How would you interpret ‘theme paper’ and ‘Senior English’ here?
I am abashed by this admiration, for it seems directed at some other person. How these girls would hoot if they saw me as I really am, cowering indoors on washdays, festooning the bathroom with my damp balbriggans so they won’t be stolen or made the subject of a theme paper in Senior English. My new life. No one has said I eat human flesh in a tortilla, but I’m getting an idea how your lives have been disfigured all these years by gossip. I can’t answer the telephone, for it’s sure to be a newspaper man asking questions: place of birth, status of bowels. I don’t know what to do with this havoc.
How would you interpret ‘theme paper’ and ‘Senior English’ in the context?
Thanks!
PS: the narrator is a writer and has a lot of fans. Many reporters wait outside his door to meet him, some girls even try to steal his shirts hung on the clothesline in his back yard.