I guess I kind of knew all along. That’s why I’d thought—briefly—about going out with Doug when he’d asked. I’d needed someone, but not just anyone. Lucas.
I wrote to Tasha about him. We e-mailed more than we spoke now, and it felt funny, almost like writing in a diary—intimate, but disconnected.
I’m dating my philosophy TA. He’s smart, gorgeous, so nice. It’s only been a couple weeks, but it’s going great. This might be the L-thing.
I couldn’t even bring myself to write the word. Afraid to admit that I really felt that way about someone older and more sophisticated. It was hard to believe that a few weeks ago, Lucas had been a customer in the coffee shop, my TA that maybe I had a little crush on. He’d become so much more in the short time we’d been together, our relationship compressed like Philosophy 101—so much squished into so little time. It made any feelings I might have had for Jack Petroski seem silly and juvenile. This was a real relationship. With a top hat, Nan would have said. All grown-up.
We went out to dinners—at Gianna’s and other places. Often Lucas waited for me at Cuppa near the end of my shift.
“Your boyfriend is outside,” Doug said one day. My face turned pink at the word, especially on Doug’s lips.
“Thanks.”
“He teaches at the school, right?” Doug was standing beside me now, his voice a touch strident. Or maybe I imagined it.
“Sort of. He’s just a sophomore, but doing a teaching assistant thing for the summer.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen him in here before.” Doug nodded, casually polishing the cappuccino machine nearby. I willed a customer to come in, but the door stayed shut, the faint jingling of the bells only the wind. “Before you started here, actually, he used to come in a lot with a girl. Pretty. Blond.”
“Oh yeah?” I tried to match Doug’s nonchalant tone. I think it was a strain for both of us.
He shrugged. “They were probably just friends. Have you met her?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe it was something else,” he said. Then, more kindly, “That was a while ago.”
The fact is, I hadn’t really met any of Lucas’s friends. I had asked him about his pictures, not about her in particular, but the group. The other students in the summer TA program, he’d told me, which meant I might never meet her. Lucas and I didn’t hide our relationship, but we didn’t advertise it either. On campus and, of course, in class we kept our distance. I would gladly have left philosophy hand in hand with him—wouldn’t have minded showing the girls in my class who Lucas thought was choiceworthy—but I understood, without discussion, that Professor McMillan might not think it okay for me to be his girlfriend, audit student or not.
In the comfortable hours at his apartment, I fantasized about moving in with him. I doodled Cassandra Canton in my notebooks, liking the alliterative sound of it whispered aloud, then quickly scribbled it out before Lucas could see that I wasn’t the deep thinker he took me for, but just a silly schoolgirl after all.
Sometimes, reading my texts, highlighting and underlining, I’d look up to find him watching me. It made my heart race.
He liked discussing our lessons before class, arguing out the philosophies. It was a habit from our first dinner together that stuck. We agreed on Locke, but I frustrated him with Descartes.
“How can you take him seriously,” I argued, “when he says things like ‘Because God has given me my understanding, all I understand, I understand correctly’? There are a gazillion holes in that.”
“Cassandra, you have to consider the context …”
“No. I can’t get past his ‘God this, God that.’ Plus, he’s a coward. His whole idea that you shouldn’t use your free will if you don’t understand something fully? Come on, Lucas, there would be no progress if everyone believed that.”
“He didn’t mean we shouldn’t take chances,” Lucas corrected, “just that we should expect mistakes because our understanding is weaker than our will.”
Lucas was incredibly well-read, always bringing bits of science or history or religion into our discussions. In class we had just started the section on determinism—the idea that there is no chance or choice—and Lucas and I were hashing out William James’s Divinity Street, Oxford Avenue problem. Once William James chose to walk down Divinity Street, there was no way to prove whether it was fate or free will that made him do it. He couldn’t test whether he’d had equal freedom to choose Oxford Avenue because he could never put himself in the exact same situation again. I was trying to wrap my head around the idea and what it could mean for the mark. I would have liked to ask Lucas, but I didn’t want him to think I was weird, bringing up my doctor-and-patient scenario again.
“You know,” Lucas said, leaning back in the nook of the sofa opposite me. “The ancient Greeks were the original determinists. They believed your fate was decided from the time you were born.”
“So William James knew which street he’d walk down even before he could walk?”
Lucas nodded. “Something like that. The Greeks personified fate in three gods, goddesses actually, that controlled people’s destinies, spun the thread of their fate at birth.”
“So they planned which street he’d walk down?” I persisted.
Lucas shrugged. “Ultimately, yes.”
“And what I’d eat for breakfast today? Or which shoes I’d wear? You know, I wish they’d clue me in, ’cause some mornings I really struggle …”
Lucas frowned. “Bigger picture, Cassandra. Life and death.”
“I’m just kidding, Lucas. Nan liked those myths, used to tell me the stories,” I said. “She gave me a book about them for my sixteenth birthday, just a little …” I’d been about to say “before she died,” catching myself just in time. I still hadn’t told Lucas my real age, couldn’t imagine doing it now. “Just a little book,” I finished. “Very old. A family heirloom. It had belonged to my mother. Of course, it was in Greek, so it was kind of hard to read.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s back in Ashville somewhere. She got me other ones too. In English. She was into that stuff. Part of the heritage or whatever. Not my kind of stories.”
“You know, they weren’t just stories, Cass. This was a religion. It’s like calling the Bible a story.”