by Jen Nadol
A few students exchanged confused looks. Professor McMillan saw, but didn’t acknowledge them.
“The human spirit is complex. The closest we can come to understanding ourselves is by examining our values, our talents, our beliefs. What makes us happy? This will answer ‘Who am I?’ ”
He nodded to Lucas, who stood and began counting stacks of the papers he’d come in with.
“Then we can move on to ‘Why am I here?’ ” Professor McMillan paused thoughtfully. “Heavy stuff, huh?”
There were a few relieved laughs. He was right—much heavier than I’d imagined. It made my head swim a little and I hadn’t even cracked a book, but I felt a thrill at the thought of doing so. It sure beat the things my brain was occupied with now: the ingredients of a mocha latte or how to make a Super Buzz-Buzz Espresso. And, of course, the mark.
“This is Lucas; he’s part of our undergraduate teaching assistant program and will be helping throughout the class.” Lucas smiled and waved. “We’ll review the syllabus when you each have a copy.”
Lucas handed the agenda for our biweekly class down each aisle. He paused when he saw me, smiled, and nodded before continuing on. I listened as Professor McMillan talked through the class outline. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Descartes, Russell, Kierkegaard. “Everyone’s favorite optimist.” A few more chuckles.
He reviewed the required texts and our first assignment, to be completed in the next three days. At the end of class, Professor McMillan thanked us for participating. “I look forward to seeing you on Thursday,” he concluded. “Those of you willing to read and engage, that is.”
Students stood, stretched, waved to friends, left in groups. I was in no hurry to go, wanting to savor this, my first college class. I collected my book bag and notes slowly, letting other students file past.
“Hello, coffee girl.”
He was close enough that I could smell his cologne, sharp and woodsy, hitting the back of my throat, slightly dizzying. Or maybe it’s just that I knew it was him. Lucas. I’d seen him a few times at the coffee shop, but we’d only spoken once. The day I saw the mark. Still, every time, there was that eye contact. The attraction now was unmistakable and I felt my heart pounding so hard with him standing next to me that I was sure he could see it through my thin T-shirt.
“You can call me Cassie.” I kept my gaze level, confident.
“Yes. Cassandra Renfield. Our one audit student. You don’t see a lot of people slogging through philosophy just for the fun of it.”
“Well, maybe I don’t know what I got myself into.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I started toward the door. He followed. “Do you have another class now?”
“No. This is the only one I’m taking.”
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
I turned to face him, sure he was making fun of my job. “Are you joking?”
“Well, I know you like it.”
“Love it. But don’t you have another class or something?”
“No, that’s it for today.”
I hesitated. I don’t know why. I’d thought about Lucas, remembering his name, said by the pretty blonde the first day. “Are you allowed to … fraternize with students?”
He snorted. “It’s just coffee, Cassandra. I’m not asking you back to my apartment.”
I turned bright red, could feel my face on fire and looked away, hoping he wouldn’t notice. Right. He was quiet and it was horribly awkward. I felt like he could read my every thought.
“Come on,” he said finally, softer. “It’s a beautiful day. We’ll sit outside.”
Café Lennox was a Parisian bistro wannabe: striped awnings, iron furniture, umbrellas. Lucas and I took a seat on the brick patio facing the quad.
“Tell me about yourself, Cassandra Renfield,” he said, leaning back with a slight smile after we’d gotten our drinks.
“Well …” I stirred my black coffee, trying to decide how to start. “I’ve been living in Bering for about two weeks. Moved here from Pennsylvania. I work at a coffee shop.”
“You don’t say.”
I smiled. “Um … I guess that’s about it. Not too much to tell.”
“Surely there’s more than that. Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“Did you move here with your family?”
“No, just me.”
“Just you? Why?”
“Why just me or why did I move here?”
“Both.”
I shrugged, not wanting to get into it.
Lucas frowned. “Well, was it to come to Lennox?”
“No.” I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t graduated from high school yet, wasn’t old enough to be a real college student.
“Uh-huh.” Lucas’s smile had faded. “You’re not making this very easy, you know. This is supposed to be a conversation, not twenty questions.”
“I’m sorry. ‘Tell me about yourself ’ sounded more like a command than the start of a conversation.”
He stared at me, then raised an eyebrow, slightly bemused, slightly annoyed. “You’re a prickly one, aren’t you?”
I shrugged again, feeling sulky. This isn’t how I wanted this to go.
I guess Lucas had the same thought, because he sighed and said, “How about we start over? I’ll go first.” He extended his hand across the table. It was firm and warm and made me a little tingly. “I’m Lucas Canton. I’m eighteen—nineteen in October—going into my sophomore year at Lennox. I’m from California, just outside LA. My family still lives there: Mom, Dad, and two sisters. I like good food, great books, coffee, squash, skiing, and challenging conversation.” He smiled wryly.
“I guess you’ve come to the right place.”
“I guess so. Your turn.”
“Okay. I’m Cassandra Renfield. You already know how long I’ve been in Bering and where I’m from.” I paused, knowing I had to tell him more or this conversation would be over. “I’m staying with my aunt for a while. I was living with my grandmother in Pennsylvania, but she died last month. My parents died when I was young. They’re buried here.”
“Wow.” He leaned back, one hand fingering his coffee cup, the other absently pinching his full lower lip. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. That must have been hard.”
“Yeah, well. I’m okay. But thanks.”
I looked away, wishing in the silence that I hadn’t brought all of that up. I could have just gone with “living with my aunt” rather than spilling the whole story. Especially the bit about my parents. For God’s sake, why on earth had I told my philosophy TA who I’d just met about them?
“So how about your dislikes?” I asked abruptly.
“I’m sorry?” Lucas had been looking out across campus, but turned back to me and I felt a slow flush as his eyes met mine. He was even better looking than I’d remembered from Cuppa. He had perfect skin and a nose neither small nor large, with a little bend in the middle. He wasn’t exceptionally tall, maybe five foot nine or ten, but fit and athletic and totally unlike my image of a philosophy student. But it was mostly those eyes. I could see now that the green was speckled with streaks of gold and amber. All in all, sitting across from Lucas made it hard to think.
“Your dislikes,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. I felt stupid, like I was pumping him for information, but I had to lighten the mood after bringing up all my baggage. “You told me what you like. How about the other half?”
“My dislikes …,” he said, thinking. “Wait a minute. You first—your likes. Don’t think you’re getting off the hook here, Cassandra.” He smiled and any heaviness lifted from our table.
We covered all the basic ground. Favorite foods, music, where we lived, what we thought of Bering. We had a lot in common, I thought. Certainly that’s what I wanted to believe.
“You’ll like Professor McMillan,” he told me.
“I already do.”
“You’ll learn so much fr
om him,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “He’s tough, but great at challenging you to think, to question everything. They’re not all like that, the profs in the department. In fact, most of them aren’t.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d have even applied for the TA program if it’d been someone else. Most of them want you to dissect Plato’s or Aristotle’s arguments to understand their moral system rather than using it to discover your own.”
“Interesting.” I wasn’t sure I had a moral system. If I did, I hoped my new professor had the user’s manual.
“Not at all what the philosophers intended,” Lucas continued. “You’ll see what I mean.” He checked his watch. I knew from the clock in front of the library that we’d barely been there a half hour, just long enough for coffee. “Ready to head out?” he asked.
He paid the bill and I didn’t argue. I’m not sure what I’d hoped for, but his breezy “see you later” left me disappointed. Had my conversation not been challenging enough or had our attraction been one-sided from the start?
The hell with Lucas Canton, I decided, walking back to the apartment and grinning at the feel of my backpack, full once again, slung familiarly over my left shoulder. He wasn’t what I’d been looking for when I enrolled at Lennox anyway.
chapter 13
I was tucked into a corner of the sofa when Drea came in around seven. The keys in the door startled me. I was used to hearing them only vaguely through a sleep-fogged brain, her arrival usually long after I’d gone to bed. We’d had exactly two meals together since I’d moved in, one of them a breakfast, which she’d spent looking at charts and bullet points for some presentation.
“Hey,” she said, tossing her orange bag onto the table beside the door.
“Hey,” I echoed.
She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. I returned to my book, fully expecting her to disappear down the hall to her bedroom.
Instead she came into the living room and flopped into the chair between me and the window with an exhausted sigh.
I considered asking about her day, it would have been the polite thing, but I was much more interested in Plato than Pete’s Potato Chips, the account I knew she’d been working on.
“What’ve you got your nose buried in?” Drea asked.
I flipped closed the cover of my Intro to Philosophy text, holding it up. She raised her eyebrows.
“A little light reading?”
I smiled. “Actually, I signed up for a class at the U. Not for credit or anything. Just for …” I stopped. I was going to say “for something to do,” but I didn’t want to imply that I was bored and she should be entertaining me. “Just to, you know, get ahead,” I finished instead.
Drea stared at me wordlessly, then frowned and turned toward the window. I figured she was worried about the money. “It didn’t cost a lot,” I assured her. “I’m covering it with what I make at the coffee shop.” I had no idea how much she was getting from Mr. Koumaras, if anything, and I’d been careful about not using up her stuff, eating at Cuppa whenever I could.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said absently.
I waited, but when she didn’t say anything more, I went back to Plato, remembering how much I preferred it when she was out.
“You know, your father taught there.” Drea was still looking away, her voice drifting, disembodied.
A-ha. I closed my book. “I did,” I answered. “Ancient history, right?”
She nodded, finally looking at me, then down at her half-empty glass. “He always liked that stuff. I remember him reading about castles and knights. Not picture books, but big, heavy things.” She made a C with her thumb and forefinger to show me the thickness. “A lot of kids are into that, but Danny always wanted the real story. Not the make-believe.”
Danny. The name ricocheted in my head, familiar and intimate. A real person, not the black-and-white photograph he’d always been to me.
She continued, “My parents were so proud when he got the professorship at Lennox. It was a big deal that he went to college—neither of them had—but to work at one? Teach?” She shook her head. “It was as if he’d been elected president or something.”
“Were you close to him?”
“He was seven years older so we were always at kind of different places in our lives, but yeah”—Drea paused, nodding—“we were pretty close. He was a good brother.”
This was the most I’d heard Drea talk. I didn’t know if it was the wine or what, but I figured this was my chance to learn something about my parents. “Do you know how he … Danny … and my mother met?”
Drea looked at me as if my speaking his name sounded as strange as it felt, though I’m sure that was my imagination. “You don’t know?”
“No. Nan didn’t really talk about them.”
“I guess not.” I couldn’t quite place her tone—bitter and wistful and amused all together. “They met when he was in Pennsylvania for a semester. She ran away from home and came back here with him.”
“What do you mean, ‘ran away from home’?”
Drea shrugged. “Just that. She was sixteen. I don’t think her parents would have let her go.”
“What?!”
“Wow,” she said, a little softer. “You really didn’t know, huh?”
I shook my head, trying to absorb what she’d said. I’d been expecting to hear about mutual friends or a blind date even. Not this. Nothing like this.
“Yeah,” Drea said, taking another sip and looking out the window again. “We didn’t realize she was so young back then. Danny kept that to himself. Kept the whole thing to himself for a while. He was finishing his graduate work in Wichita, so she just moved into his apartment, was there for months before we knew about it.”
“Wow.” I tried to imagine Nan’s reaction. Was this why she’d never talked about my mother?
“Was she …” I wasn’t sure how to ask it. I mean, I knew what I’d think if someone at school ran off with a guy in his twenties, but back then? In the kind of tight-knit, old-fashioned community Greektown had always sounded like?
Drea read my mind. “Your mother was a good girl, Cassie. Much more than I ever was, that’s for sure.” She paused, refilling her glass from the bottle beside her chair. “She missed your grandmother a lot. Talked about her all the time.”
“So why’d she leave? I mean, if she was so into my father, couldn’t she just have … I don’t know, dated him long-distance or something?”
“Who knows?” Drea said. “The way Danny told it, there was some bad stuff back home that she had to get away from. He was ‘rescuing’ her.” Drea said the last sentence with a bitterness that made it pretty clear what she’d thought of my mother. Or at least of “Danny” being with her.
“What kind of bad stuff?”
“A friend of hers died. Her best friend.” She sipped her wine. “Your mother was there when it happened and kind of lost it.”
“What?! Jeez …” I couldn’t believe Nan had never told me this. Any of it. “How did the friend die?”
“Stung by a bee.”
“Huh?”
“Some kind of allergic reaction. They were at your mom’s house with your grandmother and this friend, Roberta—God only knows why I remember that—swelled up, stopped breathing.” Drea paused thoughtfully. “I guess I can see it being pretty freaky, especially for a sixteen-year-old.”
“Yeah.” I pictured watching something like that happen to Tasha. Terrible. “But I still don’t get why she ran away. I mean, Nan would have helped her …”
“Dunno.” Drea shook her head. “Danny said the girl’s family blamed your grandmother, was furious that she’d let them play hooky. Maybe that had something to do with it.”
That sounded like Nan. I remembered plenty of “field trips,” as she called them, on days I should have been in school. Sometimes the museum, often the beach.
Drea drained the last of her wine before adding, “Or m
aybe your mom just jumped at a chance to get out of that shithole she was living in.” She glanced out the window again. “She talked about it like she missed it, but it always sounded a lot like this place to me.”
Drea stood, slightly unsteady and obviously finished with the conversation. I suspected these weren’t her first glasses of wine.
“Enjoy your book,” she said, walking carefully to the kitchen for a bottled water, then down the hall to her bedroom.
chapter 14
It was our second week of classes, day twenty-three of my ninety with Drea—not that I was counting—when the heat wave finally broke. I’d always thought the middle of the country would have more of a dry heat—something about the absence of the ocean. I was wrong. The humidity in Bering was as bad as Ashville. Worse, since our apartment back there at least had air-conditioning.
But finally, I woke one morning to find the fan’s breeze crisp and dry across my legs. It was Tuesday and I had an early shift at Cuppa, six to eleven, but the rest of the day was mine and I knew just where I’d go—the park on the south side of Bering, my favorite place to study.
I was eager to continue our assignment, Aristotle’s Nichoma-chean Ethics. Philosophy was every bit as interesting as I’d hoped, Professor McMillan pacing the front of the classroom asking question after question, the Socratic method, I now knew. I’d found myself doing it too, to see if Aristotle was right that everything we do has the end goal of happiness. Why did I wear a black shirt? Because I had to work and coffee stains on my clothes make me self-conscious. Black shirt equals clean and confident. Happy. Why was I making an espresso? Because if I didn’t the customer who’d ordered it would get angry. Then Doug might fire me; I’d have no job and be back to moping around the apartment, maybe with Drea there. Definitely less happy. How could my mother have run away at sixteen? That one I had no answer for. Inconceivable.
Still, I thought Aristotle might be on to something.
I looked forward to our Monday and Thursday sessions. The empty seats in our second class were fewer than I’d expected, though I understood why Professor McMillan had warned us. Philosophy was hard. It could take an hour to get through five pages and really understand them, unlike my classes at Ashville High, where I’d mostly had to memorize dates and facts. This was thinking.
