“How could I forget?” I teased.
“Good.” Cassidy grinned. “Pick me up outside Terrace Bluffs at eight thirty tomorrow morning. And bring a backpack full of school supplies.”
SOMEHOW, EIGHT THIRTY on Wednesday morning felt horrendously early, as though my brain was convinced it should have the opportunity to sleep in on a day off. I yawned my way through a cup of coffee and joined the line of cars waiting to exit the Rosewood gates on their way to work.
When I pulled onto the shoulder outside Terrace Bluffs, Cassidy was sitting on the curb, fiddling with a pair of Ray-Bans. She wore jeans and a plaid button-down shirt, a navy blue backpack by her feet.
I’d been expecting another of Cassidy’s antique clothing concoctions, and this seemed out of character somehow. But even dressed normally, Cassidy was still someone you’d look at twice without quite knowing why. It was as though she was disguised as an ordinary girl and found the deception tremendously funny.
“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.
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.