First Man by Ava Martell Page A

name. I made him uneasy, and I knew I hadn’t imagined that spark.
    “Can’t wait to read these, Adam.” That was the first time I’d called him anything other than Mr. Edwards, even inside my own head. I waited for him to correct me, pushing me back into the safe formality of student/teacher interactions.
    Instead, he said nothing, and I walked out of his office wondering just what I had begun.

COMING STORM
    Adam

    I cicles hug down from the trees, glinting in the pale sunlight like frozen blades. It had surprised no one more than myself that I had grown to love the bitterly cold town. In the beginning, I’d chosen this place almost as a penance, with Hawthorne-esque images of puritanical deprivation in my head.
    Every city I’d ever spent more than a few days in had been warm, blistering sun beating down on dry sands. Only England had been different with its near constant rain peppering the fields from a steel-grey sky.
    New England was an even larger change. The first bite of winter always slipped in unnoticed, riding the winds of autumn, hiding the cold taste of frost behind the scents of wet leaves and apple orchards. Every year, I’d step outside one November morning and find the world glinting with a thin layer of frost that singed your nose when you inhaled, and I’d wonder how I missed the signs.
    January was a bleak time, even for people born and raised in this climate. The whole world seemed to be a uniform shade of muddy grey, the color of the skies blending into the dirty slush on the sidewalks.
    Everyone went a bit stir crazy that time of year. The frenzy of the holidays had ended and the colorful distractions had disappeared. The Christmas trees and balsam wreathes had been hauled away by the city to be shredded into mulch for the next far distant growing season. With the absence of the reds and greens and golds that blanketed the town, we were left with grey and brown. If we were lucky, we’d get a fresh coat of white with the next snowfall.
    Summer seemed years away in January, and even the rare sunny days did little to lift our spirits. The sunlight filtered through the bare trees, weak and watery, almost mocking us with its complete lack of warmth. Times like that made me wonder how anyone survived here long term.
    January was in its last days when I walked into the school that morning. Janet was on a ladder in the middle of the hallway while Laura handed her bright red paper hearts to staple to the bulletin boards. As we crept closer to Valentine’s Day, the school would turn into even more of a den of teenage hormones than it normally was.
    A thin rain had started to fall, and I had lived here long enough to know that it would turn into sleet within a few hours. The stories I’d heard of “snow days” were an illusion in New Hampshire. Unless a full-blown blizzard roared in, life continued on as usual.
    I taught my first classes in a fog, lecturing on autopilot. Deep into the winter with no end in sight, I wanted to do nothing beyond hunker down and hibernate until the spring thaw, but one thought nagged at me, tugging be out of my winter-induced boredom.
    She called me Adam.
    I knew that I was playing a dangerous game by not instantly correcting her and drawing a boundary in the metaphorical sand between us. The rules of formality between teachers and students existed for a reason, even in a society as obsessed with casualness as America, but I had stopped seeing her in the same light as the other students for quite some time.
    Even the books we were reading for her independent study showed my change in perception towards Ember. Older fantasy might have been considered suitable for any audience, but my more recent suggestions involved more modern books that didn’t shy away from violence or sex. In a world where even relatively tame books like The Catcher in the Rye come under fire, I was treading a dangerous line with handing a student a copy of A Storm of Swords .
    I couldn’t even