were you, Markie?” she asked as she climbed in.
“Pretty much, yes. Did it hurt their feelings?”
“They were awfully pouty about it. They all agreed that a writing assignment on the first day of class was a violation of their constitutional rights or something.”
“Gee, what a shame.”
“You’re terrible, Markie,” she said with a wicked little giggle. “When we were coming down here you were saying something about a canned speech. Do you unload like that on every class you teach?”
I nodded as I started the car. “Yep—and it works. I’ve even made the P.E. Department’s blacklist.”
“That went by a little fast.”
“Physical education involves the big, strong, dumb kids who make up the assorted teams that wear purple uniforms and try to whup the teams from California. The coaches of those teams have a list of names they hand out to their tame dummies. It’s the ‘Don’t take no classes from these guys’ list. It’s an honor to have your name on that document.”
“I’m so proud of you,” she gushed, as we pulled out of the parking garage.
“Steady on, Twink.”
“Some of the names your students were calling you were naughty.”
“Good. I got their attention, then.”
“The smart-mouth who asked you to define ‘human’ was even trying to put a petition together to lodge a protest with the administration about how mean you were. Not too many people were interested in signing it, though. Quite a few of them said they were just going to drop your class.”
“Good. That’s the whole idea. What you saw today was part of an academic game, Twink. The university administration tries to get a lot of mileage out of the teaching assistants by cramming as many freshmen as possible into those classrooms. Some teaching assistants are softies who yearn for the approval of their students. I’m tough, and I don’t make any secret of it. After the first week or so, I’ve usually weeded out the dum-dums, so I’ve got the cream of the crop, and my warm, fuzzy associates get the garbage. My students probably don’t even need me, since they can already write papers that’ll cut glass from a mile away. The warm-fuzzies get the semiliterates who couldn’t find their way from one end of a sentence to the other if their lives depended on it. I picked up the business of academic terrorism from Dr. Conrad. Just the mention of his name scares people into convulsions.” While we talked, I hooked into Forty-fifth Street to get us back to Wallingford.
“I think you’re going to love my paper, Markie,” Twink bubbled at me.
“You’re just auditing the course, Twink, remember? Why write a paper if you don’t have to?”
“I want to write one, Markie. I’m going to blow your socks off.”
“Why? You won’t get a grade out of it.”
“I’m going to prove something, big brother. Don’t start throwing challenges around unless you’re ready to back them up. I can whup you any day in the week.” She paused briefly. “It’s your own fault, Markie. Sometimes I get competitive—particularly when somebody challenges me. You said you wanted a good paper. Well, you’re going to get one, and you won’t even have to grade it. Isn’t that neat?”
That took me completely by surprise. Renata hadn’t been quite that aggressive before—neither of the twins had. I’d known that they were clever, certainly, but they’d never flaunted it. Of course, Renata was older now, and the time she’d spent in Dr. Fallon’s institution had probably matured her quite a ways past her contemporaries. The average college freshman comes to us carrying a lot of baggage from high school. High-schoolies are herd animals for the most part, and they’re usually deathly afraid of standing out from the crowd. Once they move up to college, the brighter ones tend to separate themselves from the herd and strike out on their own. It usually takes them a year or so, though. Renata, it appeared, had jumped over that transition, and she’d come down running.
I definitely approved of this new Renata, and I was fairly sure Dr. Fallon would as well. This was turning out better than either of us had expected.
After I’d dropped Twink at Mary’s place, I went back to campus to continue my examination of the connection between Whitman and the Brits. I hung it up just before five o’clock and actually got home in time for dinner.
“I’m supposed to tell you that Charlie’s going to be late, Trish,” James rumbled, as we gathered in the dining room. “I guess that something came up at Boeing, and the head of the program Charlie’s involved with called an emergency meeting.”
“That sounds ominous,” Erika said. “When Boeing starts calling emergency meetings, it suggests that we might all need to go find bomb shelters.”
“He wasn’t too specific,” James added, “but I got the impression that something fell apart because some resident genius at Boeing neglected to convert inches to centimeters on a set of fairly significant specifications. Charlie was using some very colorful language when he left.”
“That might just make it difficult to hit what you’re shooting at,” I noted. “A millimeter here and a millimeter there would add up after a while.”
“Particularly if you’re taking potshots at something in the asteroid belt,” James agreed.
“Have you got anything serious on the fire this evening, Sylvia?” I asked our resident psychologist.
“Is your head starting to come unraveled, Mark?”
“I hope not. I’d like to get your reading on something that happened today, is all.”
“Whip it on me,” she replied.
I let that pass. “The Twinkie twin I was talking about did something a little out of character today. Evidently, she’s not quite as fragile as we all thought she was. She seems to be breaking out in a rash of independence. She even gets offended if I offer to drive her anyplace because she’s got that ten-speed bicycle. Rain or shine, she wants to bike it.”
“That’s probably a reaction to the time she spent in the sanitarium, Mark. People in institutions usually aren’t allowed to make many decisions.”
“Rebellion, then?”
“Self-assertion might come a little closer,” Sylvia replied. “In a general way, we approve of that—as long as it doesn’t go too far. Could you be more specific? Exactly what did she do today that seemed unusual?”
“Well, she’s auditing a course I teach—freshman English—basically pretending to be a student to get the feel of the place.”
“Interesting notion,” Erika said. “All you’re really doing is moving her from one institution to a different one.”
“Approximately, yes,” I agreed. “Well, I assigned a paper today. She knows she doesn’t have to write one, but she says she’s going to do one anyway, and then she promised me that it’d be so good that it’ll blow me away.”
“You assign a paper on the first
