My English teacher, Perry as he liked to be called, wasn't teaching us anything cool about any dead authors. I usually didn't mind his class at all, because I was such a fan of reading and his class was made up of mostly reading. Sometimes we had to do grammar. This was one of those times.

I hated grammar. Periods, semi-colons, parentheses, brackets, and making sure tenses agreed in your sentences were all part of the delicious bouquet of suffering that Perry had laid out for us to start off grammar. I went along for a while, but a nagging itch at the back of my mind kept me from becoming fully enrobed in the thrill that was Grade Ten grammar. Perry was asking Stupid Bobby all about the semi-colon when my impatient hand shot into the air. I rarely raised my hand, so it took Perry a moment or two to register the anomaly.

"Will?" he said. "Will! Yes, what is your question?"

"What do you know about Ernest Hemingway?"

Perry smiled and waggled his finger at me. His finger was all loose and wiggly, and it looked like a noodle had grafted itself to his hand. It was actually kind of gross.

"You've been talking to Viktor," he said.

It was fairly common knowledge throughout our little town that Viktor and I were all but inseparable. There had even been a widespread rumour back in Grade Eight or Nine that we were gay lovers. We didn't do much to try and quell the rumour. We thought it was funny. If people were so scared of two dudes spending time together, let them boil up their little conspiracies so they could go about their protected, ill-informed little lives.

"Yes, I have. He says that Ernest Hemingway was very manly. What are your thoughts?"

Perry chuckled.

"All right, everyone. Put away your grammar books. It's clear that Mr. Charles isn't about to let us get back on to the importance of the dash or the semi-colon."

There was a rush of bags unzipping, phones being checked, and a quick rush of murmuring as the grammar books were gratefully stowed. I couldn't help but feel a slight wave of glee, knowing that I had been the one to ruin the grammar lesson, or at least postpone it. Perry waited until everyone had more or less settled down. He was good that way. Most teachers tried to drone on while the class was still in an uproar, but Perry waited, and I had managed to maintain a decent grade in English because I actually heard what the teacher had to say. I wished more teachers would have taken a page out of Perry's book and just waited that second or two longer before ploughing forward.

"Who here has heard of Ernest Hemingway?" Perry asked.

Pretty much every hand in the room went up. Charlie from Laos was the only one that had left his hand down.

Perry looked around the room with a satisfied smile.

"Good, good. Okay, put your hands down," he said. "Another show of hands...who here has read any Ernest Hemingway?"

Two hands went up. One was Perry's, and the other belonged to Henrietta Ferguson. It wasn't surprising that it was Henrietta's hand. The rest of her, nose and all, was ninety percent of the time ensconced in one book or another. It wasn't until last year when Martin Roy had set the book she was holding on fire that I'd even seen her face. I hadn't known that books could fly that far, nor had I known that Martin Roy could run and shriek at the same time with such piercing and graceful elegance.

"There it is," said Perry, sweeping his arm at the room in a grand gesture.

"There what is?" I asked, following his hand and wondering what I was supposed to be looking at.

"Dearest Will, you'll never really know what Hemingway was about until you've read some of his work. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, maybe even of all time. To read him is to know him.'

I didn't have time to sit and read a whole pile of Hemingway books, even if they were the greatest books written by the greatest person the world had ever known.

"What about the man himself?" I asked. "What do you know about him? I understand that I'll have to read his books to truly know him, but what about some quick hits...you know, likes, dislikes...what he did for fun...was he actually a man's man...all that stuff?"

"A man's man?" said Trevor, or Robert. Some kid at the back that didn't say much, and when he did, it was usually something dumb.

"That depends on your definition of man," said Perry. "To some, Hemingway was the epitome of man, the embodiment of what we as men should all be striving toward. To many others, he is a throwback to a time that is best left in the past. It all depends on your perspective."

That was the big problem, and Perry just wasn't getting it. I didn't know what my definition of a man was. If I knew that, I wouldn't be sitting in front of twenty-five or so of my closest acquaintances asking in-depth questions about a man who'd been dead for forty years.

"Let's say I lean towards the first one you said, where Hemingway is the epitome of man," I said. "What sort of things did he do that made him such a mannish man?"

"Mannish?" said Robert, or Trevor.

"Can it, Robert," I barked without turning around to face him.

"It's Trevor."

"Whatever."

"Trevor, maybe you could keep the pedantic comments to yourself for just a few minutes," Perry suggested.

Trevor's blank stare urged him to continue.

"Pedantic means really picky about the words someone is using. Will said mannish. You had a problem with mannish, even though you probably knew exactly what Will was talking about. Did you?"

Trevor nodded.

"You're being the absolute worst kind of pedantic," said Perry. "For the sake of conversation, debate, and everyone in this room's sanity, let's just let things slide until we really get stuck, shall we?" Perry was up on his feet and on to the next thought before Trevor had another chance to retort.

I had never admired Perry more than right then.

"Your question, Will, is what sorts of things did Ernest Hemingway do to make him a man's man?" Perry asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Why was he more manly, according to so many sources, than anyone else?" Perry spread his arms, gesturing for the rest of the class to join in the conversation.

Not exactly what I'd intentioned, but I wasn't getting the answers anywhere else.

"Thoughts, everyone?' he asked.

No one's hand leapt up this time.

"He was a dark man," Perry said, turning around and facing me as he dusted the chalk off of his fingers. We had this one substitute teacher who came in once or twice a month when Mr. Schottenbreit, the science teacher, was sick. Schottenbreit claimed sickness, but we all knew he was a dirty old drunk that had hit the sauce too hard the night before. The substitute was Mr. Gerber, and Mr. Gerber was a class of sick all on his own. He had this pervy habit of rubbing his junk up against the edges of girls' desks if they had a question for him, so Viktor had this idea once upon a Monday to see how bad it really was. On Mondays we had Schottenbreit first thing in the morning, if he hadn't tried to punch a bottle of whiskey in its bottom with his liver the previous weekend. It only took two weeks of trying for it to work, for Schottenbreit was fairly predictable in his timing every month.

We got everyone to go to class a little early, just so we could test out Viktor's theory. Viktor took a cloth and a piece of chalk, and folded the cloth over the chalk, then smashed the chalk to dust with his bare hands. He then grabbed a handful of the chalk dust he'd just created and rubbed it all along the edges of the girls' desks. We all sat down and waited for Mr. Gerber. As soon as he‟d finished his opening lesson, Maddisyn Bertram's hand shot up in the air, and Gerber eagerly shuffled over. Five minutes later, he walked away from Maddisyn's desk with a chalk line directly across his junkline. It only got worse with passing Mondays. Gerber stopped substituting for Schottenbreit shortly after that.

Perry wasn't a pervert. He just had chalky hands.

"He was a dark man who didn't have the confidence to just be himself," said Perry. "And most men who act like the tough guy or the real jerk are just trying to compensate for something that they're missing."

"But they are considered men."

"Yes. And by the very definition of man back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Mr. Hemingway was the perfect example of overbloated manliness stomping around like the world owed him something."

"But he was, and is, considered to be one of the foremost experts on the art of being man?"

A flash of a laugh twinkled across Perry's eyes.

"Yes, dear Will. You could say that."

"Good. Then he can teach me how to be one."

A low bubble of whispers rippled through the room. Someone behind me snickered. Snickering was just slightly above sniggering in terms of pure rudeness. I always thought that if you didn't have the balls or ovaries to really laugh out loud, then shut up and keep your shuddery breath laughing to yourself.

I stood up and clapped my hands.

"You're leaving?" Perry asked.

"I think I have to," I said, and reached for the door handle. I turned to give Perry a big old wink and a gun, and he looked at me with a funny sort of gaze.

"So do I," he said.

I turned the door handle and opened the door.

"Where will you go?"

"I don't know. At all. I'll probably hit my thinking spot first." 

I spun around and walked out of the classroom, slamming the door behind me. I didn't mean to slam the door, but it happened and I had to live with it. The first place I had to go was the lockers so I could get my bag. I also had to leave a note for Viktor to tell him where I had gone. I wanted him to meet me later so he could help me on my man quest. My note was simple.

'I'm going home, to my thinking spot. You should come over after school and help me on my man quest,' was what the note said. I thought that the words 'man quest' would get us unwanted attention from the more homophobic members of our class, so I tucked the note through the little slats in his locker door. We often left notes for each other this way, so he was bound to get it.

That was it. That was all I needed to do. I hitched my bag over my shoulder and shut my locker. I'd never left school early before for any reason other than being deathly ill. This was strange. I felt rebellious.

"Maybe even a little bit manly," I whispered, and kicked the exit doors open. I kicked too hard, and my foot shrieked in pain. I had a lot to learn.

My favourite night of the week is Friday night.

You never know what's going to happen at our house on a Friday night. Mum throws convention out the window in the kitchen, so we have anything from mac & cheese with carrot sticks to duck a l'orange.

We've only had duck a l'orange once, but that's because us kids hated it so much Mum and Dad didn't want to waste any more duck meat.

Dinner is just the beginning. After dinner, right away, we all gather around the TV and watch this silly space show that we've never missed. Since the very beginning of the show we've watched it as a family, and we've stayed true every week. Even on the very odd occasion when we're not in town, we go out of our way to make sure that we watch that show. So, there was one thing that we knew would happen on a Friday night. After the space show was when the fun really began.

We sometimes watched a movie. Dad loved renting movies, and would get us kids one, and then one for him and Mum to watch when we all went to bed. If it wasn't too violent or dirty a film, we would get to watch it on Saturday morning.

Every now and then we would play board games. We all loved Monopoly, and I especially loved it when Dad would start randomly handing out hush money to everyone. That way, the game never ended, but we still had a good time.

My favourite Fridays were when Dad fired up the music machine and told us to pick music to dance to. We would all choose a CD in turn, and then Dad picked the best dancing songs from each one. A few years ago, he put on Paul Simon's 'Graceland,' which to this day is still the greatest album ever recorded by humanity. The song 'Homeless' came on, and Mum and Dad just started singing. Mum was holding Connor, and he lay his head down on her shoulder, and the girls and I, for the first time in our lives, just sat and listened. Dad looked over at me and smiled. His eyes were soft, welcoming and full of love. He rarely told us how much we all meant to him, but every so often he would look at us the way he was looking at me right then, and we would know that we were his entire life. If anything ever happened to any of us, he would die. He wouldn't even have to kill himself. He would just keel over and stop existing. 

It was the most beautiful experience of my whole life and, at that moment, I was complete.