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Tallulah rolled her eyes and did not even dignify Ronnie with turning around before she objected, "Of course Shakespeare was real." She looked to Mr. Gordon, very serious and world weary. "Excuse me, Mr. Gordon?" she asked, requesting attention where others had just taken it.

"William Shakespeare was a real person," she announced, although the classroom did not quiet any. "Every so often people try to come up with some kind of conspiracy about him - Shakespeare was a woman, Shakespeare was a bunch of different writers, Shakespeare was a homosexual - they're all conspiracies. The official evidence is that Shakespeare was a male playwright with a wife and three kids who worked in Elizabethan England."

"And he has plenty of strong female characters," she finished with a bit of a huff. Janice had a point, too, on that matter, but Tallulah felt she'd made it just fine on her own and didn't need anyone else backing her up.

Her arms were once again folded across her chest, the sleeve of her sweater pushed up a little to reveal a purplish bruise on her forearm. Tallulah corrected it quickly and added, "Maybe we ought to read Twelfth Night again, since clearly no one was paying attention sophomore year."

Vanessa didn't know whether or not Shakespeare was real. Vanessa didn't know whether or not he was a woman, or a bunch of different writers, or gay, and she was, admittedly, having an embarrassingly difficult time following the conversation. It bothered her. The auburn haired girl didn't like to be outdone, no matter the circumstances, and her previously silent decree of non-participation was waved in favour of having an opinion.

She just had to figure out what it was first. The rampant intelligence of all the girls (and, of course, Mr. Gordon, who was probably very much not a girl) that surrounded her impressed Vanessa, and impeached slightly on her otherwise secure sense of self. A level of strength radiated from their confident answers, and Vanessa yearned to share that with them. Also, an itch for her own set of Mardi Gras beads had wormed its way into her heart. Mr. Gordon had turned this class into a game, and a lack of beads clearly meant she was losing.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much of substance she could add. The rusty hamster wheel that was her brain creaked ominously, and the hamster, like Ophelia, had drowned itself somewhere unspeakable.

All poor, simple Vanessa could offer was to disagree with Mr. Gordon's obvious sarcasm. "I don't like Mr. Kruger."

Corinna did love Mr. Kruger. Mr. Kruger had standards. Mr. Kruger never smacked people with rulers willy-nilly just for kicks. It was always a just penalty -- and anyone who dared to nod off in his class knew well enough to expect it. (Dylan fell asleep in class all the time, didn't he, but he had the maturity to accept the consequences of that decision tranquilly and without whining.) Some people, she supposed, were like Ophelia and opted to get going when the going got tough. Some people.

"Maybe Ophelia just didn't want to face the real problem. It's not that there was nothing left to live for -- plenty of people in the play had no trouble figuring it out. Hamlet's father dies and then so does his lady love, but there's never any question he has another reason to live. But Ophelia. A man killed her father too, without remorse for having done it. Was she too much of a coward to do what had to be done? Maybe you're right -- Shakespeare didn't think honor meant anything to a woman except in the bedroom."

The reference to a video game brought Tate back from the edge of dreamland; she opened her eyes anyway, like she was checking to make sure that Mr. Gordon hadn't been taken over by some kind of headcrab. She would check for body-snatcher pods or his One True Love later to explain the sudden return to references she understood.

"But Ophelia loved Hamlet," said Tate, tuning back in. She'd been listening, barely, when Veronica chimed in; you had to be prepared to back up horror movie friends, after all, since there were so few. She swiveled in her chair to look at Corrina, and continued: "It probably never even occurred to her to kill him, if she even knew Hamlet murdered her dad." Outside of settings like horror movies, or crime-of-passion killings, you couldn't ever really kill someone you loved. Right? Tate made a face; actually, you probably could. "Women in those days couldn't do anything without ending up a pariah for it. Killing somebody was out of the question. Like, Hamlet was the Prince, he was sort of..." She paused, trying to think of a good example. It was too early, so she gave up and then said, "you know, royalty. They were above the law. But Ophelia only had status as long as her dad had status, so if she'd gone seeking revenge on Hamlet she would have died--well, been executed anyway, probably after being tortured--and have killed her one true love. That's not something to live for, that's a death wish anyway."

She was not much for death wishes, unless they were terribly romantic (murdering your one true love was not terribly romantic, killing yourself for your one true love was romantic) and sort of wondered why Corinna would be. It went down in her book as things that would never quite be explained.

Yvette's pencil stopped moving for a moment. It was a clue that the subject seemed to catch her interest. Like before, she tucked her notebook up close to her body so others couldn't see what she had been working on, but her eyes began to glance back and forth to different people as they spoke. When Mr. Gordon spoke about the various roles that women had in Shakespeare, her eyes momentarily seemed to find their way to his face.

And the beads.

Her eyes did not stay long on the teacher, soon enough bouncing to Corinna, then to Azzo, and followed by Tate. She also couldn't help but catch a faint hint of the loud whisper Vanessa offered. All of them had valid points, and the only conclusion Yvette could come up with was It must have sucked to live during Shakespearean times.

Settling her notebook on her desk, she soon enough sprawled out against the small amount of space designated as "hers" for the moment. At least the subject was interesting enough to listen to now.

During this Mr. Gordon had crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against his desk. For a moment something in his face had softened a little -- it was no secret that he favored Charys Murphy, or that he liked her more than he liked most students who fell asleep in his class, at least, if he didn't exactly favor her. Whatever it was, he looked at her a moment longer, all level blue eyes and weatherman glasses, and said, "You're right," and then, "Weren't they all."

And there, apparently, was Shakespeare In A Nutshell, by Ray Gordon. It applied to just about everything in his estimation: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. He was not a teacher who treated the main characters of books or plays with any particular disdain -- even emo kid Hamlet or over-hormonal Romeo, though if Genevieve was correct about one thing it was that he was partial to Mercutio. All of them, kids in over their heads.

He clapped his hands. He generally did that when he wanted to abruptly change a subject. Since he was the teacher and at the front of the room, he generally succeeded. "Okay," he decided. "The moment you've all been waiting for. We're going to do the scene readings we discussed yesterday -- but not today, we'll do that in class tomorrow. Now you all need to find partners. Do try to work with someone you haven't worked with before," he gestured with some beads, "though I know that if I don't mandate it you'll pick your best buddies anyway, and I don't feel like mandating anything today. It's so tiring. Chop-chop."

Janice had made an immediate beeline towards Vera, which deprived Nora of her usual partner whenever they were instructed to work in pairs. Fortunately, though, that problem soon corrected itself when Genevieve made her noisy appearance next to her, handling her desk as if it were a misshapen, metal-laden inner tube in the muttering, shuffling sea that was the unusually large group of students milling around to find their own partners.

"Hello, Genie," she said, with an airy wave. "Those are some lovely beads, I'm just sad there wasn't enough time in the class for everyone to get a chance at some. It was an interesting debate though, wasn't it?" The redhead had started flipping through her book, looking towards her notes and started up conversation on the text with the other girl, who was dedicating half of her attention towards fixing the heart shape she had made out of her beads and sighing over them.

Eventually the rest of the class had more or less followed suit, though some worked more diligently than others -- Vera and Janice were staring down at their notes like they were watching a high-def alien autopsy. Some would argue that the both of them should be the subjects of an alien autopsy.

The actual course material was shirked in favor of restarting the Shakespeare-Isn't-Real debate in one corner, and there were other, typical, stilted and clipped conversations that started up and died down with Ray passing their tables, as if it wasn't completely obvious they were holding their phones concealed under their desks and checking their text messages. It was always particularly easy to spot people texting in this class; Charlemagne Boyle would cast occasional glares at the offenders as if they were engaging in some sort of class-disrupting Satanic ritual.

And Nora went on with her mourning-dove voice over Genie, who was content to zone out while doodling yet more little hearts on her notebook.

Damian had nearly fallen asleep for the whole debate over Hamlet. He didn't enjoy reading Shakespeare, honestly who did? Apparently Mr. Gordon did. The only thing that kept his eyes from sliding all the way shut was Mr. Gordon's clapping, which snapped him awake.

Partners? He glanced around seeing most of the kids in the class hitching up. Being the new kid in class he didn't know anyone rea- oh wait! He spotted Yvette, the girl he met at the bus stop in the back of the class. With a grin he started to get up to go over and ask to be partners, but then he saw some other kid had made it to her desk first. Disappointed he sat back down.

Maybe he'd just sit and wait for someone to approach him, it's not like he was revolting or anything, someone eventually would...He hoped.