Palm reading.

During American Writers a few weeks ago, I was studying the back of my hand (so that I would not be lying when I said that I knew something as well as I knew it?) and I noticed that a web of cracks had mystically appeared there, a dry spread that felt rough on my lips when I pressed my mouth against it. I have a curious habit of resting my elbow on my desk and pressing my face behind my fist when I'm trying to sustain my attention in class.

I don't like being talked down to. I lose interest rapidly. I mused on my hand, both literally and figuratively, and realized that the Santa Anas that had begun blustering might have had something to do with the state of my skin. What do you do when your lit prof asks the class how much of the reading they had understood, and while tentative murmurs signal not so much for everyone else, you had understood every word?

A couple of weeks later, I sat in the same seat before class started. The winds had died down and my skin had returned to its normal dewiness. I love the way the back of my hand smells at 8:30 in the morning, lotion and chapstick and a close sense of I-just-got-out-of-bed-an-hour-ago-ness. The usually silent classroom had an early nervy quiver, the fluorescent stillness stung with commiseration about the day's assigned reading.

"I haven't read more than a page of the chapters..."

"I have no idea what's going on..."

"We should tell him that this is a waste of time..."

I kept my mouth shut against my hand. Our prof had asked me, when we passed each other outside the library recently, what I thought of the text we were reading. I told him honestly. "It's dry in parts, but it definitely makes sense. I like knowing how American literature was formed." How was it that I was now sitting in a room full of literature majors who didn't get the literature reading?

I listened to the lecture pensively and took notes self-consciously. Was I not supposed to be enjoying this? Didn't everyone else want to deconstruct the text and figure out where the discipline of American lit came from? My sense of solidarity was suddenly undermined.

None of them told him that they thought the book was a waste of time, but I knew it was there. Knuckle to mouth, I stared over my fingers and had to hand it to them.