Pamela Dean (17 page)

Janet stamped back to Ericson and discovered Molly in the room, lying on the floor and muttering over her math book. "You got a call," Molly said, without looking up.

"Oh! Was it Nick?"

"Nope. Thomas Lane; he said to tell you he'd got the tickets for next Saturday and Sunday, and if that's not all right you should call him. He said he thought a week's gap would stale the comparison. Why do all your friends talk like books?"

"What book do you talk like, then?"

"I used to talk like
The Wind in the Willows,
" said Molly, closing the math book and rolling over on her back, "but I'm in danger of talking like a physics text crossed with a mental health manual, if this keeps up. We
are
taking Shakespeare next term, aren't we?

The thought is all that keeps me going."

"It's only the second week of classes; are you sure you want to be a Bio major?"

"I'm entirely sure I don't," said Molly. "But I do want to be a marine biologist, and this seems to be the way to do it." She sat up and snagged a scrap of paper from the corner of Janet's desk. "Uh-huh, I thought so. I forgot part of the message. Thomas Lane has four tickets to each play, and do you know anybody else who would like to go?"

"You and Nick could come with us."

"Who the hell is Thomas Lane, and where are you inviting me, and why can't we bring Robin instead?"

"He's a very rude young man."

"Robin?"

"No, Thomas."

"And that's why you're going with him somewhere that has tickets, two nights in a row."

"Exactly," said Janet, and sat down on her bed.

Molly glared malevolently, and Janet said, "He's doing it as an apology. He yelled at me in the library. We're going to see
Hamlet
and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
or maybe the other way around."

"I'll come see
Hamlet,"
said Molly, "but they made me read Stoppard in eleventh grade and I hated it. Why don't Robin and I come with you to
Hamlet,
and you can take Nick and Tina along to the Stoppard?"

"Because I want all the pleasant people in one party?"

Molly leaned forward and fixed her huge eyes on Janet. "Which one of them are you mad at?"

Janet thought it over. "Both, actually."

"Well, then, you'll be putting all the nasty people in one party."

"Your logic overwhelms me," said Janet. "Did Thomas leave a phone number?"

Thomas, it appeared, lived on Second Forbes, the inhabitants of which were a little quicker to answer their telephone than those of Fourth Taylor. He was there, too. His voice was almost too much for the telephone; Janet could hold the receiver four inches from her ear and hear him perfectly. After she had expressed her approval of his plans and secured his for the additions to their party, she called Fourth Taylor again and, getting an irate female voice after forty-three rings, asked for Nick. He wasn't there. She thought of leaving a message, but they would probably tease him about it. She could talk to him after English class tomorrow.

She hung up the phone and wandered down the hall to the bathroom, where she considered her face in the mirror for some time. It was a pleasant and serviceable face, as always, and certainly all that burgeoning red hair was nice, even if it refused to be straight and sleek like the mane of a horse. But it did not look to her like the sort of face that beautiful young men would either be rude to or bother to make amends to. It did not even look much like the sort of face a theatrical and poetical type like Nick would look twice at.

Well, he probably liked her for recognizing Eliot, even if she had missed on Milton. But that still left Thomas as much of a mystery as ever. A civil apology would have been enough, surely; or offering to buy her a hamburger in the Tea Room, if his conscience was really hurting him. Tickets for the Old Theater and all of two weekend evenings—not to mention the hours on the bus, one coming and one returning—seemed excessive.

She went back to the room. Molly had flung her math book against the wall and was lying on the bed laughing. When Janet asked her what in the world she was doing, she said she was placing bets with herself about how seriously she had damaged it.

"Oh, no, you don't," she added, as Janet headed for the abus ed book, which was lying

between her desk and the wall. "You have to bet, too, if you're going to pick it up and ruin my fun."

"Okay, I bet you a dollar you cracked the spine."

"Money leaves me unmoved," said Molly.

"Okay, if I'm wrong I tell you all about Thomas."

"Done."

Janet eased the book off the floor and examined it. "You win," she said. "I'm amazed.

All you did was bend the dust jacket and the first four pages."

"Put the poor thing back on my desk and tell me about Thomas."

Janet did as she was instructed, and sat down on her own bed. "He is stupefyingly gorgeous," she said.

"I bet he's not cuter than Robin."

"He's not cute at all," said Janet. "He exists in another realm entirely."

"Sounds distracting," said Molly.

"Yes, I think it probably will be." She told the entire story, which Molly met with a nice mixture of indignation and amusement. When the story was done, she asked, "What are you going to tell Nick?"

"Et tu?"
said Janet, exasperated. "I've been wondering that all afternoon.
Your
job is to explain to me that I'm being very silly. Why should I tell him anything? Besides, you talked me into inviting him. I'll tell him he's invited."

"I did not talk—oh, never mind. Maybe Thomas and Tina will hit it off," said Molly.

"Thanks a lot."

"Well, how many of them do you want, anyway?"

"That's another thing," said Janet. "How come nobody so much as looked at me the entire time I was in high school, and now they're swarming out of the woodwork?"

"Didn't they really?" said Molly. "You're much nicer to look at than I am, and I had six boyfriends in four years. They were jerks, though."

"All of them?"

"Well, four of them, anyway. Of course, I was a jerk too, so we got along very well."

"Do you think you're a jerk now?"

"Only when bored or hungry."

"Speaking of which, do you want to go to dinner?"

"Let's wait for Tina."

"Where is she?"

"Watching a
Star Trek
rerun. It's over at five-thirty."

"Tina watches
Star Trek?"

"Why not?"

"Never mind," said Janet. "I think I must be being a jerk—and I'm not even bored or hungry."

"Could you hand me that math book? I might as well be both at once."

Janet gave her the book. "Speaking of which," she said, "I told my father about the books flying out the window, and he said he'd like to see them. But they're not on Peg's shelves."

"Not even the Liddell and Scott?"

"There was a modern printing, not the one we saw."

"Huh. Why does your father want to see them?"

"He collects college folklore. I think he's writing a book on it; he won't say, and he'd probably have to publish it under a pen name, or posthumously."

"After the garden loam," said Molly, and giggled. "I wish I'd known; I could've asked Peg at lunch. And speaking of
which,
where were
you?
"

"Eating with Nick in Dunbar."

"Are you planning to desert us regularly?"

"It's not you, it's Taylor. I couldn't face it in this weather."

"It has a melancholy charm," said Molly. "It prepares one for the miseries of math class. I think I chose the wrong professor. There's one who teaches with Zen proverbs, and another who corrects your spelling, according to Nora. Either one would have to be better than somebody who just tells you what you're supposed to know, once, and goes on." She sighed heavily, and opened the math book.

Janet looked longingly at her little row of unread books, and then thoughtfully at her complete Shakespeare. Then she reminded herself that while she had certainly done some reading for English 10 in the past weekend, she had not done the reading actually assigned for tomorrow's class. She pulled Volume I of the little red-and-white paperback set off her lower shelf, and settled down on the bed with the General Prologue to
The Canterbury
Tales.

After half an hour she decided she had better go read in the fourth-floor lounge. It could not be easy to study mathematics while in the background your roommate alternately chortled and read bits of verse in an incomprehensible dialect aloud to you. She was pronouncing it wrong, anyway; most of it didn't scan. Evans had promised them a lesson in Middle English phonetics tomorrow; it appeared to be his policy to let you struggle through something on your own before explaining it. Janet got up quietly and slipped out the door.

Molly didn't look up.

She was well into the "Knight's Tale" when Tina came back, and it was not until she was stopped dead by a line with five footnotes to it, none of which told her what she wanted to know, that she realized there had been voices and laughter in their room for some time now. She closed the book and left the lounge. The door to their room was open. Janet, proceeding down the inner hallway still bemused by Chaucer, was in time to hear Tina say,

". . . taking me to a concert on Wednesday," in a voice of immense exhilaration; but by the time her brain had registered the words she was already around the corner, and Tina was looking triumphant and Molly guilty.

"Hi, Tina," said Janet. "Dinner?"

"If you guys don't mind Eliot. Nick said he'd probably be eating there."

"Good," said Janet, "I want to invite him to the theater." She wanted to stretch the rest out, but something in Tina's face made her say hastily, "And you, too. Do you guys want to go see
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
with Thomas Lane and me?"

"Thomas Lane?"
said Tina. "The one Peg showed us in Taylor, the day we bought the curtains?"

Janet thought about it. "I guess he was one of them," she said.

"Of course he was. It was Nick and Robin and Rob a

nd Thomas Lane and Jack

Whatshisface."

"Nikopoulos," said Janet.

"Right. And Thomas was the most gorgeous of the whole bunch."

"Well," said Janet, "do you want to go?"

"What about Molly?"

"She and Robin are coming with us another night to see
Hamlet.
"

"What
is
Rosencrantz Whatever?"

"It's a very funny modern play by Tom Stoppard."

"Well, okay. It sounds like Shakespeare."

"It's
Hamlet
from Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's viewpoint. But it doesn't matter; I read it before I read
Hamlet
and I thought it was hilarious."

"Well, okay,” said Christina again. "Thanks." She put the books she was holding neatly on her lower shelf, shrugged out of her pink nylon jacket and hung it over the back of her desk chair, tucked her gray Blackstock T-shirt into her pink corduroy pants, put the jacket back on, zipped it to just below the Blackstock seal on the T-shirt so that the lion seemed to be peering over the zipper pull, and said, "Let's go, before the line gets too long."

Outside was a gray evening sliding all too quickly into dark. Forbes Hall looked like a modern prison and Eliot like an ancient dungeon. Even the inside of Eliot was gloomy. The dark wood frowned at them; the lights seemed as far away as the moon.

Nick had taken a table in the farthest corner, overlooking the wooden bridge and the place where the stream came out of the lake. He was wearing a blue Blackstock T-shirt that was too big for him. Janet considered the Latin motto, which was generally translated as

"Hold fast to learning and fear not," and wondered if he had put the shirt on to give him courage against whatever had ailed him this afternoon. He looked much more like himself: his color was a little high and his hair had come uncombed. He had spread the maroon sweater, a tan raincoat, and a red umbrella over the table and was glaring at all comers. His face lit up when he saw them in a way that made Janet's stomach try to fall out. "Thank God," he said. "I was afraid the footballers would get here first and throw me out the window. How are you, ladies?"

"Sick of mathematics," said Molly, slapping her tray down one chair away from him.

Janet sat between them, on Nick's right, and watched Tina take the chair on his left.

He looked inquiringly at Tina, who said, "I don't think I'm supposed to be in Chem 30, even if I did get a perfect score on the AP test."

"Good Lord, I should think not," said Nick. "That's not a course for freshmen. Who's your advisor?"

"Fields," said Christina.

"Well, be round with him and get into Chem 23 where you belong," said Nick, and turned to Janet. "And how is it with you?"

"As with the indifferent children of the earth," said Janet, without thinking; then, as Nick looked wary and Tina confused, she said quickly, "Do you want to go with Thomas Lane and Tina and me to see
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
at the Old Theater next weekend?"

"What about Molly?" said Nick.

Janet explained, again.

"Certainly," said Nick. "Stoppard is a wicked man and I should very much like to see his play. But have an eye for Robin; he'll probably disgrace you again, if you take him to see
Hamlet.
"

"No, he won't," said Molly. "I'll bring a canvas bag, and suppress him if he asks for it."

"What has Robin got against Shakespeare?" said Janet. "I thought it was just Olivier he was laughing at."

"Shakespeare said clowns should speak no more than was set down for them," said Nick.

"Well, Hamlet said so," said Janet, amused, "but—"

"Is Robin a clown?" said Molly. "He seems very sober to me."

"It's his studies," said Nick. "He's a mad rogue, really. Wait until he's got all this Greek past his gullet, and you'll see. Or wait until we produce our play this winter."

"How's that going?" said Janet.

"Nobody else wants Ericson Little Theater for anything, so we may have it. We've too many actors already, but if any of you likes to do makeup or lighting, we'd be pleased to overburden your schedules for you."