The professor, this tiny Eastern European guy with a penchant for stroking his little blond chin beard, rolled up his sleeves. He drew two hydrocarbon chains on the board—that much at least I could recognize. One was shaped like an M, the other like a W.
“Who can tell me the difference?” he asked, surveying the lecture hall.
No one was brave enough to hazard a guess.
“There is no difference,” the professor finally said. “The molecules are identical, if you consider them in three-D space.”
He held up two plastic models and rotated one of them. They were identical.
“Now, if you please,” he continued, drawing two new molecules on the board. “What is the difference here?”
It was mind-blowing, the way I could suddenly see exactly what he was asking, now that I knew to look past the scribbles on the board and to imagine the molecules as they actually were.
“Come on, doesn’t anyone play Tetris?” the professor asked, earning a few laughs.
“They’re opposites,” someone called.
“They’re opposites,” the professor repeated, picking up two new models and rotating them, “in the same sense that your left hand is the opposite of your right hand. They are mirror images of each other, which we shall call enantiomers.”
He went on, talking about how opposites could actually be the same thing, and how they occurred together in nature, not actually opposites at all, but simply destined to take part in different reactions. It was nothing like the grueling equations we’d been forced to crunch in honors chem, numbers with exponents so high that I sometimes felt bad for my calculator. There wasn’t any math to it at all, just theories and explanations for why reactions proceeded the way they did, and why molecules bonded in three dimensions. I didn’t understand all of it, but the stuff I did get was pretty interesting.
When the class ended, Cassidy turned toward me, a little furrow between her eyebrows.
“I’m really sorry I mixed up the classrooms,” she said.
“What are you talking about? That was awesome.”
I’d never before walked out of a classroom with my mind racing because of what I’d learned, and I wanted to savor the feeling as long as possible. It was as though my brain was suddenly capable of considering the world with far more complexity, as though there was so much more to see and do and learn. For the first time, I was thinking that college might not be like high school, that the classes might actually be worth something, and then Cassidy started laughing.
“What?” I asked, a bit annoyed that she’d interrupted my private Zen moment.
“No one likes organic chemistry. It’s, like, the worst requirement there is for pre-med.”
“Well, maybe I liked it because I’m not going to be pre-med.”
“No, you’re planning to be a field hand.” Cassidy rolled her eyes.
“Obviously. I’ll operate on a seasonal schedule. I’ll call it Spring Gleaning.”
Cassidy whacked me with her notebook.
After an unexciting philosophy lecture on something called consequentialism, we walked back to the Town Center. It was around noon, and the weather had turned scorching. The sky, which was a brilliant blue directly overhead, lightened to white gray as it stretched over the mountains.
I took off my button-down, which I’d worn over a T-shirt in case it was a date.
Cassidy glanced over as I stuffed the collared shirt into my backpack.
“What happened to your wrist?” she asked.
“Nothing, it’s just a brace,” I said, not wanting to get into it.
“So it’s some kind of jock fashion statement?” Cassidy teased. She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair, suddenly becoming serious. “Is that why you always wear long sleeves?”
“No,” I said, mocking her. “I always wear long sleeves because it’s some kind of jock fashion statement.”
She stuck out her tongue, which made her look like a little kid.
“Very mature,” I said. “I thought we were pretending to be college students.”
“Not anymore. Class is dismissed. Now it’s lunchtime.”
We got sandwiches at Lee’s, one of those chains you grow up thinking must be everywhere, but in reality exists only in California.
At Cassidy’s insistence, we took our sandwiches across the street to this little slope of rocks and grass that ran alongside the man-made creek and had our picnic in the shade of an oak tree. On the trail above us, bicyclists whizzed by on their narrow path, and across the water, I could see another couple spreading out their picnic. Not that Cassidy and I were a couple.
I turned up the speakers on my phone and put on an old Crystal Castles album while Cassidy rooted through the grass, picking tiny white flowers and knotting them together into a crown.
“Here,” she said, leaning in to place the circlet on my head.
Her face was inches from mine. I could see the freckles that dusted her nose and the gold flecks in the disquieting blue of her eyes.
When she pulled away to study what I looked like with the crown of flowers in my hair, I had the brief impression that she knew how much she confused me and was enjoying it.
“When can I take this off?” I asked.
“When you tell me where you’re applying to college,” she said mischievously.
I shrugged. That question was easy.
“Probably here, maybe some other state schools.”
I could tell instantly that I’d said the wrong thing.