The semester dragged on to its end. I got permission to bring the car Daddy had left for me onto the campus during exam week and park it in front of the residence house. It was a dark red Cadillac, embarrassingly long and heavy and funereal. I packed all my belongings in the trunk with my typewriter stowed beneath piles of sweaters and cutoff blue jeans. I stacked my books on the backseat and threw all my 45 rpm records on the shelf beneath the rear window. On the morning of my last exam I drove the car over to Ransom Hall, the domain of the history and English departments, and parked it in the back and went inside to take the exam. The exam was in World Lit, “The Ancient World Through the Renaissance.” All my life I had loved to take exams and write essays. I grabbed a stack of blue books at the door and began to fill them with opinions. I discussed Job in the Old Testament, then moved on to Homer, then to Plato’s Symposium, then to Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. “Then you will do your duty,” said Don Quixote, “for it is not necessary to be dubbed a knight to engage in battles such as these.” That was the text I chose to open my essay on simile and metaphor, an extra-credit question. I wrote happily away. When I looked up two and a half hours had gone by. There were only three other people left in the room. “Anything can stand for something else,” I wrote in conclusion. “Any key will turn the lock into the secrets of our brains. Everything is like everything else and everything is hooked up to everything else and everyone is included. ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!’”

I closed the blue book, picked up the stack of them I had filled, there must have been nine or ten, and began to gather up my things. My English teacher, whom I had worshipped so desperately from afar, came over to me. “You wrote all of these?” he asked.

“I had a lot to say.”

He grinned at that and carried them before him up to his desk and put a rubber band around them and then walked with me outside. “I have a surprise for you,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell you until you’d finished writing. I was afraid it might distract you.”

“I got an A?”

“Oh, I’m sure you got an A, Rhoda. No, it’s something else. You won the freshman writing contest. I entered that essay you wrote on The Fugitives and you won first place. Not even edited. I’m proud of you.”

“What did I win?”