Chapter 1
"What a difference from Blackwood Cove!"
Jasmine smiled as she jogged along, pulled by her enthusiastic friend. Luffy was correct in his observation. While their hometown was cold and clammy and gray, this place was green and bright and full of life. Blackwood Cove, even in summer time, was possessed of a certain leaden weight, as though the heart of winter resided somewhere deep in the ground beneath it and bled its influence into the town all year round.
Together, the two friends raced down a wide asphalt path. To their right was a guardrail and a two-lane road, the main line that stretched between New Market and Wildwood College. To their left was nothing but forest, an untouched and unmapped vastness where the wild spirit of the old frontier still seemed to exist. Ancient trees brooded tall and heavy over everything else, filling the understory with shadow and calm and silence. A chipmunk chittered; a car ambled by at forty miles an hour, its tires a whisper on the surface of the road.
Luffy looked back, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. "Pretty dang hot out here for a Spring day!"
"Getting tired on me?" Jasmine asked between breaths, grinning as sweat streamed over her forehead and upper lip. She reached up and wiped it out of her eyes, looking at the brand-new GPS watch her father had sent her as a birthday gift. Four and a half miles in. Nearly there.
The journey from her apartment at the edge of New Market to the school was six miles. And a lot could change over that distance. Civilization became wilderness. The hustle and bustle of a large town was reduced to the faint buzzing of insects and the trilling of birds as they swept to and fro on their unknown missions.
This was the middle of Jasmine's first semester at school. Wildwood was not a cheap school, and to make ends meet she had foregone the purchase of a car. She had a bicycle, but she rarely used it.
"Tired?" Luffy asked. "Never. I could run all day, you know that. How about you, huh? Can you keep up?"
She answered him with action rather than words, picking up her pace and blowing right past. He leapt to keep up, and did so easily. With four legs, the eight-minute pace Jasmine usually went at was nothing to him.
Twelve minutes later, the path began to drift away from the road and wind into the forest itself. At first this seemed like a pointless meandering, but suddenly the forest opened into a vista of the college. It sat on fifty acres of cleared space and took up only half of that, leaving the rest as sports fields, walking trails and empty expanses of grass where students and staff often had their lunch.
Wildwood was a symmetrical grouping of granite buildings that had stood here for close to two hundred years. Minor renovations had been done, electricity, water and telephone added and then, much later, internet, but it existed pretty much as it did when it was first built. The asphalt path transferred into ancient flagstone pavers as Jaz and Luffy crossed the threshold of the school grounds. They slowed down, walking the rest of the way, both craning their necks to survey the looming school. Because of the forest surrounding it, much of Wildwood stood in deep shadow at this early hour. All but the clock tower, which rose up into the sun, its face blazing like a beacon.
"It's quite a sight, huh?" Luffy asked.
Jasmine nodded. In a moment they were surrounded by other students, lounging on the grass and studying for whatever class they were about to go into. Only a few of them looked up at Luffy in surprise; most were already used to the dog's presence here.
The two friends circled around the back of the building and approached a smaller structure that stood a short distance away from the main cluster. It used to be a carriage house or some such thing, but it had, sometime in the first half of the last century, been retrofitted as a gymnasium. Wildwood did not have a large athletics program. In fact, the only two programs it offered were track and field and wrestling. But it had a long history of excellence, and part of keeping the mind sharp lay in training the body. It was one of the tenets of the college, and every student was encouraged to use the gym any hour, any day.
Jasmine had taken that encouragement and ran with it. She and Luffy entered the building and skirted around a pilates class that was already underway. They went into the locker room. Jasmine approached a bench and lowered her heavy backpack onto it. From inside she pulled out a change of clothes and a metal bowl. The latter she filled with water and left on the floor for Luffy. The former she took with her into a shower stall to wash off the stench of the run. She used her hands to scrub sunscreen from her face and arms.
While she was in the middle of washing, she heard someone else enter the locker room. The newcomer began talking to Luffy, no doubt scratching his ears and rubbing his belly and all the other things the Golden Retriever liked.
Jasmine shut off the water and patted herself dry. She was still self-conscious about wandering around the locker room with nothing but a towel to cover herself, so she quickly dressed inside the stall and stepped out to find a familiar young woman giving Luffy his very own massage treatment.
"You big ham," she said, shaking her head.
Luffy let out a groan of contentment. "Being a dog does have its advantages."
Alicia Newman looked up, smiling. "Luffy's a good boy. Aren't you Luffy?"
"Sheesh," he said, still smiling. "And that's one of the disadvantages. People think they need to talk to you like you're a baby."
Jasmine smiled, lowering herself onto the bench to put her shoes back on.
"He likes you," she said.
Alicia shrugged. "Dogs like everyone."
Jasmine shook her head. "Not true. I know someone who Luffy doesn't like at all."
"Oh? Who?"
"Just someone from back home," Jasmine replied. "What brings you in here, anyway? Are you in that pilates class?"
"Me? God, no," Alicia said, laughing. "I'm about as flexible as a steel rod. I'm pretty sure I'd snap in half if I tried doing any of that stuff. I just saw you heading this way so I thought I'd stop by."
Jasmine grinned. "You didn't do the homework, did you?"
"Well..." Alicia returned the grin, looking sheepish. "It was either that, or get the four hours of sleep I managed to get."
"Did you ever think about, I dunno, taking less of a workload?"
Alicia nodded. "Next semester. I just don't want to be in school forever, you know? So, are you gonna help me out?"
Jasmine sighed, reaching for her bag. "You owe me."
"I still owe you for last time," Alicia said.
"Okay. So you owe me double."
She pulled out her worksheets. But rather than simply give Alicia the answers, she tried to be as instructional as possible. There was no point in cheating if you were going to come away from it just as ignorant as before.
"So, let me get this straight," Alicia said at the end. "A weird teenager and a scared old man were really all it took for this guy to completely change his mind? It was enough to make him see how screwed up the world is?"
"No!" Jasmine said, laughing. "There's more to it than that. You just need to actually read the book."
"I will, I promise," said Alicia. "This weekend. But I just need to get through this class. Please, Jasmine."
She shook her head firmly. "You've gotten all the help you're going to get from me."
"Not fair. You've probably already read the book five times."
"I admit nothing," Jasmine replied with a smile.
Alicia gave her a playful slap on the arm. "Well, if I fail it's all your fault."
"You won't fail. You're smart enough. College is half knowing the answers and half knowing how to stumble into them. Right?"
"Something like that." Alicia looked at the time on her phone. "Crap! We'd better go."
Luffy jumped up. "Are we running again? Let's go!"
***
Professor Hawke's Creative Writing class was one of the largest at Wildwood, at least in terms of size. However this semester a record low number of students had elected to take it. So Jasmine and the others stepped into a rather empty and deserted lecture hall. The majority of the desks were still covered in cloth from the winter break; half the lights in the ceiling were turned off, leaving a small semicircle of illumination around the professor's desk and blackboard.
Jasmine took her seat near the middle of the existing class. Luffy obediently slinked in under the desk, lying down and breathing out the rest of the heat he had generated on the run.
Despite Alicia's concerns, they were some of the first people to arrive. As the students trickled in at a slow pace, it became clear that a few desks would remain empty. Jasmine felt herself wondering if the desk directly in front of her would be one of those... but a minute before the bell, Charles Dane came strolling in as though he was on a relaxing walk through the park.
Tall and well dressed, with hair that was never less than perfectly coiffed, Charles was the definition of a preppy. His expression seemed to flip between a self-satisfied smirk and a grimace of disgust, and nothing else. He appraised Jasmine as he reached his seat, huffing a bit when he saw Luffy lounging in the shadows beneath the desk.
"Still allowed to bring that beast in here?" Charles asked. "I swear his breath is worse than my grandfather's, and he's dead."
"Newsflash," Luffy said. "Those are my farts you've been smelling. Enjoy."
Despite his words, Charles reached back as he sat down and very stealthily gave the dog a pat on the head. He wasn't all bad, just mostly. As Alicia sometimes liked to say.
"So, what is it today?" Charles sighed, opening his bag. "More of that insufferable sci-fi nonsense? I thought this class was for literature."
"Science fiction is one of the greatest kinds of literature," Jasmine said in response.
"Yes?" Charles asked, glancing back, his expression seemingly balanced between the two extremes he was known for. "How so?"
"It reflects on human nature in ways that no other genre can, because it shows us events that could happen but haven't yet. It draws parallels with history and shows us how the world might look in the future."
Charles shrugged. "It's all a lot of nonsense. Pulp writers who somehow got lucky enough to get their own section at the bookstore. Nothing more."
"What is that I hear?" called a shrill voice from the front of the class.
Until now, Professor Sampson Hawke had been sitting quite still and peacefully. Now he stood from his desk, lifting his ever-present mug of tea and approaching the first row of seats. He reached up to adjust his small glasses but somehow they stayed perched at the very end of his nose.
"Class technically hasn't started yet," Professor Hawke added. "But..."
He glanced at his watch.
"...now it has," he added. "I see that some of our more enthusiastic students may have an opinion to share. Charles, Jasmine, is there anything you'd like to say to the rest of the class? Any discussion or debate you'd like to start?"
As always with Professor Hawke, it was difficult to tell whether he was being genuine or else seeking some sort of disciplinary action.
The rest of the students looked around, shifting in their seats.
"Uh, no sir," Charles said. "We were just discussing how we got on with last night's homework."
"Right," Jasmine said.
The professor nodded. "I see. I could have sworn I heard someone insulting one of the most beautiful branches of fiction to be found, but I guess that doesn't matter. Everyone's entitled to their opinion."
He turned back to the blackboard. With the hand he wasn't using to hold his cup of tea, he grabbed a bit of chalk and scrawled something out on the board.
Method and Means of Writing.
Then he turned to the class.
"By now you all should have finished reading Fahrenheit 451," he said. "And you also should have reached the afterword, though I'm sure many of you didn't bother to read it. Basically, half of the idea for the novel started out as a short story based on a real-life experience. The original story was only like the resulting novel in tertiary ways. Any writer could have been inspired to write a novel based on it, and the resulting novels would all differ vastly. The fact that Mr. Bradbury came up with Fahrenheit 451 speaks to his own individual method of writing."
He used the chalk to point at the first word he had written.
"The method refers to the exact words and how they are ordered. How they make up the story, the characters, the morals and purpose of the whole thing. Mr. Bradbury used his poetic and greatly analogistic style of writing to give us an unforgettable and singular work. That is his method. But what about the means?
"The means refers to the physical way in which a thing is written. Dalton Trumbo used to like to write longhand from his bathtub. Roald Dahl had a favorite armchair he liked to tuck himself away in with his legs in a sleeping bag. To bring up another giant of science fiction, Isaac Asimov enjoyed shutting himself in tight, closed spaces to hammer away at his typewriter and then his word processor with superhuman speed. Ray Bradbury, in writing Fahrenheit 451, came to a method that was not normal for him.
"Rather than write at home, where he would be distracted, he sought a quieter place to work. But he couldn't afford office space, so he elected to write on a typewriter in the basement of a library. A typewriter he had to pay to operate. All in all the novel took him eighteen days to write and cost somewhere close to twenty dollars. That was not Bradbury's preferred method of writing, but it was the method he used. The result was a beautiful and lasting novel that we read to this very day."
Charles shifted slightly in his seat, probably just seeking a more comfortable position.
"Oh, I'm sorry Mr. Dane," Professor Hawke snapped. "Am I boring you, or offending your literary sensibilities? I apologize. Perhaps next time we can cover the works of Lord Byron or Shakespeare. Or maybe you would prefer George Eliot? For now, let's talk about how creativity is the key term in the phrase 'creative writing,' and how the means of writing can change while the methods stay the same..."
***
"Is it just me," Alicia said, "or did Professor Hawke seem snippier today?"
"I'll say," Charles said with a sigh. "I thought he was going to crawl down my throat at one point. The man's on a tear."
They were walking to their next class, a language and linguistics course which they happened to share. Luffy strolled along beside them, drawing a disapproving stare from a passing custodian.
"He was fine yesterday," Jasmine pointed out. "Something must be bothering him."
"Well, he'd better sort it out," said Charles. "If this abuse keeps up, I'll have no choice but to let my father know."
Alicia laughed. "Really? You'll let your father know?"
Charles shrugged. "Why not?"
"Because it'll turn you into a walking, talking cliché," Alicia replied.
"Too late," said Luffy.
Jasmine cracked up laughing. Alicia grinned, assuming it was at her own remark.
Charles scowled at both of them. "Why am I friends with the two of you, anyway?"
"Because we're awesome," Jasmine said.
"Keep thinking that," Charles grumbled.
"What's with you, anyway?" Jasmine asked. "I'm used to you having a silver spoon up your butt, but today it's like there's a whole telephone pole up there."
Charles went stiff, his usual languid walking gait transmuting into something upright but shambling. Like an undead butler.
"Don't worry about him," Alicia said, giving Jasmine a nudge. "He's just upset about not getting that position on the student council."
"What a shambles," Charles griped. "What a miscarriage of responsibility and duty. Everyone knows I should have had that position. Everyone."
"Just let your dad know," said Alicia. "He'll figure it out for you."
Charles scoffed. "Contrary to your inexplicably negative opinion of me, I don't require my father's assistance with every last matter that pops up. I'm going to take care of this one myself."
"Yeah?" Luffy asked, looking back with his tongue hanging out. "How are you going to swing that one, chief?"
Charles answered without needing a transposition from Luffy's human companion.
"I'm going to speak with Dean DuPont and see if we can't sort this out," he said. "In this and in all matters, logic should prevail. It will become clear that I am a much better candidate for the position than that pauper."
Jasmine had no idea which muckraker he was referring to. She had enough on her plate, reading two or three novels a week and writing her own short stories and novellas, that she didn't pay a whole lot of attention to school politics. It was all quite dry to her, far less interesting than the imagined worlds contained in all the pages of the school library, a room that was rivaled only by The Book Nook in its ability to capture her.
By then the four of them were approaching their next class. Technically it was called Language and Linguistics: How Our Words and the Way We Use Them Influence Our Understanding of the World, but for obvious reasons it was often called LnL for short, even by its professor.
Where Professor Hawke was eccentric, moody, and prone to sudden outbursts, Professor Alan Keller was a quiet and brooding man who seemed to both hate and love the English language in equal measure. His hair grew in two stages. At the sides it came in as wild tufts, and on top as faint wisps on his liver-spotted scalp. What he lacked up top he made up for down below, with a Shakespearean beard and mustache that put the old Bard to shame in its dimensions and style.
Professor Keller was in his usual posture as the students filtered in, reclining in the wing-backed monstrosity he used in place of a normal desk chair, his feet up on an ancient, threadbare ottoman and a razor thin, modern laptop perched on his skinny legs. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and he seemed to be as comfortable as any man had ever managed to get. There was a small microphone taped to his lapel; a huge profusion of notes had already been written out on the board, starting with numbered instructions which the students followed. They sat and, in near silence, took out their books and turned to the right page.
"Another note taking session," Charles complained. "When are we actually going to learn something in this class?"
It was that moment when another young man, sitting in the very next row, looked back and gave Charles a friendly smile. Jasmine had seen this boy around. He seemed nice. She thought his name was Oliver. But the sight of him seemed to have an effect on Charles that was similar to that of being immersed in a vat of cold slime. He shivered from head to toe, and made a disgusted noise.
"That rat," he said as he took his seat. "That absolute waste of skin!"
"What's wrong with him?" Jasmine asked.
Alicia leaned over. "That's Oliver Bridges, the one who took the position Charles was after."
Jasmine shrugged. Obviously it would be annoying to lose out on a position you wanted, but Charles's reaction seemed quite over the top. Then again, everything about Charles seemed over the top. She put it out of her mind and refocused her attention on the front of the room as Dr. Keller cleared his throat and began the lecture from the comfort of his armchair.
"It may not seem like it," he said. "But language is both the finest tool and the deadliest weapon available to us. It can cause unimagined destruction and bountiful growth, depending on mere inflection..."
"Oh, we'll find out about the power of language," Charles grumbled. "We'll find out very soon."
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
