ACADEMIC POINTS

It was still dark out, when a girl only weeks shy of her Sweet Sixteen entered a hallway so empty, so quiet, it could be mistaken for a barren tomb.

Her destination was Mrs. Fowler’s classroom, third door on the left in the English department. The girl was surprised to see a light already on. One lone figure was seated at a desk, last seat of the last row.

“Now see, people always tell me I’m ridiculously early,” she told the boy, after examining the empty room and deciding to claim the seat next to him. No answer, outside of an mmph sound, came from the boy.

He was lanky, dressed in a way that hinted he truly didn’t care about the latest styles, with dirty blond hair that was starting to curl up in the back. A kid she’d seen around school for years now, but had never spoken to.

“I mean, honestly, I’m a bit offended. I think you’re trying to steal my thing, y’know.” Being early was in fact her “thing.” As was the quarterly science fair. The student council. And the National Beta Club, naturally. One of a thousand kids in the school standing three inches over five feet, with chestnut brown hair she usually kept in a ponytail. But one of a kind in science and extracurriculars, she liked to believe.

“When’d you get here?”

The boy didn’t look away from his book. A worn paperback with a carrot-colored school library label taped across its spine. Looked like the book was called The Beautiful and the Damned. “Maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

The rest of Kennedy High’s academic team wouldn’t be arriving for another thirty minutes. Mrs. Fowler was the team’s sponsor, demanding daily practice sessions before school. She expected nothing less than the best from her students, and would never dream of recruiting less than the best from Kennedy’s student body.

So, this quiet, anti-social kid—he was here for a reason. And curious Pauline Grodzki wanted to know what it was.

“You always take the early bus, don’t you?”

Just a bob of his head in response.

“Getting to school when it’s still dark out—guess it gives you some quiet time alone.”

A non-committal nod, this time.

“That’s what you like best, isn’t it?” she asked, maintaining the smile her mother had taught her to use when introducing herself. “Your little thing.”

He gave her a brief look. “Apparently.”

“So…Mrs. Fowler asked you to join the team?” Another nod. “Well, I think you’ll have a lot of fun, Vincent. That is your name, right?” It’d been a gamble, one Pauline was eighty-percent certain of.

Eyes still on the book, he gave an unenthused answer of “Yeah.”

“Okay, and you don’t strike me as a ‘Vinny.’” A flash of disgust passed on his face. Pauline laughed, even though she wasn’t certain the humor was intentional. “So, Vincent David, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Two first names. Or two last names, I guess.” She tapped her freshly-sharpened No. 2 pencil against her bottom lip. “Quite impressive, Vincent-not-Vinnie. Seriously, I’m jealous. When you have a name like Pauline Grodzki—no alliteration, no flow, no hope of the average person spelling it right…”

“They’re just names.” Vincent paused before turning his page. “And you’re envious, not jealous.”

“Oh. There’s a difference?”

“Envy is when you want something someone else has,” he explained, his voice still bordering on monotone. “Jealousy is when you protect what you already have.”

Her face brightened; an expression more sincere, less practiced. “I’ve heard that before, I think. Like the difference between ‘fewer’ and ‘less.’ Real grammar freak stuff.” A thought struck her. “Oh, is that why Mrs. Fowler asked you to join the team?”

Vincent shrugged.

“We could use some help with that. Last year—during the flippin’ Finals, no less—someone from the team had to go up to the board and diagram a sentence. Diagram a sentence about as long as my arm.”

He made a pssh sound, which she interpreted as a courtesy half-laugh. Or maybe he meant it as “no big deal.” As “you dummies shouldn’t have had a problem with that.”

Pencil in hand, Pauline pointed at his book. “You read a lot, don’t you? I see you at lunch, always with some book.”

“I guess.”

“I’m working through the Emerald Enchanters series right now. Cannot. Believe. Seamus was backstabbed by—oh, sorry.” Her fingers covered her mouth, embarrassed. “Spoilers.”

“Please. Don’t read that trash.” A moment of silence, then Vincent continued his thought. “Old books. Dickens. Steinbeck. That’s the good stuff.”

“Oh. Well, I read some of that, y’know, because—”

“They force us to.”

Her grin returned. “Basically.”

“Some of it’s dry, but compared to what’s published today…” His eyes rolled, apparently repulsed by the thought of today’s urban fantasy and young adult fiction, the genres with a hold on Pauline’s heart.

Three weeks later, Pauline was entering Mrs. Fowler’s empty classroom with a copy of David Copperfield under her arm. Vincent’s suggestion, the first one she’d taken.

She was halfway through. Taking her standard seat next to Vincent, she’d open their conversation with some bit about the book. Prod him for thoughts; anticipate his crack about her typical reading fare. She could then retaliate; let him know this stuff is fine, but overrated.

“They’re not all about poor people,” Vincent was telling her today, after Pauline accused the great Charles Dickens of having some twisted poverty fetish.

“Think you’re wrong about that, bud,” she replied, drumming her pencil against the book. “It’s his whole…milieu. That’s his entire identity as a writer. Didn’t they even create a word to describe—”

“Dickensian.” Vincent was good with coming up with words like that. And he was getting better about looking her in the eye when they spoke.

“See. His name is literally associated with horrendous poverty. That’s the dude’s brand.”

Vincent stretched back in his seat. “So what if it is? They’re still good stories.”

He hadn’t been an easy nut to crack, but Pauline eyed her subject as carefully as anything she’d ever studied beneath a microscope. Vincent resisted bland pleasantries, but he liked debate. Wouldn’t volunteer anything, but would answer specific questions if Pauline had already revealed something personal about her own life.

This is how she discovered his parents had been divorced for seven years. That he lived with his mother and stepfather. Vincent despised the man, an overbearing loudmouth who looked for any thin justification to belittle his new family. Pauline even learned she shared a small connection to Vincent—when she lived on the other side of town, her family were regular patrons of the pizzeria owned by his stepfather, a place he now worked afternoons.

“I just wish my dad would stop laughing every time he sees this book cover,” she told Vincent. “Always making some dumb joke about…a magician?”

“Don’t get it.”

“Me, neither.” She held the paperback, thumbed its dulled edges and studied its cover. “But, yeah, it’s a pretty good book. I like when he bites people.”

“Pretty good,” Vincent smirked. “But can’t live up to books about sparkly vampires and wizard kids and secret clans of sexy leprechauns.”

“First of all, I never touched Twilight.” A half-truth. She’d seen all of the movies. “Secondly, Emerald Enchanters deals with all the heavy themes you like in these old books. What happened to Seamus in the third book—that unforgivable betrayal—is just as tragic as anything those poor English kids go through.”

“Sure it is.”

“And it’s not my fault something written two hundred years ago isn’t exactly fresh and exciting today. Some of these paragraphs I have to reread three or four times before I even get what he’s saying.”

“But you do it, though. It’s worth it. Just because something’s old doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.”

“Hopefully no kid’s being sent off today to work at the ol’ family bottling factory.”

Vincent’s face turned solemn, hinting the joke was no longer amusing. “Crappy stepfathers still exist. Mothers who won’t stand up to the crappy stepfathers still exist.”

“Well…at least you’re getting an extra hour or two away from them every day.”

“Every weekday,” he corrected. “And, yeah, a whole week in March.”

It was a month away, the academic bowl regionals. March 9, 2020 to March 14, 2020, to be precise. Dates marked on both calendars.

“Thanks to you and that East Egg and West Egg stuff.” It was Vincent who instantly identified The Great Gatsby’s settings during the lighting round, ridiculous names that just made Pauline laugh. Silly they might’ve sounded, but the answer enabled Kennedy High to advance to the regionals.

His countenance relaxed. “You diagraming that prokaryote thing off the top of your head was worth more points, actually.”

“Oh, it’s all teamwork,” Pauline said with a wave of the hand. “And Grayson County, Duckworth County— next month, they won’t know what hit ’em.”

The world didn’t quite know what hit it in the coming weeks. News reports were confused, contradictory. Pauline read everything she could on the virus, watched the footage from Italy and Spain, but couldn’t seem to find clear answers to any question.

Lines of anxious humans clad in rubber gloves and cotton masks wrapped around the block, awaiting entry to an increasingly bare supermarket. It was one of the few institutions still open, per the governor’s order. No indoor dining. No school.

No academic bowls.

No early morning chats with Vincent, either. Pauline had never gotten his number, and based on their previous conversations, she knew his stance on social media: “It’s stupid.”

A year passed. After heated negotiations and protests from aggrieved parents, the school system announced it would be reopening for the final six weeks of the academic year. Pauline arrived for the first day an hour early. It was her thing.

The year’s academic tournament had been cancelled, but habit had Pauline passing by Mrs. Fowler’s classroom that morning. A familiar figure was in his familiar pose, seated in the back row. She could feel a tingle entering her cheeks.

He’d grown even lankier since last year. Maybe a little more handsome.

“Still nauseatingly early, I see,” she said with the teasing inflection honed during their previous chats.

“Hm?” he muttered, only barely removing his attention from his book, open flat on the desk.

“Man, Vincent. A solid year.” She took her seat, placed a hand on his knee. “How have you been?”

Vincent’s answer amounted to little more than a shrug of his shoulder.

“You get your driver’s license yet?”

Only a shake of the head no.

“Got mine three months ago. The DMV guy couldn’t ride in the car with me, of course, because of the thing. Had to ‘observe my skills’ while he watched me putter around the parking lot. Still, though, it’s mine! Want to see?”

Face still planted in his book, Vincent again shook his head.

Pauline removed the license from her purse. She nudged it into Vincent’s line of sight. “Vincent, c’mon. Look. They told me not to smile. Still, pretty decent photo. You should see my mom’s. Caught her with one of her eyelids half-open.” She imitated the look, tried to make him laugh. He only stared at her.

It had been a year. Pauline reasoned she’d gotten rusty. Led too much with the goofiness. She straightened herself up and returned the license—the one she was still darn proud to own, regardless of his flaccid reaction—to her purse. “Well, anyway. How did the scary virus year treat you?”

“You already asked me that.”

“Okay. Try answering.”

“It was…it was a year at home, Pauline.”

“I know. Staying in bed with the laptop, taking tests in your pajamas…fun at first, but then it got old. Old and kinda gross.”

His eyes flicked away from the book. “A year. At home.”

She could see it in his slate gray eyes. A year at home wasn’t quite the same for Vincent, was it? “Oh. I see.”

“Yeah. And since he had to close the restaurant, he’s home all day now.”

“Ah, I get it.” She felt a rare rumble of anxiousness in her stomach. Embarrassment and pity. “Sorry about that.”

“Wasn’t asking for sympathy.” His tone was sharp. “Just giving you an honest answer.”

“Well, look on the bright side—we’re back, in person, eight hours a day.”

Vincent returned to his book. “Yes. Very bright.”

No sympathy, no pity. He hated that. She remembered that much. “Yes, eight hours of your luminous presence. Just a ray of sunshine.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“The sullen pout that touches any who come into its path. Warming the cockles of all hearts here at Kennedy High.”

“Yup,” he said, flipping to the next page of the book. She was close enough to make out some words on the page; see some names she recognized.

“Hey-hey-hey. What the fudge is this?” asked Pauline, reaching for the book’s cover. A flash of heat tingled on her skin as the truth was confirmed to her.

“It’s nothing.”

Excited laughter escaped her throat. “Oh, it’s far from nothing. That’s Emerald Emergence! That’s the newest one—I haven’t even had a chance to read it yet.”

Vincent’s hardcover was the fifth entry in the Emerald Enchanters series, a fantasy franchise with romantic overtones starring a collective of impossibly beautiful, impossibly troubled, supernatural beings. A massive worldwide bestseller, in spite of the pandemic.

“Whatever. It’s dumb.”

“So dumb you’re on the fifth book in the series?”

She could see crimson entering Vincent’s cheeks. “It’s something to read,” he mumbled. “Got it on sale.”

“Mm-hmm. Vincent, this is your girl, here. And Mrs. Fowler’s empty classroom has always been a No Judgment Zone, I promise you. Look at me. Look.” She clapped her hands, gazed intensely into his eyes. “Are the Emerald Enchanters books not the most amazing works of literature ever produced by man?”

“You’re ridiculous.” Her gaze did not abate. “They’re…maybe they’re better than I thought they’d be.”

“When Enya had to abandon Liam in the Otherworld? Didn’t that rip your guts out?” she asked. “When Darragh proposed to Gráinne, only a night before the Morrígan escaped the Stone Prison?” She clutched his shoulders. “This is serious drama, Vincent!”

His eyes closed. “When the Morrígan invaded the wedding…”

“Uh-huh…” she said, nodding.

“But the King’s Oath prevented Darragh from killing it…”

“Yes…”

“And when Lydon refused to forgive Enya…”

“Even though he’d been forced to do far worse to Rhiannon, yeah…” Pauline said, her grin widening.

Vincent’s eyes opened. He said the following words as if a great relief was washing over him. “I…I wanted to strangle that hypocrite.”

Pauline tightened her fist into a victory clench. “Yes! You see? Could your girl ever lead you astray?”

Vincent straightened up his unfashionable t-shirt and reclaimed his book. “You are wrong about one thing, though,” he said, flipping through the pages, locating his place. “Back in Book Three, Seamus totally deserved what happened to him.”

An utterly obscene opinion. One Pauline would be arguing with Vincent until the opening bell’s ring. One of several opinions on numerous subjects she’d be contemplating and countering on these early mornings, the sky still dark and the halls so quiet.

Six weeks later, on another dark morning, Pauline would be sliding a yearbook over to Vincent. It was thinner than last year’s volume; no pages devoted to all of the cancelled extracurricular activities. It still had blank pages for dedications, though. And Pauline made sure Vincent signed one with his name and number.

Their debates would continue over the summer. Into the next year, and the summer after.