Predictably, no one does. Not even Josie or Abigail. Over the course of the next twenty-five sweaty minutes, Evelyn tells us all about how her undergraduate thesis was on this French guy who devoted his life to the theory that life is absurd, meaningless, etc. “Camus wasn’t a nihilist, though,” Evelyn says, scribbling even faster on the board. “No nihilist can say, ‘In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’”

“Come again?” Josie says, looking around the room to see if anyone else found that quote a bit startling. No one else is really close to awake.

“Thank you, Josie!” Evelyn says. “It’s beautiful, right? But how can someone find beauty in the world if it’s meaningless? Aren’t the two antithetical? Well, according to Camus—”

Evelyn puts a reading up on the projector about a guy called Sisyphus, who was sentenced to push a rock up a hill but the rock keeps falling back down. (Gravity is the unsung hero of the story.) We take turns reading it out loud, which is probably even more annoying than pushing a rock up a hill.

“This, folks,” Evelyn says, speaking as Camus through the side of her mouth as her finger puppet scans the room, “is what I call ‘the absurd.’”

She returns to the projector and draws two circles in the margin of the story, one in red and one in yellow, and then a red squiggly line between them. “This is the fundamental conflict between what humans want from the universe—reason, meaning, answers—and what the universe actually is: chaos!” She writes chaos in the circle on the right and meaning in the circle on the left. Then she writes the absurd above a line with arrows pointing to each.

“This class is absurd,” one of the hockey guys in the corner says, just loud enough that Evelyn might be able to hear him.

Evelyn continues, “Camus claims that Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero and that his punishment is representative of the human condition: He must struggle perpetually and without hope of success. So long as he accepts that there is nothing more to life than this absurd struggle, then he can find happiness in it.”

“Well, that’s depressing,” Doug pipes up.

“No, it’s not,” Brendan says. His voice is firm, and I’m not the only one who turns around to look at him. He’s not wearing a tutu today, and his hair is all down, and if I saw him on the street and knew nothing about how he sings everywhere, I would think he was cute in a seventies-rock-band-type way.

“This is good,” Evelyn says, clapping her hands together. “Yes, let’s get into some more dialogue now. Why is it depressing, Doug?”

Doug kind of stutters a bit, and she takes pity on him. “Anyone else want to chime in? No need to raise your hand, just call things out.” When no one does, she looks at me. “What do you think, Cham?”