Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [36]
Nick wondered if he should hug her. She sounded like she needed a hug. “Shit happens and then you die,” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He sneezed. “Hey, did you hear about that huge meteorite?” Yesterday a giant meteorite had fallen out of the sky in Peekskill, New York, and smashed a Chevy Malibu.
“You can kiss me now.” Eliza propped herself up on one elbow, waiting.
“Huh?”
“Or we could have sex,” she said hopefully.
Nick took another hit off his joint, holding the smoke in until his face turned pink and his lungs were about to burst. He really liked Eliza. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He just didn’t feel like kissing her or anyone else right now, unless maybe Shipley walked in and threw him down on the ground and ripped off her clothes and insisted that he kiss her.
“I’m kind of saving myself for someone,” he told her as he exhaled.
Eliza stared at him through the cloud of smoke. Her eyes were tearing up and she couldn’t see for shit. She tossed the headlamp at him and stood up to go. “Aren’t we all?”
8
At college you are free to do as you please, almost. You can—if you so choose—eat Doritos for breakfast, not comb your hair, wear the same jeans for a month without washing them, sleep all day, cut your classes, and stay up all night. You can not floss. You can take up a dangerous hobby that would terrify your mother, such as hang gliding or collecting wild mushrooms. But absolute freedom is a scary concept. Without some sort of sympathetic authority, chaos reigns. You need to know that someone is paying attention and that you will be chastised, if not punished, for slacking off. That’s where the advisor comes in.
Every professor embraces the role of advisor in a different manner. Some invite their advisees over to dinner with their families. Some treat their advisees to ice cream and mini golf on Friday nights. Some take them to a folk music festival to drop acid. Professor Rosen preferred to meet with her advisees the old-fashioned way—in her office.
Shipley’s advisor meeting was right after Eliza’s. Shipley sat on the wooden bench outside Professor Rosen’s office, listening to the shrieks of laughter that emanated from within. The hallway was narrow, windowless, and plain, embellished only by the flyers, sign-up sheets, and other miscellany with which the English staff had decorated their office doors. A portrait of Shakespeare. A flyer advertising a screening of the film Halloween in the Student Union. A sign-up sheet for pumpkin carving at a professor’s home—BYO pumpkin. Knives provided.
The three girls from Shipley’s orientation trip emerged from the office next door to Professor Rosen’s, wearing matching pink hooded Dexter sweatshirts. Elli, Nina, and Bree. Or was it Briana, Kelly, and Lee? They shared a triple in Sloane, the only allwomen’s dorm on campus, and had recently formed the Dexter Spirit Club to replace the now-defunct Dexter Cheerleading Squad, which had lost its funding in the late seventies.
The girls paused in front of Shipley, smiling giddily, their arms linked.
“Poor you,” one of them said. “Lucas is our advisor.” She lowered her voice. “He’s so amazing.”
Professor Lucas Weaver was one of those handsome young English professors who toys with the hearts of his female students by wearing his hair just long enough to hang in his eyes, asking them to call him by his first name, reading aloud from Molly Bloom’s sexy monologue at the end of Ulysses, and placing just so on his desk a picture of himself hugging his terminally ill wife. So sensitive and charming and trapped in a loveless marriage to an invalid! Lucas—as he was known—was even more crushworthy than the average handsome young professor because of his adorable Tennessee accent and his tendency to moonwalk into class.
“Oh my God is he cute,” one of the other pink-sweatshirted girls agreed. “He’s like Bill Clinton, but younger and thinner and with better hair.”
“He’s reading ghost stories aloud in the chapel on Friday night for Halloween,” the third girl chimed in. “We’re going to dress up.”