“Valerie,” Grady said, “if I understand the academic process, your teacher meant for you, not me, to figure it out. That,” he went on, uncharitably and unmoved, “is the way to learn.” And he stuck his nose back into the kettle of print.

She turned abruptly toward the door. “Maybe I can help…?” I heard my voice saying.

She hesitated and, with a lovely, what-have-I-got-to-lose shrug, settled beside me on the floor. I shot a fleeting glance at Grady. Immersed in his paper, he didn’t give a damn that our respective philosophies of education were at variance.

Valerie pointed a slim finger to the smudged and questionable page. I leaned toward it, her, my God our shoulders were touching. Still I managed to get my eyes back in focus.

That’s when I met two new girlfriends

[I read]. One of them was Cindy. She

was weird and Nancy. We climbed a

mountain. Some of the girls climbed

down. I was one of the some.

I showed her how to fix it. “Thanks,” she said. She pulled up a leg of her jeans and licked an adorable scab on her knee.

“Could I do that for you?”

“What? Usually I’m pretty good with words,” she confided. “When I look up a word in the dictionary the same day I never have to look it up again. But,” she went on, “I’m not as good as you are.” It wasn’t a compliment, the way she said it, but a realistic evaluation of the evidence at hand. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I let it pass—the intimation that despite my syntactic skills I was still a child. “I don’t know,” I said airily. “Maybe I’ll star in a porno flick. What do you want to be?”

“Me? Nothing.”

I furrowed my brow critically. The response was not totally lost on her.

“Hell,” she said, “there’s a lot of nice people who don’t work.” Her wayward loyalty to the pariahs of the Hebraic-Protestant ethic was, I thought, admirable. “What I like,” she went on, “is to just let things happen. Just let ’em fall into place, you know? Instead of trying to like direct them.”

It had been my experience that things, given half a chance, fell chaotically out of place. However, “I agree with you totally,” I said. From behind the wall of his paper, Grady tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress something between a snort and a snicker, and sank deeper into his chair.