“I saw a coyote this morning,” she announced, climbing into the front seat. “It was in our backyard obsessing over the koi pond.”
“Maybe it just wanted a friend.”
“Or it was looking for a koi mistress,” Cassidy observed wryly.
It was a reference to a poem, I guessed, but I couldn’t place it. I shrugged.
“‘Had we but world enough and time,’” Cassidy quoted. “Andrew Marvell?”
“Right.” It sounded vaguely familiar, like something Moreno had put on an identification quiz back in Honors Brit Lit, but I wasn’t exactly a big poetry fan. “So where are we going?”
“Where we have no business being, other than the business of mischief and deception,” she said. “Just drive over to the University Town Center.”
So I did. And while I drove, Cassidy told me her theory about winning at debate tournaments. The most successful debaters (“I’d call them master debaters, but clearly you aren’t mature enough to handle that, Mister Smirkyface,” she teased) knew to reference literature and philosophy and history.
“And the more sophisticated your references are, the better,” Cassidy said, toying with the air vent. “You don’t want to quote Robert Frost, for God’s sake. Quote John Rawls, or John Stuart Mill.”
I hadn’t heard of either of those last two guys, but I didn’t say anything. Actually, I was trying to figure out if we were on a date, albeit one that had started at eight thirty in the morning.
“We could still go gleaning,” I said, nodding out the window as we passed one of the remaining orange groves.
“I don’t know why you think that’s funny.”
“Haven’t you heard? It’s my hillbilly way of taking you to a museum.”
Cassidy shook her head, but I could see that she was smiling.
The University Town Center was an odd place to be at 8:45 in the morning. I hardly ever went there, since it was a fifteen-minute drive in the direction of Back Bay, this snotty WASP beach town. Actually, the Town Center straddled the border between Eastwood and Back Bay, said border consisting mostly of a Metrolink station, a medical complex with which I was intimately familiar, and a golf club where my father was a member.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” I said, pulling into the lot, “how the Town Center is on the border of two towns but in the center of neither?”
Cassidy snorted appreciatively.
“Well, come on,” she said, putting on her sunglasses. “We’re going to be late for class.”
“Ha ha,” I said, but Cassidy didn’t seem like she was joking. “What are we really doing here?”
The Town Center was the unofficial hangout for the University of California Eastwood, whose campus was just across the street.
“I already told you,” Cassidy said impatiently, climbing out of the car and shouldering her backpack. “Mischief and deception. We’re crashing some classes at the university, getting you good and educated in the liberal arts so you make a stunning debut at the San Diego tournament. Voilà, here’s our class schedule.”
I looked down at the purple Post-it she’d handed me.
“History of the British Empire?” I read aloud. “Seventeenth-Century Literature? Introduction to Philosophy?”
“Exactly,” Cassidy said smugly. “Now hurry up. We’re taking the road beyond the road less traveled, and being on time will make all the difference.”
“WON’T THE TEACHER notice?” I asked, struggling to keep up with Cassidy’s fast pace as we took the elevated pathway from the Town Center to the main campus. “We’re not exactly enrolled here.”
“First of all, it’s professor, and no, they won’t notice. I used to spend spring break staying with my brother when he was at Yale, and I’d randomly sneak into classes when I got bored. They never caught me. Besides, I picked survey courses, the ones with like a hundred students. We’re just going to appreciate the lectures, take notes on whatever we can use in debate, and then go on our merry way.”
Which is basically what happened—in History of the British Empire, at least. We joined a hundred other students in an echoing, tiered lecture hall and sat through a mildly interesting but mostly dull fifty minutes on imperialism, capitalism, and war economy. I dutifully scribbled down some notes, which was more than I could say for the bearded guy two rows down who spent the entire class playing Angry Wings on his phone.
“So?” Cassidy asked, once the class had let out and she’d dragged me into the line for the nearest coffee cart. “What did you think?”
“Interesting,” I said, because I knew that was what she wanted me to say.
“‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.’” Cassidy grinned and poured some sugar into her coffee. “Hamlet. And speaking of which, time for some seventeenth-century literature.”
WHEN WE GOT to the lecture hall, something seemed wrong. It wasn’t until I noticed the textbooks that I realized why.
“I think we’re in the wrong room.” I whispered. “Should we go?”
And then a professor in a funny, flat-bottomed tie strode to the front of the room and it was too late to do anything but sit there and listen.
Somehow, we’d wound up in Organic Chemistry. I’d done honors chem as a junior, which had been one of the least pleasant experiences of my high-school career, and I assumed that organic chemistry would be an equally painful continuation of the same.