I actually did feel a little better the next day, and I like to think it was due to the magic soup, though it could have been the fact that I slept in until 11:30. My sinuses felt less like impacted golf balls, and after I took a couple of decongestants I felt almost normal. I texted Bethany, Your boy brought me the magic soup, and now I am magically healed.
She replied, You must’ve gotten the only magic bowl. I’m still sick.
Damn. Really?
Yeah, my throat is on fire. I’m going to get it swabbed in a little while to make sure it’s not strep.
Oh. Sorry. Hope it’s not strep.
While I was eating my cereal (and wishing I had more soup), I pulled up the course catalog for NOVA. They didn’t have a huge Latin department, and it looked like I’d probably place out of most of their classes if I did well on the AP, but they did have one on Virgil that looked interesting. It was on the Annandale campus, which isn’t too far away, on Mondays and Wednesdays from five to seven. I don’t row in the fall, so logistically, it was possible. I went in search of my dad. He was sitting at his desk with a pad of paper on his lap and some computer program open on the monitor in front of him.
“It lives!” he exclaimed, without turning around. “I was beginning to wonder.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Ish.”
“What do you know about SAS?” he asked.
“Only that I’m full of it.”
“Not sass,” he said, smiling. “S-A-S. It’s a statistical programming language. Supposed to be very easy to learn.”
“I’m guessing it’s not?”
He pushed away from the desk. “Maybe it’s me.”
“Isn’t this the kind of thing you have grad students for?”
“I just need a simple program that’ll make me a database.”
“You could ask Sebastian.”
He gave me a dark look. I said, “He does computer stuff!”
He made a face. Dad was analyzing medieval tax documents over the period of several hundred years to see how the money moved around. The pipe roll of 1130 was the first surviving English tax document, and then there were a bunch missing because of the civil war that happened right after that, when the English barons promised to support Henry’s daughter Maude as the queen and then her cousin tried to take over anyway and the whole country spent twenty years eating itself alive in a civil war because the patriarchy sucks.
Anyway, that’s what Dad was doing, and had been doing for the past couple of years, but it was not going well because he is not very good at math or computers.
“It took Einstein ten years to learn calculus,” I reminded him.
“When you’re Einstein, you can take ten years to learn calculus. Unfortunately, I’m not him.”
“He was a crappy family man,” I said. “So we’re probably better off.”
“Did you really come down here to talk about the pipe roll?”
“No, actually, I came to talk about my classes for next year.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just, you know they do dual enrollment with the community college, right?”
“I remember Delia mentioned it a couple of years ago.”
“Yeah, so I’m kind of topped out on Latin as of this year, and I was thinking maybe I could take a class over there so I don’t have to give it up.”
“At NOVA, huh? How would you get over there?”
“I’m not really sure about that part. I have this, uh, friend. And he’s taking some classes over there, and he seems to like them. Otherwise I’ll have to sit out Latin next year.”
“Hmm,” he said. “We’d have to figure out the logistics with your mom. You ever been there, even?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”
“Well, when you’re feeling better, why don’t you head over? Check it out. See if you think it’s workable to get there on your own.” He smiled at his program. “I don’t suppose dual enrollment means the classes are free?”
“No, I don’t think so. But the credits transfer, so it’s probably cheaper in the long run.”
He nodded thoughtfully. I suspected what he really wanted was to get back to work. “Maybe I’ll just go over there today,” I suggested.
“Aren’t you still sick?”
“Barely,” I said. “Can I use the car this afternoon?”
“I’ll be doing this until I retire,” he said. “So sure.”
NOVA has six different locations, not one contained campus like GMU. Annandale is the biggest one and also the closest to my house, so I decided to head over there that afternoon. I stopped at a bench on the quad and watched the students go by. It was kind of a mixed bunch in terms of age. There were people who looked like they were my age or younger, and then a couple of ladies in hijabs walked by who looked like they were probably in their fifties.
I wasn’t sure why I was there, except that I was curious. Middleridge was starting to feel kind of tight, like a shirt I’d outgrown, and this was the logical next size up. Plus, there was something undeniably appealing about the idea of telling people at school, “Sorry, I won’t be here tomorrow. I’ll be at college.” I smiled thinking about it. I wandered around the main building, where most of the classes were held, and then went down to the basement to check out the bookstore.
There wasn’t a lot in the language section, so I meandered down the aisle to see what they had for English. There was a huge tome of the giants of Russian literature on the shelf for a literature-in-translation class. I pulled it out and sat down on the floor with it on my lap.
The type was really small. I’m not normally one to be bothered by that, but it was like the publisher had tried to save money by using the least amount of paper possible. And on top of that, there didn’t seem to be normal punctuation marks, like quotes or paragraph breaks.
“Good grief,” I muttered, two pages in. I wasn’t even sure what I was reading—a short story by Chekhov, I knew that much, and there was a little boy and he seemed to be eating soup? With his nanny?
Someone walked up to me and, in a low voice like a movie announcer’s, said, “Aphra Brown.”
I looked up into the face of Greg D’Agostino, who was grinning from ear to ear.
“Hey,” I said. “I mean, hi. I mean.” Of all the times to be channeling Bethany.
Jeez, that was a mean thought.
He said, “Aren’t you sick?”
“Not so much now. There was, you know, the soup, which you brought. That you brought. Which you brought. Ugh, they both sound right, I don’t know.”
“I think it’s which,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, it’s a nonrestrictive clause, right?”
Brilliantly, I said, “Um.”
“Nonessential information,” he explained.
“Well, then no, because the origin of the soup was important. So I’ve changed my mind. It’s the soup that you brought.”
I wished this felt less like flirting. I was pretty sure bantering about the rules of English grammar didn’t count as flirting for Greg. I wondered if he and Bethany flirted, but I imagined they just skipped that part and went straight to the making out. “So,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
“I was meeting with the professor about my independent study,” he said. “I had to rework the syllabus since your girl Bethany reminded me I’d included no women.”
That’s right. She had said that.
“Are you signing up for next semester?” he asked.
“I—I’m not sure. I just wanted to look around, I guess.”
“And you decided to do a little light reading?”
I looked down at my book. “Something like that.”
“That translation isn’t getting you anywhere,” he said, putting the book back on the shelf. “Too archaic. I have the Robert Payne at home, if you want it.”
“Don’t you usually read this stuff in the original?”
“I go back and forth,” he said. “Depends how ambitious I’m feeling.”
I got up off the floor. The decongestant I’d taken seemed to have struck the edge off my wits, or maybe that was just Greg. “I guess I’m done, then,” I said. “I was just looking around.”
“I’m just picking this up,” he said, flashing me a slim paperback with a title in Russian that I couldn’t read and didn’t feel like asking about. “I was going to get something to eat now, though.” He inclined his head toward the door. “Did you want something? The food’s not great, but it’s better than the stuff at Middleridge.” He grimaced. “Barely.”
“Are you sure? I was going to go home, but…”
“Oh,” he said. “No, of course. That’s fine. I was just offering.” And he looked…sad.
I said, “I…I guess I could get a sandwich or something first, though. I mean, I am kind of hungry.”
I waited in line for my turkey club and then sat down across from Greg, who had a greasy-looking burger and a paper cup full of curly fries. The dining hall was pretty empty, and I mentioned this to Greg.
“Yeah, that’s kind of the downside. Mostly everyone here’s part-time, and they aren’t exactly here to make friends. Don’t come for the social life.”
“I was just coming for the Latin, actually, if I can figure out how to get over here.”
“Well, you could ride with me, if we have class at the same time.”
I stared at him, my jaw popping a little. “What?”
He shoved a fry into his mouth. “Why not?”
My head spun a little. Damn decongestant.
“What else were you thinking of?”
“What else?” I repeated.
“If you want to miss first block, you have to take more than one class.” He suddenly looked a little embarrassed. “I mean, I know it’s kind of expensive.”
“It’s not that,” I said, even though I honestly had no idea how much community college classes cost. “I just don’t know what I’d take.”
He opened the NOVA course catalog on his phone and slid it toward me. “Well, have at it. The world is your oyster, Aphra Brown.”