Regina's Song (9 page)

There was the usual stirring around while they tried to find the enrollment cards among all the other papers they’d been given on sign-up day.

“Quickly, quickly,” I nudged them. “We’ve only got an hour, and we’ve got other fish to fry.”

It didn’t do any good; it never does. It still took them the usual ten minutes or so to get the cards to the end of each row. Then I gathered the cards and distributed the course descriptions.

“All right, then,” I said after that was finished, “Let’s begin. For most of you, this is your first day of college. You’ll find that things here are quite a bit different from what you’ve been accustomed to. You’re adults now, and we expect more from you. You’re here to study and to learn. You’re not here to occupy space; you’re here to work. If you don’t work, you’ll fail, and then you’ll get to do it all over again. This is a required course, and you won’t get your degree until you’ve managed to get a passing grade from me or from one of my colleagues. Our goal is to teach you how to write papers that your professors can understand. Writing was invented several thousand years ago as a way to pass information back and forth between humans. Since most of you are human, it’s a fairly important skill.” I paused and looked around. “Nonhumans, naturally, aren’t required to take this course, so all nonhumans are excused.”

It got the same laugh it always got. It was a silly thing to say, but a few laughs never hurt.

“Would you define ‘human’ for us, Mr. Austin?” a young fellow near the front of the room asked.

“You’ll have to take that up with the folks in anthropology,” I told him. “I operate on the theory that anybody whose knuckles don’t drag on the ground when he walks is probably human. But we digress. As students, you’ll need to communicate with your professors in a way slightly more advanced than grunts and whistles. That’s why you’re here. I’m supposed to teach you how to write, so we’re going to write—at least
you
are—and you’re going to start now. Your first assignment is a five-hundred-word essay, and just for old times’ sake, why don’t you take a run at the ever-popular ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’? Since you’ve all probably been working on
that
old turkey since about the fifth grade, you should have a head start on it. You’ll be graded on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and thought content. It’s due on Wednesday, so you’d better buckle down.”

There were sounds of serious discontent.

“Hey, gang,” I said, “if that makes you unhappy, the door’s right over there. You can walk out anytime you want.”

There was the customary shocked silence when I dropped
that
on them. Teachers at the high-school level almost never invite their students to leave.

“I’m not your friend, people,” I told them bluntly. “I’m not here to make you happy. If your papers aren’t up to standard, you’ll get to do them over again—and again—and again. You’ll keep doing them over until you get them right, and that won’t alter the fact that you’ll be writing other papers as well, and you’ll probably beriting those also. Things will definitely start to back up on you after a while if you keep turning in tripe.”

“How much credit for class participation, Mr. Austin?” the young fellow who’d asked for a definition of
human
asked in a slightly worried tone. I get that question every quarter—usually from speech majors who’d sooner die than actually put something down on paper.

I shrugged. “None. You’re here to write, not to talk. If you want to say something to me, write it down. Then type it, because I won’t accept handwritten papers. Use pica type and standard margins. You might want to pick up a copy of the MLA style sheet. That’s the final word on academic style.”

I saw the usual look of blank incomprehension. “The Modern Language Association,” I translated. “Try to write complete sentences; incomplete ones irritate me. Oh, one other thing. You’ll encounter people out there who’ll try to sell you papers. Don’t waste your money. I’ve already seen most of them, so I’ll recognize them. If you try to foist a secondhand paper off on me, you’ll be taking this course over again, because I’ll flunk you right on the spot. You should probably know that my flunk rate doesn’t even come close to the bell curve. If I happen to get an entire class of incompetents, I’ll flunk the whole bunch. Now, then, if you want to drop the course or change instructors, go to the Registrar’s Office. Don’t pester me with your problems.”

I let that soak in just a bit. “Any questions?” I asked.

There was a sullen silence, and I was fairly sure that my deliberate mention of the registrar was ringing a few bells.

I looked around. “Not a word?” I asked mildly. “Not even a few whimpers? Aw, shucky-darn.”

There was a nervous laugh. Evidently I’d gotten through to most of them. “You seem to have grasped my basic point, then,” I told them. “The policy here is ‘my house; my rules.’ As long as you remember that, we’ll get along fine. Class dismissed.” I scooped up the enrollment cards, stowed them in my briefcase, and was out the door before any of the suck-up crowd could get in my way. A strategy of abruptitude works quite well when you want to make a clean getaway during those early sessions. Shock and run cuts the sniveling short; linger-longering just encourages it.

I went out to the garage, unlocked my car, and leafed through the enrollment cards to take a body count. There were too many, of course. There always are. My unfriendly speech in the classroom had been designed to correct that. Academic terrorism does have its uses, I guess.

I read some more of
Paradise Lost
while I waited for Twink, and after about a half hour she showed up. “You weren’t really serious about all that grumpy stuff, were you, Markie?” she asked as she climbed in.

“Pretty much, yes. Did it hurt their feelings?”

“They were awfully pouty about it. They all agreed that a writing assignment on the first day of class was a violation of their constitutional rights or something.”

“Gee, what a shame.”

“You’re terrible, Markie,” she said with a wicked little giggle. “When we were coming down here you were saying something about a canned speech. Do you unload like that on every class you teach?”

I nodded as I started the car. “Yep—and it works. I’ve even made the P.E. Department’s blacklist.”

“That went by a little fast.”

“Physical education involves the big, strong, dumb kids who make up the assorted teams that wear purple uniforms and try to whup the teams from California. The coaches of those teams have a list of names they hand out to their tame dummies. It’s the ‘Don’t take no classes from these guys’ list. It’s an honor to have your name on that document.”

“I’m so proud of you,” she gushed, as we pulled out of the parking garage.

“Steady on, Twink.”

“Some of the names your students were calling you were naughty.”

“Good. I got their attention, then.”

“The smart-mouth who asked you to define ‘human’ was even trying to put a petition together to lodge a protest with the administration about how mean you were. Not too many people were interested in signing it, though. Quite a few of them said they were just going to drop your class.”

“Good. That’s the whole idea. What you saw today was part of an academic game, Twink. The university administration tries to get a lot of mileage out of the teaching assistants by cramming as many freshmen as possible into those classrooms. Some teaching assistants are softies who yearn for the approval of their students. I’m tough, and I don’t make any secret of it. After the first week or so, I’ve usually weeded out the dum-dums, so
I’ve
got the cream of the crop, and my warm, fuzzy associates get the garbage.
My
students probably don’t even need me, since they can already write papers that’ll cut glass from a mile away. The warm-fuzzies get the semiliterates who couldn’t find their way from one end of a sentence to the other if their lives depended on it. I picked up the business of academic terrorism from Dr. Conrad. Just the mention of his name scares people into convulsions.” While we talked, I hooked into Forty-fifth Street to get us back to Wallingford.

“I think you’re going to
love
my paper, Markie,” Twink bubbled at me.

“You’re just auditing the course, Twink, remember? Why write a paper if you don’t have to?”

“I
want
to write one, Markie. I’m going to blow your socks off.”

“Why? You won’t get a grade out of it.”

“I’m going to prove something, big brother. Don’t start throwing challenges around unless you’re ready to back them up. I can whup you any day in the week.” She paused briefly. “It’s your own fault, Markie. Sometimes I get competitive—particularly when somebody challenges me. You said you wanted a good paper. Well, you’re going to get one, and you won’t even have to grade it. Isn’t that neat?”

That took me completely by surprise. Renata hadn’t been quite that aggressive before—neither of the twins had. I’d known that they were clever, certainly, but they’d never flaunted it. Of course, Renata was older now, and the time she’d spent in Dr. Fallon’s institution had probably matured her quite a ways past her contemporaries. The average college freshman comes to us carrying a lot of baggage from high school. High-schoolies are herd animals for the most part, and they’re usually deathly afraid of standing out from the crowd. Once they move up to college, the brighter ones tend to separate themselves from the herd and strike out on their own. It usually takes them a year or so, though. Renata, it appeared, had jumped over that transition, and she’d come down running.

I definitely approved of this new Renata, and I was fairly sure Dr. Fallon would as well. This was turning out better than either of us had expected.

After I’d dropped Twink at Mary’s place, I went back to campus to continue my examination of the connection between Whitman and the Brits. I hung it up just before five o’clock and actually got home in time for dinner.

“I’m supposed to tell you that Charlie’s going to be late, Trish,” James rumbled, as we gathered in the dining room. “I guess that something came up at Boeing, and the head of the program Charlie’s involved with called an emergency meeting.”

“That sounds ominous,” Erika said. “When Boeing starts calling emergency meetings, it suggests that we might all need to go find bomb shelters.”

“He wasn’t too specific,” James added, “but I got the impression that something fell apart because some resident genius at Boeing neglected to convert inches to centimeters on a set of fairly significant specifications. Charlie was using some
very
colorful language when he left.”

“That
might
just make it difficult to hit what you’re shooting at,” I noted. “A millimeter here and a millimeter there would add up after a while.”

“Particularly if you’re taking potshots at something in the asteroid belt,” James agreed.

“Have you got anything serious on the fire this evening, Sylvia?” I asked our resident psychologist.

“Is your head starting to come unraveled, Mark?”

“I hope not. I’d like to get your reading on something that happened today, is all.”

“Whip it on me,” she replied.

I let that pass. “The Twinkie twin I was talking about did something a little out of character today. Evidently, she’s not quite as fragile as we all thought she was. She seems to be breaking out in a rash of independence. She even gets offended if I offer to drive her anyplace because she’s got that ten-speed bicycle. Rain or shine, she wants to bike it.”

“That’s probably a reaction to the time she spent in the sanitarium, Mark. People in institutions usually aren’t allowed to make many decisions.”

“Rebellion, then?”

“Self-assertion might come a little closer,” Sylvia replied. “In a general way, we approve of that—as long as it doesn’t go
too
far. Could you be more specific? Exactly what did she do today that seemed unusual?”

“Well, she’s auditing a course I teach—freshman English—basically pretending to be a student to get the feel of the place.”

“Interesting notion,” Erika said. “All you’re really doing is moving her from one institution to a different one.”

“Approximately, yes,” I agreed. “Well, I assigned a paper today. She knows she doesn’t have to write one, but she says she’s going to do one anyway, and then she promised me that it’d be so good that it’ll blow me away.”

“You assign a paper on the first day of class?” Trish demanded incredulously. “You’re a monster!”

“Just weeding out the garden, Trish,” I told her. “It’s the best way I know of to scare off the party people. Evidently, Renata took the assignment as a challenge, and now she’s going to jump on it with both feet.”

“She’s making a pass at you, Mark,” Erika said bluntly. “She wants to write her way into your heart.”

“Get real,” I said. “There’s none of that going on.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure, Mark,” Sylvia said thoughtfully. “It’s not uncommon for a psychiatric patient to have those kinds of feelings for the therapist.”

“I’m
not
Twink’s therapist, Sylvia,” I objected.

“Oh, really? You worry about her all the time, you do everything you possibly can to make her life easier, and you get all nervous if she does anything the least bit out of the ordinary. You’re trying everything you can think of to make her get well. In my book, that makes you her therapist.”

“I think you might be missing something, Sylvia,” James said thoughtfully.

“Oh?”

“Mark’s been a brother figure for Renata since she was a baby, and he’s the only person she recognized when her mind woke up. Isn’t it possible that this ‘I’ll write a paper that’ll blow you away’ announcement is an effort to gain Mark’s approval?”

“He’s a father figure, you mean?”

“Something along those lines, I suppose,” he rumbled.

“Thanks a bunch, gang,” I said sarcastically. “Now we’ve got a toss-up. Is she aggressively showing off, or is she just yearning for approval?”

“It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?” Erika suggested.

“I’ve
got
to meet this girl, Mark,” Sylvia said. “For right now, though, maybe you’d better talk with Dr. Fallon about it. He knows her, so he’ll probably have some idea of what’s
really
going on. It might not be anything very significant, but on the other hand . . .” She left it hanging.