than was in your book, though?
    Of course, Gianfranco hadn’t learned all of what was in the book, let alone more than that. “In the nineteen sixties, what two events showed that the corrupt, capitalist, imperialist
United States was only a paper tiger?” Comrade Pontevecchio asked. His finger shot out. “Mazzilli! Yes, you! Recite!”
    Gianfranco jumped to his feet. “Yes, Comrade Teacher!” But it wasn’t yes. “Uh …” His wits seemed frozen. “The Vietnam missile crisis?” There was something about Vietnam in the chapter, and something about missiles. He remembered that much, anyhow.
    It wasn’t enough. Titters ran through the classroom. Some of the laughter was probably relief. Not everybody would have known the answer. Gianfranco could tell it was wrong. He stood there, waiting for the teacher to put him out of his misery—or to give him more of it.
    Comrade Pontevecchio made a production of taking a red pen out of his shirt pocket and writing in the roll book with it. “No,” he said coldly. “Be seated. If you don’t care about the past, how can the present matter to you?”
    I’m living in the present , Gianfranco thought.