Plus One

13: A kiss and a coat

13: A kiss and a coat

Three standard days drifted past with no notable disturbance from any of my San Franciscan companions; on day four, however—on a Tuesday morning at eleven fifteen—Charlotte called me with bumbling excitement to inform me that, against my will, I was attending dinner that evening with a twenty-five year old law student named Jon. Without intending to be insulting, I found myself wondering how Charlotte had gotten remotely acquainted with a lawyer; she hated when I picked petty fights with her, so the concept of the hyperactive woman in a debate with someone who argued for a living seemed a little bit absurd. Furthermore, she wasn’t exactly an advocate of the law, swearing frequently by the motto “it’s only a crime if you get caught.” The mild curiosity was wasted: Charlotte stampeded over my attempts at speech with a time and place, threatened to kill my family if I bailed on Jon, and then hung up.

Adrian’s psychology class had ended thirty minutes ago, and though I was due at a restaurant on the pier in an hour and a half, I had no pressing desire to leave. There was something fascinating about watching the professor try and fail to organize his thoughts and belongings after a lecture. He had just finished covering a thin overview on dreams, assigning a five-day journal complete with analysis over archetypal dream signs, and he was now on a rage trying to decide on how to grade them.

“Now, see, I could judge it based on length—a page for each entry gets full credit—but some dreams are incredibly short, even though they carry a world of meaning. And then some can be analyzed much more freely than others; there will undoubtedly be that student who dreams about flying on a magic carpet of toast, and then panics when he realizes that airborne bread doesn’t signify anything at all other than imagination.”

“Adrian,” I interjected; he ignored me, pacing fervently around the empty lecture hall.

“Would it be fair to grade based on the quality of the writing? This isn’t an English class, but yet everything is based on writing. How can a student be good at expressing their views on psychology when they have the vocabulary of a fifth grader?” he paused and flung his hands in the air, digging them in his messy hair. “What if I gave them all A’s? Would they notice? Does that make me a good teacher, or a bad one?”

“Adrian?”

“But if I go too easy on them, they’ll lose respect, and start assuming that they can slack off for the rest of the year. I don’t actually care if they learn anything at all, but I’ve got a reputation to uphold. Or rather, I have a reputation to create. An easy teacher might be loved by students in the moment, but he’s hated by everyone in the grand scheme of things.” His voice dipped high and low, bounding between notes several octaves away within a few syllables; he slowed down, he sped up, then he stopped altogether before leaping back into a typhoon of odd sounds and melodramatic sighs.

“Adrian!”

“What?” he groaned, spinning around to glower at me.

I rolled my eyes. “Re-lax. You’ll know what to do when everything is turned in—which, by the way, isn’t for another week. Don’t try to give yourself all these rules, just grade based on… I don’t know, on quality.”

“Would you like to grade them for me?” he retorted, pouting.

“You got mad at me when I recorded the scores of that last reading reflection as fractions instead of percents,” I pointed out. “I don’t think you’re capable of trusting me to grade anything without a clear answer key of right and wrong answers.”

Adrian sighed and scratched the back of his neck, looking apologetic. “I hope you know I think you’re smart, Cassie.”

I grinned. “You think you’re smart. You think I’m above average.”