When I saw the tall yellow building encased in a square with the grounds and the windows in the roof, I wanted to go back home. Above came sounds of voices. Girls' heads were peeking out of the windows and teachers were walking the grounds.
"Welcome to the... uh... education of the Lemonnier schools, our school is the gold medalist at the Universal Exhibition of 1878." One of the teachers said when she reached me. She had orange red lips, an interesting sharply curved nose and the outward-turning earlobes of a cartoon mouse I'd once seen in a drawing. "I'm Mrs. Guillaume. I know you are Tali, your father told me all about you and your extraordinary appearance."
Extraordinary appearance? I was stumped. What did she mean? That I was ugly?
"Come on, I need to take you to the staff room so you can meet the other teachers."
She took my hand and pulled me after her. We were soon walking up some wooden stairs and into a room where there were different machines. One took up four industrial-sized desks and seemed to weigh a lot (I later found out it was a printer, printing at a rate of around eight pages per minute. Some other machines were a Caligraph and Smith Premier typewriter, a dye copy machine on top of a cake pan of gelatin that made an image (only 50 copies at most and actually called a hectograph), a mimeograph with heavy waxed-paper stencils and ink squirting out through the cut marks on the stencil made from a pen. And then there was another one I was really familiar with, because Mr Buscarino had the same one at home. A letter copying press, which made copies twenty-four hours after a letter was written. Oiled paper. Mr Buscarino wrote letters with special unblotted copying ink.
"This is Mrs Toussaint, Miss Chastain, Miss LaRue, Mrs Abreo and Mrs Allemand... we don't have many teachers to run our girl's school yet. Maybe you'll be a teacher or a donater to contribute for our school. We're also having a suffrage meeting after school and Mr Buscarino said you'd be more than willing to attend." Mrs Guillaume introduced.
I just smiled angrily. Of course Mr Buscarino wanted me to be a New Woman.
YOU ARE READING
Sell Some Lives
Historical FictionIt's 1894... or is it 1904? The years blur together until Tali loses the way to go. Until the future seems far too ugly to imagine. Will her life ever take a turn for the better? Or for the worst...
