He took another long sip of his beer. Plus, you know, it’ll get you out of the library sometimes.
Thanks to the ring, we didn’t return to the subject of my break. We talked about our schedules, and I eventually went through a play-by-play reenactment of my day in the lab, including what Professor Kaufmann told me about my sterile technique being impressive. We cracked open free peanuts for dessert while I talked about her research, what I’d read online about her work, how she’d determined the effects of plankton on seawater viscosity. He said she sounded killer.
—It would be weird if I went to her office hours on the first day, right? I said.
I thought he’d tease me for being a suck-up—I was looking for excuses not to go now that it was almost time—but he said, Absolutely not, you should absolutely go. I said, I don’t know, maybe next week is better, and then he stood up and said, No, now. You’re going now, no excuses. He jumped from the booth, grabbed my coat and held it out for me.
—And come by Happy Hours, too, he said on the way to the bar’s door. We start next week. Thursday and Sunday nights.
I tucked my hands into Jillian’s stupid mittens and said, Maybe I will.
*
The walk uphill toward campus went much slower, but I made it to Professor Kaufmann’s office, which was neat and organized but sparse—like wherever she really worked was somewhere else. When I knocked on her already-open door, she said my name and declared me her very first visitor of the new year. Just as I’d planned, I told her I’d grown up near the ocean and that I’d read about her research on her Web site. She said, Oh, super! and launched into a description of some mutant microscopic organism off the coast of some island I probably should’ve heard of. I was able to follow along at first, and every time I contributed something to the conversation, she said, Yeah, super! (Super would prove to be her very favorite adjective; she’d write Super! across the top of all but the first of my lab write-ups, and I heard her voice each time I read it—not the Miami soup-er I’d always known, but her version of it—her zoo-pah!) But within a few minutes of that first visit, I was looking around the room for family photos—for anything personal—to turn the conversation back toward something I could handle. There was nothing to latch on to except her enthusiasm, but that, along with Ethan’s encouragement to visit her office that afternoon in the first place, turned out to be enough.
26
THE FIRST WINTER OF THE new millennium would be the coldest to settle over the Rawlings campus in sixty years, and the first few feet of snow that would harden into the icy bedrock encasing us through April fell pretty much continuously over the weekend between the first and second week of classes. So you can understand why I was confused when Jillian came home Saturday night flecked in snow, and as she peeled off her layers, asked, Liz, what are you doing this summer?
—This summer? It’s negative a million degrees outside. Must you torture me?
She separated her fleece from its waterproof layer and spread each over the backs of our chairs. I watched her from my bed, where I lay on my stomach.
—Seriously, she said, what are you thinking of doing this summer?
—I don’t know. Go to the beach? Hang out with Omar?
—No, I mean for work, for, you know, experience.
—Why are you asking about this right now? Where’ve you been?
She went back to our door and retrieved her boots, placed them inside. She pulled off her hat and finger-combed her hair to bring it back to life.
—Because what you do the summer between your freshman and sophomore years pretty much goes on to determine your entire career.
—That can’t be true, I said, but I wondered: Is that true?
—I was at an arch sing, she said. And yes it’s true. And I saw that guy there.
—What guy? What’s an arch sing?
—That guy, Ian, she said. Hold on a second, you don’t know what an arch sing is? They only happen pretty much every Saturday somewhere on campus.
—Oh wait, I said.
There’d been a few times when I’d walked around and/or through groups of men singing in a semicircle while people stood around and watched. I always looked for a hat full of change or something being passed around, but never saw one: for some reason, these people were doing this for free, possibly even for fun. Jillian told me yes, these were the aforementioned arch sings. The group for which she’d just risked hypothermia was one called the All-Nighters.
—In this weather? I said. People stood outside for singing? Did anyone get frostbite? Wait, before, did you mean Ethan?
—People huddle together, Liz. Life does go on when it drops below fifty degrees. And yeah, sorry, Ethan. You should go to one sometime, it’s kind of a thing here.