“Do you think you’re going to like your room?” she asked. “I hope so.”

“It’s a great room, I like it fine.”

“I know it’s small. It used to be part of the landing, back when we bought this house. Then we closed it in for storage.”

“It suits me fine. All I need is a desk and a bed.”

“Now don’t like it too much because you can’t keep it, you know. Even if I start to like you.”

“That’s all right. I’m going back to the dorm in the fall.”

She was touching one of the pots along the top of the soil, pressing with her fingertip. “Lord, I hate how my hand shakes. You like living in the dorm?”

“Yes, ma’am. I figure I’ll never get that experience again so I might as well know what it’s like.”

“What experience?”

“Living in a dorm with all those people around me.”

She nodded but he was not sure she understood him, even so. After a moment she said, “Young people are all so bad these days. Noisy and all. And with the drugs. I don’t like those drugs.”

“I don’t either, Mrs. Delacy. I don’t even drink.”

“Well, that’s good.” She was at the screen door. “You can call me Miss Dee, you know, like the boys all do. It’s fine.”

“Well, thank you.”

I, Claudius

HE READ UNTIL HE HAD REMEMBERED enough about the book to know what to write. One part of him was already planning the paragraphs of the paper. Tate never would have read the Robert Graves book anyway, so was Ronny really depriving him of anything? Other than the failing grade he deserved, of course. But that was an excuse. The twenty dollars, though, that was an actual reason. He needed that. And this would be the last time he cheated. It would.

Upstairs, he settled at the desk with a pad. He enjoyed the work of study, reading and constructing arguments. The kind of exercise he needed to do for Tate’s paper was interesting, too, because he had to write less like himself and less cleanly and correctly than was his custom. He only had to write a paper, not get a good grade on it. He had read Tate’s writing before in order to correct it and knew the kind of mistakes Tate would ordinarily make. He could make Tate sound dumb, if he wanted. But he ought not go too far. It would not do, for instance, to discuss “that Claudius motherfucker,” though that’s what Tate would say. In a paper he actually wrote himself, assuming he had ever done such a thing, he would have distorted his voice on his own, for propriety’s sake. But he would have done so awkwardly and halfheartedly. So Ronny did the same thing.

It was also interesting in the case of writing a paper for another person to think of himself as constructing an idea that this specific person might have. What kind of reaction might Tate have had if he had really read the novel? How would he have translated that into writing for a class? (Better to think like this than to wring his hands over what he had decided to do.) Ronny began to hear sentences in his head and wrote them down on the pad and pretty soon was fleshing out some of these into paragraphs, crudely drawn and partially shaped, with enough of an idea expressed, and enough strain showing in the idea, to convince the history professor that this was Tate’s work.