Tap & Gown (12 page)

Avoiding the chill emanating from Arielle’s turf in the back of the hall, I hoofed it down to the front of the classroom and slid into a seat in the terra incognita of the first row. In my guise as serious student, I flipped open a page of my spiral notebook, uncapped a pen, and prepared to take my first-ever set of copious notes about the fascinating field of greenhouse gases.3*

“Excuse me, Amy Haskel?” said a girl two seats to my left.

I looked up. “Yes?”

“I’m Michelle Whitmore.”

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“Uh, hi.” Should I know this girl? She had straight brown hair pulled into a messy upsweep, pale skin with a dash of freckles across her nose, and was dressed in a green scoop-necked shirt that almost, but not quite, made her eyes the same color. “How did you know my name?”

She pointed at my notebook. “Written right there.”

Oh. Smooth one.

“I find it really embarrassing, for both of us, that I have to introduce myself to you.”

Wow, ego much? “Excuse me?”

“I’ve been waiting very patiently for your last problem set. It’s a week overdue.”

I gawked. “You’re my T.A.?” I’d been seeing this chick’s green smiley face on top of my homework assignments all semester, but nothing more. As far as I was concerned, this Michelle Whitmore could have been named “Section 4.”

She gave me a mock salute. “Which you’d know if you ever showed up to my section.”

Ooh, busted.

“You’re a senior taking this pass/fail, correct?” When I nodded, she shrugged. “I’d be e-mailing you if you were veering into the fail zone. Class participation is only ten percent of the grade.”

“But problem sets are twenty.”

“Affirmative. And that means this probably isn’t a part you can skip. So … when can I expect it?”

“How’s after lunch work for you?”

“End of class would be better,” she admitted.

I pressed a hand to my heart. “You can’t be suggesting I use lecture period to complete the assignment!

What kind of graduate student are you?”

“The kind that’s secretly an undergrad who spends her History lectures coloring in her lab notebook illustrations. I know the score.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Wait, I’m being T.A.’d by an undergrad?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, firstly, you’re not being ‘T.A.’d’ by anyone at the moment, between not turning in assignments for me to grade and not attending my sections. And, secondly, welcome to the wonderful world of Group IV.”

The professor walked over to the lectern and smiled at the audience. Especially the suck-ups in the first three rows. “I can’t do my homework in the front row, at the very least.”

“True,” she conceded. “Do you have a class after this?”

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“Lunch.”

“Have lunch with me and I’ll give you a crash course on everything you’ve missed in my exhilarating sessions all semester. Maybe I’ll even give you some of that credit back. Then turn in your problem set.”

“Really?” After I’d basically disrespected her for the last three months? This chick was being way cooler than I’d be if the situation were reversed.

“No, you’re right, they aren’t that exhilarating. Mostly we draw clouds.”

I laughed, and the prof shot us both a dirty look. Cool and funny. Maybe I should have been going to her class all semester. I settled in and listened to the professor tell us all about carbon sinks and ice ages.

It was actually pretty fascinating. Shame I have only developed an interest in things outside of my field of study at the end of my college career. I’m sure that when I’m old and gray, I’m going to regret not taking more advantage of the breadth of classes Eli had to offer when I’d had the chance. I could have squeezed in an extra credit here or there.

Maybe then I wouldn’t be choosing, my last semester, between Renaissance Italy and climate change.

After class, I started in on the problem set while Michelle spoke to the professor, the other TA.s, and the more enterprising students from our section.

“You’re doing that one all wrong,” she said over me as I struggled with number three.

“Good thing I have a chance to fix it before I turn it in,” I shot back. I hadn’t dealt with balancing equations since high school. This one was supposed to explain to me the theory behind ozone depletion, but I couldn’t seem to get the catalyst right.

“I’m going to make you suffer just a little for your credit,” she said. I grinned and packed up my stuff.

Lunch options up on Science Hill were pretty slim. Everyone who doesn’t hoof it back to Commons on the main campus eats in the dining hall on the top of the Biology Tower. The food there is only decent, but the views are spectacular, and you’re more likely to see grad students and professors in that hall than anywhere else on campus.

“You’re a senior, too, right?” I asked her during the elevator ride. The indignity of having an undergrad T.A. would only be compounded by discovering she was younger than me.

“A junior,” she replied. “I guess that’s what I’d be. I went abroad last spring without credit transfer, and then I took another semester off this fall to do research, though I stayed on campus.”

“So you matriculated with my class.”

“Yeah, and I’m hoping they don’t count me being in the neighborhood last fall. They kick us out after eight semesters taking classes here, you know.”

I did know that. My friend Carol lived in fear of reaching her eight-semester limit without completing all her credits. Of course, Carol couldn’t seem to keep a full course load. She dropped classes every time she landed a juicy role in a campus play—which was pretty much every semester. I don’t know if she wanted an Eli degree as much as she wanted the connections that came out of Eli’s prestigious drama program. For her, the diploma was superfluous.

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“Is that tough for you,” I asked Michelle, “knowing that all your classmates are graduating this semester?” That was one of the issues that had kept me from doing a semester abroad. Unless I picked one of two Eli-managed programs, my credits wouldn’t transfer and I’d have to watch my class graduate without me—Lydia and my other friends, all gone.

She shrugged. “It might be if I were still living on campus. I don’t notice so much now that I’m not living in Strathmore anymore.”

No wonder I’d never met her. Of the twelve residential colleges on campus, only Strathmore and Christopher Bright had freshmen living within their walls. Freshmen from the other ten, including my Prescott, lived together on Old Campus and only moved into our residential colleges sophomore year. Eli administrators claimed the strategy helped us make friends outside our colleges. Strathmore residents, by contrast, tended to be more insular. If there was someone I didn’t at least know
of
in my class, they probably belonged to Strathmore or Christopher Bright Colleges. The fact that Jamie had been in Strathmore during undergrad probably didn’t do much for his natural isolationist tendencies.

At the top floor, Michelle stepped out into the dining room and scanned the seating area. “Okay, let’s eat here.”

As if there was anyplace else to sit? I followed her to the buffet line and grabbed a tray.

“As it is,” she said, spearing a rice-and-tomato-stuffed bell pepper and adding it to her plate, “I don’t really see a lot of my old Strathmore friends much. I’m mostly up here with grad students and other scientists.”

I grabbed a pepper stuffed with ground beef and slid my tray alongside hers. “I think the community I’ve got in Prescott is one of the things I’ll miss most when I graduate.” Well, that and the community of Rose

& Grave. But if I accepted Jenny’s offer, I wouldn’t really be leaving them, would I?

“Must be nice,” she said, and with her face turned away toward the frozen yogurt machine like that, I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or bitter. Not everyone at Eli was as attached to their college as I was to Prescott. I knew several students who had even transferred colleges to be closer to their department of study, their significant others, or, in some cases, the gym. But Strathmore and Christopher Bright residents tended to be more into it than others, as a result of their early bonding experiences.

As we sat down, I took a quick survey of her plate. Meatless. “Are you a vegetarian?”

She nodded. “Vegan. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?”

I laughed. “I guess I’m beginning to notice stuff like that more often now. My boyfriend is a vegetarian.”

“And he hasn’t managed to convert you yet?”

“Nope. We still haven’t decided how to raise the kids, either.” I took a big bite of beef-stuffed pepper and pondered if Jamie would find that joke amusing or not. I mean, kids?

“Meat scares me these days. The hormones, the chemicals, deforestation and resource allocation—and then there’s the possibility of widespread quality control issues. The danger of mad cow makes hamburger decidedly less appetizing.”

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I swallowed with some difficulty. “You’re a real killjoy Michelle.”

“Wait until you hear me get into my spiel about ozone depletion and skin cancer.”

Proving she wasn’t remotely kidding, my Geology T.A. proceeded to scare the crap out of me for the next twenty minutes. The world, in her opinion, was on the verge of coming to an end, thanks to rampant consumerism and industry and pollution by, well, us. Oil was running out, not that we were doing anything about it, soil erosion and depletion were at an all-time high, the global effects of climate change were and would continue to be catastrophic to food production, wild spaces, and of course, there was that pesky severe weather, of which we could only expect more as the global climate became increasingly warmer and more unstable, atmospherically speaking. Super-storms, super-floods—and that was just from the sky. Related to nothing we’d caused (for once) we really needed to rethink the wisdom of building enormous cities on top of fault lines (hello, Los Angeles) or in other geologically unsound regions (hello, Mississippi River Delta). It was … sobering. By the time I attacked my half-melted frozen yogurt, I couldn’t help but see a distinct similarity between my bowl of vanilla mush and chocolate jimmies and our beleaguered polar ice caps. Each skinny, sinking jimmie might as well be a starving polar bear falling through the ice.

“So now you know what you’re missing by skipping my section every week,” she said blithely, spooning herself some vanilla swirl soy-based concoction.

“What … can we do about it all?” I asked, appalled.

She lifted her shoulders. “I dunno. Recycle? Use public transportation? Take classes like this so you know exactly what we’re up against, beyond all the political bullshit?”

“I guess I’m doing pretty well, then.”

“Stop eating meat,” she went on.

Now she sounded like Jamie! “I’m glad we have geologists like you around.”

“I’m not a geologist,” she said. “I’m a chemist. I’m on loan to the Geology department this semester.

Long story.”

“Interesting one?”

“Not really. Now let me show you that equation for the ozone destruction catalyst …” She started doodling on a napkin, then suddenly stiffened. “Actually, I forgot, I have to be back at the Geology building now. Can we finish this there?”

“For what?”

“Um, office hours. I just have to have my butt in the chair. No one will show up. Let’s go.”

We bussed our trays in record time, then Michelle practically sprinted to the elevator, her messenger bag flapping hard against the back of her jean-encased thighs. In the elevator, she started jamming on the lobby button, as if the elevator would interpret her repeated depression of
L
as a sign of urgency and descend any faster.

“Do you get in trouble with the professor if you’re late?” I asked.

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“Heaps.” The door closed, and Michelle leaned against the wall. “And I owe him a lot for taking me on, too. I don’t want to flake out on him.”

But once we left the building, we headed back to the Geology lab at a pace that could only be described as “casual stroll.” She took me to the smallish library on the fourth floor, where I wrangled with letters and numbers until the whole thing made sense:

CFCl3[pollutant]+ UV Light ==> CFCl2+ Cl

Cl + O3[ozone] ==> ClO + O2

ClO + O ==> Cl + O2

Cl + O3==> ClO + O2

ClO + O ==> Cl + O2

(And so on …)

I looked at the results. Man, the Earth was screwed.

“You know,” she said, as she marked my score in her grade book. “Judging from your mid-term grade, you’re going to wind up with a solid B in this class, even without your ten percent participation credit.

Your grades must be pretty good to go with pass/fail here.”

“I’m a Lit major,” I said. “Anything less than an A-minus is an embarrassment.”

“They swing a more classic curve in the science departments,” she replied. “I have to fight hard for my As.”

And yet, she was an undergraduate teaching assistant. Something told me that Michelle Whitmore was simply being modest. I wondered what her true story was. If Jenny weren’t up to her ears in background checks for the potential taps, I might even ask her to find out for me. Because what’s the use of having the resources of a rich and powerful secret society at your beck and call if you don’t take advantage of it to snoop on your teachers?

Now I was the one who sounded like Jamie.

“You’re all set.” She handed back my completed problem set with her standard green smiley face at the top. “I assume you’ll be heading back downhill now, back to the safety of the liberal arts.”

“You better believe it.”

“Well, it was nice meeting you, Amy Haskel.” As I got up to leave, she settled in with a copy of a dense-looking scientific paper. “Oh,” she added. “I like your sneakers.”

I looked down at my yellow All Stars. “Thanks.”

As I hiked back to the main campus, I thought about what a shame it was that Michelle had been in Strathmore, had taken a semester off, had moved off campus, had locked herself away in the labs. She
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