Books, Booze + Becoming an English Teacher

In spite of the disaster that was junior English, I signed up for AP Literature my senior year. I really have no idea why I did it; no counselor had ever suggested anything like that to me, and my parents had not pushed me into it. Okay, to be honest, it was probably because my two best friends took it. Mabel Norton (commonly known as “Mabel the Tick”) was a far cry from Patricia Robinson. She wore all black almost every day, and she was a ​very ​round woman with black readers perched on the end of her nose. My class included 14 girls and one boy, and for about three months, we all thought she hated ​all of ​us.