“Wanna walk to class together?” She was already at the closet, flicking through her clothes.
“My first class is organic chemistry. It starts at ten.” I sat up in bed. I was staring to get excited. I knew it was dorky, but I was excited about the prospect of starting o-chem. The professor had done a lot of research in the area of molecular imaging, and he was supposed to be brilliant.
“Mine too!” Rachel squealed. “With Klaxton? We can walk over together!”
“You’re taking organic chemistry? With Professor Klaxton?” I tried not to sound incredulous.
She nodded.
“Um, okay. Let me just shower.”
I grabbed my shampoo and bathroom stuff, showered quickly and then dressed in a pair of jeans and a purple tank top. I’d heard that New England was supposed to be cold, but even though it was the end of August, there was no sign of fall. The temperature was supposed to be in the mid-eighties.
When we got to class, Rachel suddenly became all business.
“We should sit up front,” she instructed. “So we’ll be taken seriously.”
I had no problem with sitting up front. In fact, I liked to sit in the front row. I’d read a study once that said students who sat in the front row tended to absorb information better. I wasn’t sure if it was true or not, but I liked to think it was. Was it possible that I’d had Rachel all wrong? Maybe she was one of those eccentric geniuses you were always hearing about.
We settled into the front row, and I pulled out my notebook and pen.
Rachel pulled out her own notebook, which was black and had a cartoon drawing of a woman wearing a flowing white gown on the front.
“It’s Athena,” Rachel explained. “Goddess of wisdom and divine intelligence.”
“Cool.”
“It’s more than cool, Lindsay. She jumped out of Zeus’s head fully formed after Zeus swallowed her mother,” Rachel said, as if this was a fact. She traced her finger over the Athena’s long hair. “She brings me good luck.”
I wanted to ask Rachel if she really believed that, but I didn’t have a chance.
Professor Klaxton walked into the lecture hall and took his place at the podium. I sat up, determined to pay attention.
Organic chemistry was notoriously difficult, and when I’d gotten scheduled for my classes, my advisor had tried to talk me out of taking it until next year. I’d taken college-level chemistry my senior year of high school, and I was looking forward to o-chem, so I talked my way into it. I loved a challenge.
“Good morning,” Dr. Klaxton said. He was younger than I’d thought, and kind of unkempt. He had a bushy brown beard, and his hair was a little greasy. He looked at the class and shook his head. “One hundred new victims, ripe for the torturing.”
I expected the class to laugh, but nobody did.
“Mark will pass out the syllabus,” Dr. Klaxton reported, nodding to his teaching assistant. Then he reached into a coffee mug that was sitting on the lectern and pulled out a jellybean. I watched in disbelief as he popped it into his mouth. “The first thing you need to know about this class is that I will expect you to keep up with the reading. If you get behind on the reading, you will get behind in the class. If you get behind in the class, it will be impossible to catch up.”
I glanced down at the piece of paper that the teaching assistant had set down in front of me. There was a lot of reading. At least fifty pages a night, which might not be a lot if you were reading a novel, but the organic chemistry textbook was dense, with tiny type.
“Good,” Rachel said. “I’m glad we only have fifty pages to read a night. I thought it would be worse.”
I resisted the urge to strangle her, and reminded myself I was up for a challenge.
This I what I wanted, what I’d dreamed about. When most of my high school classmates were wasting their free time surfing gossip websites or dreaming about Taylor Lautner, I was on the review sites of other high schools – Choate, Taft, Trinity. I’d read how much work the students at these tops schools had to do, and I’d feel wistful.
It might have been crazy of me, wanting to have more homework. But schoolwork was my thing. I was good at it. I never doubted myself when it came to working hard or getting assignments done.
I sat up straighter and paid attention. For the first time since I’d gotten to Cambridge, I was starting to feel like I belonged. Who cared about Justin Brown and his dumb fighting and his crazy friends? He was just a distraction. I was here to get one of the best educations in the world. And some boy wasn’t going to get in my way.