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

hadn’t recognized her because my attendance in psychology had lately been poor. I had hoped the course would feature more murderers and outcasts. I was about to switch to criminal justice.
    â€œJenny?” I tried.
    â€œJulia,” she said, and hopped off the statue. She smoothed her dress with the heels of her hands. The day was unseasonably warm; the wet smell of the already-fallen leaves had risen over the campus, and the students had brought out their bright shorts, their flip-flops, for one final outing. All except me. I was wearing my raincoat, as always; and inside it I was starting to sweat.
    â€œI’ve eaten at your restaurant,” Julia told me.
    â€œYou have to be kidding.”
    â€œNope,” she said. “I liked the carrot manicotti. It’s justly famous.”
    â€œIt’s not really famous. It’s a ploy.”
    â€œSo why do you always sit here?”
    The question I’d been waiting two years for, and it caught me by surprise.
    â€œIt’s nice,” I told her, which sounded weak even to me, so I tried again. “It’s suitable. Nobody bothers me.”
    â€œIt’s uncomfortable.”
    â€œYou get used to it.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œSort of.”
    She smiled. Her gums showed. “You’re the expert.”
    I was trying to find something wrong with her, to help me regain my usual footing. She was skinny and I could just make out the cords in her neck. That and her washed-out coloration made her look, I supposed, a little tired.
    Was that the best I could do? I who’d called a linebacker a name that made him weep?
    â€œ OK ,” I said, “here it is. What I like about this statue is its very vulgarity and ludicrousness and the fact that it’s about to collapse. Which I think is deeply symbolic. Which I think sums up my feelings toward this—” I waved my arms around, unable to come up with a grand enough gesture; it would have to encompass practically everything I’d ever heard of. “This situation,” I concluded. “In which we find ourselves.”
    â€œI think it’s gross,” she said, and smartly, without warning, took my arm. “Let’s go someplace else. Walk me to class.”
    â€œTo class,” I repeated. “Let’s go.”
    The two of us walked a little ways across the campus, not talking. Julia had put on a pair of sunglasses; she turned her chin up and watched the sky, while I met the eyes of the people passing us, trying to convey by my unconcerned expression that it was ordinary for me to be strolling with an attractive stranger, that were it not for the feather-touch of her hand on my elbow (steely, I refused to look down at my elbow, her hand) I might veer away, not noticing her absence until I deigned to turn my head.
    â€œWhat’s your game?” I said, finally, trying to sound tough; but I was melting, melting.
    She looked at me over her sunglass rims. “I don’t have a game,” she said. “I’m just a curious person. I’m wondering why you’re so disaffected all the time.”
    â€œWhy aren’t you? That’s what I’m curious about. You don’t seem brain-damaged. You’re sober.”
    â€œI like it here.”
    â€œYou must have an unusual definition of ‘like.’ You don’t like a place just because you can tolerate being trapped there.”
    â€œI wanted to come here,” Julia said. This stopped me in my tracks.
    She had transferred from Bryn Mawr, it turned out. She’d grown up in Greenwich Village: backdrop of my daydreams, the place where I was going to share joints and bon mots with scat singers, painters, and the attractively poor. She had come to Chandler City of her own free will, bound to it by no necessities of blood or finance. I couldn’t believe it. I was fascinated—intellectually, I told myself—by this challenge to my ordering of the