The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

is thorough and detailed—I can recall each act of mean-spiritedness, each self-righteous slur, every one of my embarrassing affectations. I grew my hair long and wore a hideous beard, which tufted out from the sides of my jaw and across my neck without ever impinging on my face. An ordinary beard, at least, would have covered my acne. All the marijuana I was smoking made me break out more severely than I ever had in high school. I was always changing majors in response to imagined slights from my professors. I wore a long black raincoat wherever I went, inside or outside, winter or spring, and I fancied that the people who whispered at my passing were inquiring of each other what my mysterious story might be, what I knew that they didn’t; and so on.
    On the east side of campus, in a little copse of elms, stood a statue of Tip Chandler. Our founder, immortalized in bronze, must once have struck a noble figure. Under one arm he clutched a stack of books—Homer, Virgil, Ovid—and with the other he gestured grandly toward the west, his palm open and flat as if he were offering something to the Pacific; but that hand was empty. A goldpan was slung from his belt. His sandaled feet were spread wide apart on hispedestal, as if he were trying to keep his balance on an unsteady surface. And perhaps this pose represented one last burst of prescience on the old prospector’s part, for, as it turned out, the weight of the memorial was too much for the less-than-solid clay our school was built on. So Tip Chandler came to resemble his name. By the time of my arrival he had developed a list of about twenty degrees in the direction of his outstretched arm, so that his gesture of manifest destiny took on the aspect of a lunge; he seemed to be diving like a graceless ballerina into the elms.
    This was where I liked to sit: on the high edge of the canted pedestal, behind the statue’s back, my raincoat tucked between me and the cold marble. It was not at all comfortable. My back rested against Chandler’s unyielding calves, and the tilt of my seat forced my knees up awkwardly toward my chest. But many footpaths met at the statue, making it a particularly visible place to settle myself; and it was so uninviting as to guarantee that no one else ever sat there. It suited my imagined reputation that there should be a location associated with me, and only me, in the public mind. It made me, I liked to think, a sort of landmark unto myself.
    All this by way of explaining my dismay when, one afternoon in the fall of my junior year—having by this time D-plused my way through eight majors, alienated myself from most of my original cadre, and proceeded not an inch toward the manifestation of my own destiny, whatever it was—I arrived at my station to find that someone was already sitting there. It was a girl.
    â€œI sit there,” I said dumbly.
    The girl was no one I recognized. This alone was strange. By virtue of my endless disapproving contemplation of the people walking by me, I had come to know almost everyone on campus—if not by name, then by some offensive habit of bearing or dress. But this girl was new. She was wearing a long black sundress with a pattern of ivy that coiled up to the scooped-out neck. Her face was pale and scattered sparsely with light freckles. She was pretty, I guessed—her prettiness was thematter-of-fact brown-eyed kind that is usually agreed to be unintimidating. I found it nerve-racking. She smiled in a hard but serene way. She was looking at me as if I were about to say something.
    â€œBut now you’re sitting where I sit,” I explained.
    â€œI know you sit here,” the girl said. “You’re Sam Grapearbor. We have psychology together.” She swung her legs gracefully over the pedestal’s edge and let them dangle almost to the ground.
    Now I was beginning to place her; she sat in the front of the class and left as soon as the lecture ended. I