You Naughty Insurgent, You!

While masked radicals ran and fired all around her, Maud kept her attention on DBC Pierre’s novel entitled Ludmila’s Broken English. She’d been summering at this beach and reading novels on this shore for fifteen years, and she wasn’t about to let riotous brutes disturb her peace now! She’d had enough of it from her at-risk students at the Urban Girls Literacy Yard, known as U.G.L.Y. She could keep her book in her lap and pull her hair down so it swung over and hid her face. ‘That’ll trick ‘em!’ She said from behind a veil of thick, dark hair and through her strong, clenched teeth. She buried her attention back in the novel. Pierre’s novel contains such fabulous drama, like conjoined twins being separated and a woman getting sodomized by her grandfather. Who could pay any attention to real, angry gunmen with fiction like that to read?! So Maud didn’t notice when the heavy-breather with a rifle came around to hide behind her back to use her as a shield. She only got a clue when he sneezed without covering his mouth. “How rude!” Maud said. And she flipped the hair away from her eyes, turned herself around to look the brute in his face, then she slapped him and poked him in the eye. “Take that! You ill-mannered Insurgent!” While he yipped and howled, Maud walked off gracefully. A rain of bullets may have been peppering the air around her, but not one bullet dared strike our well-mannered heroine. Even bullets know that you don’t get too close to Maud the urban girls’ reading tutor.