Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet (9781476763248) (6 page)

Mary rolled her eyes in a very not-professional-barista way. “She's in a band. She says she's going to ‘pursue her music.' ”

My eyebrow went up exactly the way Ms. W's does. Mary must have been burned by Eddie more than I thought for her to not only be anti-dating, but anti-band.

But it makes sense. I mean, she didn't even bring her bass with her. And she loves that thing.

“Anyway,” Mary said as the girl in question made her way back
behind the counter, toward where we were chatting, “Violet, this is Lydia. My cousin.”

“Hey,” Violet said. “I see absolutely no family resemblance.”

“I know, right?” I agreed. “Cool hair.”

Violet had one of those faces that was completely blank—not that she was plain. But she just had normal features, nothing standing out. This meant she could do anything she wanted with her hair and it would work on her. She had this funky asymmetrical cut that was bleached blond and dyed purple on the ends, which I could never in a million years pull off.

“Are you the cousin moving to the city with Mary?”

“That's me.” I'm pleasantly surprised that Mary had willingly revealed pertinent details of her life to a total stranger. Maybe we'll get her out of Jane's closet yet.

“Awesome—hey, you and Mary should come see our band play. We're doing a farewell show on Friday at Carter's. And one the next weekend. And maybe another after, we'll see.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Mary said. I knew she was being noncommittal for my sake. If it was up to Mary, she would have just said no outright, because going to a bar on a Friday is pretty much her idea of hell. But she was looking at me, trying to gauge how I felt about the idea.

I'd figure out how I felt about it later. Right then, the bell above the entrance tinkled, and the walking cliché of confused-looking white Rastafarians entered.

“Oh, goody, these guys,” Violet said. “All right, Mary, gear up. Learning how to deal with these clowns is an essential part of Books Beans and Buds barista training.”

I took that as my cue to take my mochaccino and get out of the way. As I started to shuffle back to a cozy table by the book section, I heard Violet address the newcomers.

“Welcome to Books Beans and Buds. Go, Pioneers We Do Not Sell Pot Here.”

“Wh-what?” one of the guys said. His dreads smelled like Kitty's litter box as I passed by him.

“We do not sell pot here,” Violet repeated, and then without missing a beat, “Can I interest you in a budding beverage?”

I settled into my table, looking at the time on my phone. I had about an hour to go before my next class. Forty-five minutes if I wanted to get to class early and get a good seat. This time I think I'll sit in the front row. And turn my phone completely off.

Still, with forty-five minutes to kill, I decided to do what Lizzie would do—get a jump start on being the smartest person in the room and do some of the reading for psych.

I pulled out my textbook and flipped to the right chapter. We'd spent most of the rest of the lecture talking about behaviorism and classical conditioning. You know, where you associate one thing with something else and it makes you react a certain way? (See: me and my phone.) So, the reading was mostly about this guy Ivan Pavlov, who would ring a little bell right before he fed his dogs. Eventually, he trained his dogs to salivate when they heard that bell, whether they got food or not. (Also, you know how he measured the amount of saliva they produced? He cut out a hole and put a tube in the dogs' cheeks! I would never do that to Kitty.)

The thing is, in class, the lecture was super interesting. But the reading? It was all numbers and charts about how much the dogs salivated versus when they didn't hear the bell ringing and it was
super
dense and boring.

This wouldn't be a problem, but Professor Latham said that more than half our grade would be based on our interpretation of the reading. How am I supposed to interpret the reading if I'm nodding off in my mochaccino as I read it?

This might be more work than I thought it was going to be.

I was saved from nodding off for the second time when my phone buzzed again.

I totally get if you don't want to talk to me. But it doesn't have to be a beverage. It could be a foodstuff. Or a beverage/foodstuff combo.

That made me smile, just a little. Obviously he was really sorry about getting me in trouble. And I
am
going to have to be in a class with him for the rest of the summer. Better to let bygones be gone by. Or something.

You're assuming I want to hang out with you . . .

I added his contact info into my phone right before it buzzed again.

I hope you do. ;)

I slipped my phone back into my bag without responding. Too forward, too soon. Also, I have a super dense paragraph on Pavlovian saliva levels to read; I need to concentrate.

And besides, I hate winky faces.

“Oh my God, Lyds, you're in this class, too? How . . . great!”

I hadn't been the first person to my Gothic Literature class. I hadn't even been the second. By the time I slipped through the door, there were limited seats left.

I blame Pavlov. If he and his saliva measurements hadn't been so snooze-worthy, I wouldn't have fallen asleep, and Mary wouldn't
have had to wake me up five minutes before class began, and I wouldn't have had to sprint across the quad to make it to class on time. And this building was not easy to find. It's in the farthest corner from anything—totally missable if you don't know it's there.

So, not only was I almost late, I was out of breath and a little sweaty when I ran into the classroom and basically smacked into Harriet.

“Um, yeah,” I said, a little flustered. “Like I told you yesterday?” She just looked at me as if the idea had never transferred into her brain. “Um, is that seat taken?”

Harriet looked over at the chair next to her, with her bag on it. She frowned. “Oh . . . sorry, I'm saving that for someone.”

“No worries,” I said, forcing a smile as I moved to the other side of the table, where the only other two open seats were.

Unlike the lecture hall for my psych class, this classroom was small, and all set up around one big table, like a conference room. There were only about fifteen students in the class, give or take. Apparently, this was going to be one of those “discussion” classes, where you don't get tested on the facts and stuff, but again, it's all about how you interpret the material.

Old, old material.

But I needed a class that would fulfill my English requirement before transferring to Central Bay College, and this was all that was open, so let's hope gothic lit is easier to interpret than my psych textbook.

“Hey, um, everyone?” said a tiny student at the front of the classroom. “We're mostly here, but I'll give it another minute before we start, okay?”

I was about to ask where the instructor was, but then I realized—the tiny student
was
the instructor. I realized this because she took a seat at the head of the table, and said, “I'm your instructor, Natalie.”

Natalie. I've never called a teacher by their first name before. At least, not since kindergarten when the Blue Bugs classroom was led by Miss Judy.

Natalie looks like she's younger than me. I mean, I know that I can pass for a worldly twenty-four or -five since that's what my old fake IDs used to say (before I crossed the magic threshold into +21-dom, where I suddenly became legally able to hold my liquor), but this girl looks like she could still be in high school. It doesn't help that she's about the same size as her backpack—which she was currently unloading onto the table.

Excellent. This Natalie is going to love me, because I have all the books, too.
Dracula
,
Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights,
and a bunch of Poe. I'd actually gotten all the books from Lizzie—she'd given me her copies the second she saw the syllabus. They even have her notes in the margins, so it's like I have my own private tutor already.

I reached into my bag and started piling all my books on the table, too—until I noticed everyone looking at me like I was totally weird.

“Oh, Lydia,” Harriet whispered across the table. “You don't have to show off. It's not like this is on camera.”

Isn't it totally amazing how one simple sentence can make you feel like you're five years old and just got scolded by your parents? Harriet was looking at me with, like, the
deepest
concern, and it made me burn red even more.

I let my bangs fall forward, covering half my face, but snuck a glance out at the rest of the room. A couple of students were eyeing me, but most weren't, and Natalie hadn't even looked up from where she was unloading an entire library from her bag, until the door swung open behind her.

“Sorry I'm late,” came a familiar voice from the door. Well, newly familiar. I brushed the hair back from my eyes to see Cody entering the room. “I got turned around on the quad.”

His face lit up when he saw me. He mouthed, “Hey,” as he made his way to my side of the table.

“Uh, Cody?” Harriet said, clearing her throat. Her eyes flicked
to the chair next to her. The one she had been saving for someone. Guess that someone was Cody.

Although he must not have known his seat was being saved, because he hesitated, saw the instructor ready to begin class, and shrugged an apology toward Harriet as he took the empty seat next to me.

It all happened in less than a second. And it totally didn't mean anything. But still, watching Harriet's face fall made me feel a little better. So sue me.

“Good, we're all here now,” Natalie squeaked from the front of class. The pile of books in front of her was practically as tall as she was, so she had to shift to one side to see over it. “These are all the books in our local library that qualify as gothic literature—all the books that have a heroine in danger from a dark and brooding man and a deep, sinister horror hidden in the past, or a scientific discovery gone awry, causing the creator to be doomed by his own creation.”

“Ah, we're not going to have to read all of those, are we?” Cody asked, earning a couple of laughs—the loudest from Harriet. “I'm all for a good scare-fest, but we can Netflix some, right?”

Natalie smiled nervously, and I realized . . . it's possible that Natalie hasn't taught a class before. Ever. (Note to self: confirm theory and inform Ms. W about my rad observational skills at our next session.)

“No, we're only going to be reading the books that are on the syllabus—like yours.” Natalie pointed to the comparatively microscopic pile of books in front of me.

“Great.” Cody smiled at me. “At least one of us came prepared.”

I felt myself smiling back.

“But you're right,” Natalie was saying, “it is a lot of books. At the height of the Victorian era, gothic literature was the best-selling genre of fiction, even though snooty critics dismissed it as ‘sensationalist.' But the popular stuff always is. There were more gothic books being sold than there are vampire YA books now.”

Natalie chuckled at her own joke. The rest of the class just kind of . . . blinked.

“Um, anyway, I just wanted to illustrate a point. This genre was huge, and a lot of it survived, influencing storytelling to this very day. It was influential in its own time, too. Even Austen and Dickens both tried their hand at putting a little gothic into their stories. Any idea why?”

“Wasn't it just, like, totally popular? And they both liked money . . . so, they were following a trend,” Harriet said.

“Yes,” Natalie admitted, “but . . . think bigger. Any ideas?”

“Um . . .” I raised my hand. “I haven't done any of the reading yet, or anything,” I ventured slowly. “But trends only happen in a moment, and then fade away. And things that last . . . they sort of tap into something true about everyone that we hadn't realized before. They say something real.”

Natalie smiled wide. “Exactly. And we are going to spend the next six weeks figuring out what that is. We're going to draw a line straight from gothic's origins to
Wuthering Heights
to
Dracula
to . . . to modern dystopian novels like
The Hunger Games
. But let's begin at the beginning, with Walpole and
The Castle of Otranto
 . . .”

As Natalie picked up one of the old paperbacks in front of her, jabbering on more and more excitedly about the themes that the writer Horace Walpole stole from medieval literature to create the first gothic novel, I snuck a glance around the table. Most everyone was taking notes. Except for two people.

Wanna guess who they were?

Yes, while Cody was trying to send me another wink (too many winks, dude), Harriet was looking at me like I was eyeliner that just wouldn't go on right and was messing up her whole vibe.

Well, I thought, so much for renewing
that
friendship. I did not sign up to be caught in the middle of some stupid love triangle this summer, but if Harriet's glare was any indication, I wasn't sure I had much of a choice in the matter. Guess our frenemy status was continuing to play out like a crappy TV drama after all.

*  *  *

It's still weird to me that there's no bell in college. No buzz over loudspeakers telling you to pack up your bags and go to your next class. And in this room, there's no clock on the wall, so when Natalie said, “Oh my gosh, I've been talking for an hour!” we were all kind of surprised.

I grabbed my bag and shoved my pile of books into it as fast as I could.

“So—” Cody started, but was cut off almost immediately.

“Cody!” Harriet cried, wrapping herself around him and sort of knocking him off balance. “OMG, when was the last time I saw you? Spring break?”