Meeting Robin got the evening off to a good start. Once they got their coffee, they found chairs at an empty table for six, but it didn’t stay empty for very long. Various people came and left over the next hour, and there were a lot of wide-ranging but relatively unimportant topics discussed.

For a while – and this was later on in the evening – Cam had the misfortune to be sitting between two girls who had to have a loud, if uninformed discussion about the books of the Twilight series, which Cam thought was both juvenile and inane. Feeling a little more confident with himself and suspecting he didn’t want to know the girls much better than he already did, when asked, he told them that he thought the books were pretty stupid and aimed at semi-literates, at best. Needless to say, the two girls didn’t appreciate his view at all. They soon found a better place to gush about their favorite reading material, leaving Cam relieved to see them go.

“Cam,” Robin grinned after they were gone. “Did you actually read those books, or were you just repeating what someone else said?”

“I read some of them,” he reported. “Well, actually, I read one, and it was so bad I had to look at another just to see if it would be as terrible. If anything, it was worse.”

“Do you actually read fantasy, then?”

“Quite a bit. It’s not like I live on it, or live for it, like those two, but I’ve read a fair bit. Realistically, I can see how Twilight can appeal to young teenage girls who want some vicarious romance in their lives. It could be worse.”

“How could it be worse?”

“They could be reading trashy romances. At least fantasy exercises the mind a little.”

“I see your point,” she nodded. “Have you ever thought about majoring in literature?”

“I’ve thought about it,” he conceded. “In fact, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, since that’s what my dad majored in. But like you, I want to make a living, too.”

“It’s not easy, is it? I mean, figuring out what to do.”

“No, it isn’t.” He was starting to like Robin – she was open and easy to talk to, and she clearly had a head on her shoulders, unlike a few of the girls they had talked to in the last hour, who almost defined the concept of “airhead.”

Before too long the band got started; Cam was surprised it had taken this long. As far as he was concerned, they could have waited a few hours more, since they were both loud and bad. “The entertainment committee must not have had much of a budget,” he yelled to Robin from the great distance of a foot or so away.

“What?”

“I said they … oh, hell, let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not sure what you said, let’s get out of here.”

“That’s what I said.”

“What was that?”

Somehow, they got the message across; they headed for the door and weren’t the first people in line to leave.

It was cooler outside the building, and the bad music was subdued enough to be only an irritation. There were a number of students gathered around in a little park area near the steps, sitting on benches or planters, or just standing around talking. “Would you tell me what the point is of having a mixer if the music is so loud people can’t talk?” Cam snorted as he and Robin looked around for a place to park themselves.

“Beats the hell out of me,” she replied, finding a seat on the rim of a concrete planter.

Cam sat on a step a few feet away and said, “Maybe the idea is that if the band drives everyone out they can wrap things up earlier.”

“You could be right,” they heard a strange voice say from a few feet away. Cam looked up to see a strangely dressed girl. She had on an ankle-length skirt, a long-sleeved shirt with a vest over it, and had her hair mostly buried under a headscarf. It seemed as if she were dressed to be standing on those same steps a hundred years before. She was carrying a small black book.

He couldn’t help but wonder as to the dress but had the feeling that it would be a little personal to ask. “They must think that all teenagers like loud music,” he commented.

“Mere stereotypes,” she smiled. “I take it you’re also new here.”

“Just got here today,” Cam replied. “What’s with the book?”

“Oh, I thought I might not find someone worth talking with, so I brought a little light reading.”

“Somehow I don’t think it’s one about vampires,” Robin put in.

“Oh, no,” the girl smiled. “This is Good-Bye To All That by Robert Graves. It’s one of those books that everyone ought to read but no one ever does.”

“Never heard of it,” Robin said.

“It’s a memoir of World War One by one of the better poets to come out of it alive,” the strange girl replied. “It’s amazing that men could make it through such horrors and maintain their sanity, not that Graves totally managed it.”

“That is not 50 Shades of Grey,” Cam shook his head.

“There’s no accounting for taste,” the girl said. “Our life on this earth is short enough as it is, so wasting time on frivolous things cuts down on the items of quality we can enjoy.”

This girl, whoever she was, had just put into words something that had bothered Cam for some time, although he wouldn’t have said it quite like that. “There’s only so much time for the good things, so it’s better to take advantage of what you have,” he agreed.

“Precisely,” she laughed. “Of course, everyone has a different definition of what the good things are. I happen to enjoy seeking out wisdom from those who have gone before us. I find a vicarious pleasure in experiencing a tragedy like World War One through the eyes of one who was there, but at the same time I’m relieved that I can close the book when I feel like it.”

“I’ve read a little about World War One,” Robin said. “I can’t say I’ve read enough to know much about it, other than it was a four-year horror story.”

“Most wars have major elements of horror story, but that one was worse than most. The human suffering, the hopelessness or pointlessness, gives depth to Camus’ theory that life is absurd.”

“You read Camus, too?” Cam said. “I started The Plague once, but I got lost in it.”

“It’s not the easiest book to read,” the girl replied. “His ideas are better expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus. Humans have a tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, but often are unable to find any. It is the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.”

“Buddhists have the belief that all of life is suffering,” Robin put in. “I don’t know that I buy that any more than the belief that all life is absurd.”

“That all life is absurd may be too simple a statement,” the girl grinned. “It’s more a case of the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail, and therefore are absurd. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to find meaning, since who knows if the absurdists are right or wrong? After all, there may be meaning for something somewhere.”

Cam knew he was in deep water, and it was getting deeper with no sign of anyone around to throw him a rope. “You sound like you’ve studied this,” he said in an effort to lighten the conversation.

“A little,” she replied. “There is a great deal of philosophy out there to study, and I’ve only scratched the surface of it. I hope to get more deeply into it in the next few years.”

“I suspect you’re going to make things quite interesting around here while you’re doing it. By the way, I’m Cam Patterson.”

“And I’m Robin Skinner,” Robin added.

“I go by the name of Jodi Burton,” the girl said. “And I’m pleased to meet you both. Are you especially close friends?”

“No, we only met a couple hours ago,” Robin said. “I haven’t met many people around here yet, but some of those I have are interesting. It’s not like high school, and I suspect that there are people here who are going to have to learn that the hard way.”

“Yes, it will be interesting to watch,” Jodi laughed. “I’m a few years out of high school, so I suspect that my perspective might be somewhat different. The real world has a way of doing that to you. I presume you are both recent graduates?”

“This spring,” Cam admitted. “I’ve been looking forward to college, but I expect that it won’t be much like the real world, either.”

“I can tell you it’s not, but there are few better places to acquire some of the experience and knowledge that I wish to learn, and enough to at least be recognized that I know them. I sometimes wonder if it’s the best idea, and I can think of some who managed to achieve distinction without it. But it has become the expected route so I feel I must explore it.”

The three of them talked for several more minutes, and Cam was left with the impression that Jodi knew what she was talking about even if sometimes he couldn’t understand it. She was operating on a much higher plane than he was, and he suspected he might never reach hers even if he wanted to.

After a while, Jodi said, “I have enjoyed talking with you and hope we may do it again, however, I see someone with whom I wish to speak, so I must leave you now.”

“Sure,” Robin said. “I enjoyed talking with you, too. It’s fun to talk with someone who lives in the realm of ideas, and I hope I’ll meet more of them while I’m here.”

“As do I, Robin,” Jodi laughed. “As do I. You take care and enjoy the rest of the evening. I expect I’ll be seeing you around, and you too, Cam.”

Both of them sat and watched Jodi walk away and greet another girl – this one normally dressed, at least. The two of them walked away out of the lights of the steps.

“You know,” Robin said after a moment. “There goes one strange girl.”

“No fooling. Interesting, but strange. I have to wonder how she’s going to get along around this place. Something tells me she’s not going to have the easiest time of it.”

“Something tells me she’ll hardly notice,” Robin shook her head. “She’s got other things on her mind. I just hope a few people will remember watching Shaella Sunrise when they were kids. You know, ‘It’s OK to be different.’”

“You don’t get much different than her,” Cam grinned. “But you know, I think I like her for it.”

“Me, too, Cam. Me, too.”

Cam and Robin sat at the base of the steps for another hour or more, sometimes just talking between themselves, but more often with some of the other students hanging around. In general, the students they met were more like them, rather than off in the next world like Jodi. They were, like Cam and Robin, mostly just out of high school; some had a good idea of what they wanted to study, and others didn’t. Some were more or less from the local area, and others from a ways away, like Cam and Robin were, but most kids seemed to be from west Michigan.

Eventually it grew late enough that Cam and Robin were yawning. It had been a long day in a strange place, and calling it a day seemed like a good idea. Being a gentleman, Cam walked Robin back to her dorm, and said goodnight on the steps before heading off toward his own dorm. As he walked across the campus it was easy to daydream that things had gone differently, that they might be heading off to his empty dorm room together, and well … Robin didn’t seem to be that kind of girl, but at least it was pleasant to think about.

The room was empty when he got there; there was no sign of Howie, not that he expected any, for he knew Howie was having much better company tonight than he would, the lucky guy.

It was still on the early side for Cam, but there wasn’t much else he really felt like doing out on campus. He thought about finding a book to read, but he hadn’t brought much with him, figuring that he’d want to concentrate on studying. Now he realized that mistake; at the moment he would have settled for The Plague if he’d had a copy – it would probably have done a good job of putting him to sleep. He flipped open his laptop and booted it up, but there wasn’t much there for him, just a couple of “Good luck” e-mails. There were some people going to other colleges he expected to exchange e-mails with, but he reasoned that they were going through the same thing as he was. He thought about cruising around the web a little bit, seeing if there was something to read there, but when he got down to it, the idea bored him. It would be something to kill time, nothing more. What was it Jodi had said about not wasting time on frivolous things to make time for worthwhile things?

Jodi was a strange, strange girl, no doubt about it. She’d made an impression on him, but it was one he was sure he didn’t understand. She had been dressed like someone right out of the first of the previous century, and that was so different as to make her stick out among the crowd of mostly sloppily dressed students. What was that all about? Why did she do it? Was it a one-time thing, or normal for her? He hadn’t gotten into the subject with her, thinking that it really was none of his business, but he was curious about it.

There were a lot of questions, no good answers, and they were mostly none of his damn business, anyway. After thinking about it more than he really wanted to, he realized that the best use he could make of his time right then was go to asleep. He didn’t have much on his schedule for the next day beyond finding his way around campus a little more and perhaps meeting a few new people, but he wanted to be ready for the start of classes on Monday.

He took off his clothes, took a shower, then got into bed, just letting his thoughts run free as he tried to fall asleep. Mostly he reviewed his discussions with Robin and with Jodi. His daydream about Robin returned; it would have been much more pleasant to be in bed with her than be by himself, even if they didn’t do anything – it would have been less lonely if nothing else. If things had turned out that way he wouldn’t have minded, although he didn’t feel an imperative need for it. For a moment he even imagined being in bed with Jodi, although he couldn’t put a sense of reality to that particular daydream.

Inevitably, his daydreams morphed to the girl he’d really liked to be in bed with, although it seemed impossible that it would ever happen again. It would have been nice, though …

November 24, 2012

There had been bad days when he was on chemo, and some not as bad, but some of the bad days had been really bad. Among the things that had kept him going on the worst ones was his friendship with Latasha.

They had become quite a bit closer in the months since she’d shaved her head to show her sympathy for him. They weren’t exactly inseparable, but she spent a lot of time with him, sometimes helping him keep up with his studies, sometimes doing things for him he had difficulty doing himself, but mostly just being a friend.

Sometimes they talked. In fact, they talked quite a bit, finding out things about each other that they’d barely admitted to themselves. It had been during those discussions that Cam had come to realize that in the long run they didn’t stand much of a chance with each other.

Latasha was rather dark-skinned, which by itself went a long way to make her an outsider in the nearly white Bradford. Her father was an executive with General Hardware Retailers, the big industry in town. It was a huge regional distribution facility for the company, with hundreds of trucks arriving and leaving daily. General was a big deal in Bradford, and there were Bradford kids who had no higher goal in life than getting a warehouse job out there, and with good reason: it could be a solid lifetime job with good pay and excellent benefits, but it had its obvious limits, too.

Latasha’s father and mother had been college sweethearts, and he’d gotten a job with the General Hardware Retailers national office right out of college. He’d been transferred here and there to regional distribution centers like Bradford, with time spent in the home office in Denver. As a result, Latasha and Darnell had grown up in mostly white communities like Bradford, and had virtually no first-hand knowledge of what it was like to live in a black or more evenly mixed-race community.

From an early age, Latasha felt as if she had missed something important in life, and she admitted to Cam in those private discussions that she wanted to make up for her loss. As she put it, “It’s hard to be a black when you don’t know what being a black is like.”

Cam thought she might have a point there, but it was one also best ignored. His own opinion was that race shouldn’t mean anything, but people should. While she didn’t agree, he conceded it was her right to feel the way she did. But at the same time, she said right out that she felt she ought to be looking for a black guy to marry; one of the reasons she’d decided on going to an urban school was to look around for one. While Cam felt a bit of loss in admitting to the reality of her feelings, it was the way things were, and that was that. They could still be friends, though – even if nothing more could come of it.

During one of those deep and painful discussions, though, Cam had admitted – well, no, she’d wormed it out of him – that one of his greatest fears about the cancer was that he’d end up dying a virgin. It was not an easy thing for him to admit to himself, and even less so to Latasha; in fact, it was rather embarrassing.

It was then that she made a statement that he considered at the time, and still did, to be extraordinary. “Cam,” she said. “Whatever else happens, I’m not going to let you die a virgin.”

“Latasha, that’s … I don’t know what to say. You don’t have to do that.”

“No I don’t have to do it, but I want to,” she told him. “So get that fear out of your head, ’cause it ain’t gonna happen. But I want you to get better, not worse, because I don’t want to have to make good on it when you’re really hurting. So, when you do get better, I’ll make good on my promise, and we’ll do it right. Probably only just once, but we’ll have the best time we can.”

To say that Cam was flabbergasted would be to put it mildly. He was not feeling anywhere near his best when she made the statement – in fact, he was at about the lowest he had felt all the way through the ordeal – but she made it clear that she was serious about it. She didn’t make the promise just once, either, but several times, including a couple of times right in front of his folks.

He did get better, and her promise may have been part of his motivation. However, almost a year passed, and while she still promised they would do it, they agreed that they should wait for a time when it could be really special, have something to really celebrate.

The state athletic association had two days to get in eight football games in each of the classes, so the schedule was tight at the Joe Louis Arena. It meant that the Bradford-Spearfish Lake game kicked off at eight in the morning, a time when most high school students were barely awake, but it meant that everything was over with, including press interviews, by noon. There was a welcome home celebration for the team in the middle of the afternoon, and some parties to attend, which filled up the evening.

It had been a long day, and Cam was understandably tired as the parties wound down, but toward the end, Latasha got him off to the side and told him, “Get a good night’s sleep, Cam, because tomorrow we’ve got something else to celebrate.”

“You’re kidding,” he said. “I thought you’d forgotten about it.”

“No way in hell,” she said. “If you think I’m going to make a promise like that and not keep it, you’ve got another think coming.”

“But Latasha … where? How?”

“I’ve worked it out with your folks,” she grinned. “They’re going to take Ty and the girls out for the day. So, like I said, get a good night’s sleep, Cam, because I intend to wear you out tomorrow. I’m protected, so you won’t have to worry about that little issue.”

“Latasha, I’ve said before that you don’t have to do it.”

“And I’ve said to you before, what if I want to?”

Cam didn’t sleep very well that night. He’d often thought about it and wondered what it would be like, but somehow it never had seemed quite real. In fact, it didn’t seem quite real then, but then, the next morning as Aunt Shae was getting breakfast ready, Latasha drove her car up to the house and walked into the kitchen like she’d done a hundred times before, like nothing special was going on.

Cam hadn’t even noticed that Aunt Shae had set another place at the table, but Latasha sat down next to Cam like it was an everyday thing. Only the feel of her hand caressing his leg under the table made it feel any different than normal.

After breakfast, Cam’s dad and Aunt Shae got the family ready to go out for their day trip to Chicago. Although nothing was said, it was clear that they knew what was happening, and Ty did, too – he had a glint in his eye and a smile on this face that pretty well told the whole story. This was really going to happen!

As they were heading out the door, Aunt Shae grinned at the two of them and said, “Good luck, you two. Have a fun time today!”

His dad added, “Take your time and enjoy yourselves. We’ll give you a call about an hour out in case you’re still going at it.”

Once the minivan was heading out the driveway Cam turned to Latasha. “Girl, you planned this, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did,” she smirked. “You would never have gotten off your dead white ass and taken the initiative. Now let’s go up and take our time. I’m a virgin too, and you are going to fix that.”

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