Chapter 16: First Day of College (Again)

Sunday, August 26, 1984

The weekend felt like the lull before the storm. That was a feeling we were all used to by now. We’d gotten used to there always being a tournament, or a big test, or something else just around the corner.

We all coped in our ways. One of those ways was to go shopping at the mall, which we did yesterday. I tagged along, but it was definitely the girls who had the most fun with shopping. That was as it should be, I think.

We hadn’t been to the movies in forever, either. After much extended discussion in the mall, we wound up picking ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension’. That movie had been a favorite of mine since it came out — now, more or less — and I hadn’t seen it in ... well, more years than I’d been alive, probably.

Yes, I explained all of that to the girls, who were (mostly) not impressed. Jas gave me a shove, but it felt pretty pro forma.

The first interesting point was that Angie stuck up for it. Not for me, but for the movie itself. It’s a fairly nerdy movie (at least, I think it is), and that first-life Angie liked it was a bit of a revelation, if only a minor one.

The second interesting point was that Mel stuck up for it, too, and genuinely. Perhaps she had a bit more nerd in her than I’d expected. It would serve her well in her Mech E classes, probably.

Everyone enjoyed the movie, thankfully, and the girls started making random references to it. Given that many of the quotes in the movie itself were pretty random, it worked well.

Paige was particularly fond of calling people ‘Big Booty,’ to which (of course) the correct response is ‘Boo-tay! Tay! Tay!’

After our day of mostly being quiet, dinner was surprisingly lively. Everyone was excited by the prospect of classes starting at last. That, and the rest of college life would start, too. We wanted to connect with GSS, there were clubs to consider joining, and our first Aggie football game would be next Saturday.

In some ways, we’d spent the last four years waiting for tomorrow. Most Memorial students did, in one way or another. Here it was, at last.

When Jas and I went to bed, she snuggled right up as usual.

“I was thinking about it today, and ... it’s...”

She hesitated, nuzzled her head against my chest a bit, then said, “I’ve come a long way, and most of it’s been since I met you.”

I kissed her forehead.

“You know that makes me happy, honey,” I said.

She giggled and elbowed me playfully.

“Of course! It’s not that, though. It’s ... some of it was me. If I hadn’t come a long way in my freshman year, you wouldn’t have mattered. But if you hadn’t been you, maybe we don’t get through the summer of 1982. If we don’t ... probably I’m still one of the poster children for Impostor Syndrome, and struggling with this and that, and generally a pain in the butt to myself and others. Mama would’ve maybe set me right about you, but that could have been too late...”

“Not on my end.”

“Probably not, though I think you’d know when to cut your losses this time,” she said. “If not, you should.”

I nodded.

“I think I do. You wouldn’t have counted. Not easily, anyway.”

“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “Anyway ... I think my point was that I’m not the only one.”

“Oh?”

She nodded, then leaned up and kissed me softly.

“You’ve changed a lot, too.”

“I can agree, but we’re likely not seeing the same thing.”

“I’m sure we’re not,” she said, smiling. “Look ... the Steve I met in 1981 was ... well, he was you, so he was mature and grown up and all of that. Not ‘serious’ — he was a kid — but ... he was ... he wasn’t sure of himself the way you are now.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“I’m not sure you get through Jess without me. Oh, there’s the argument that she never would have asked you out without me in the picture, and that’s true I think, but it’s not just that. And ... I think us being together two and a half years helped you hold things together at Northwestern when Laura had her freakout.”

I nodded, then said, “Without you, that whole thing would have gone differently. How differently? I don’t know.”

“Mostly what I guess I’m trying to say is that I’m ... well, ‘glad’ is way too weak, and ‘ecstatic’ sounds like we’re doing something we’re not, but... ‘thrilled,’ maybe, that we’re here and together and building a life together.”

“You know I am, too, but yes — I’m very much thrilled that we’re here, together, and plan to be together a very long time.”

She kissed me again, quickly.

“You asked me before if I felt like I was missing out, and I don’t. I really don’t! Everything I want to do I can do, and the person I want to be is the one I am with you in my life. I got the crazy out of my system before I even met you, and I don’t want to let it back in.”

“Whereas you brought the right sort of crazy into my life. Not just you, but you had a big impact on that.”

She giggled.

“When you’re rich — which we’re going to be — we can just be ‘eccentric.’”

“I’m good with that.”

“I love you, Steve.”

“And I love you, Jasmine.”

“Let’s try to get some sleep. I think I’ll manage.”

“Me, too.”

Monday, August 27, 1984

Breakfast today was catch-as-catch-can. Angie had an 8 o’clock history class halfway across the campus and was gone before Jas and I even started eating breakfast. Jas was taking the same history class, but she was in a Tuesday/Thursday afternoon section. Angie and Paige had accounting at that time.

Paige, Jas, and I were the next to leave. Paige and I were both in the same Honors Chemistry class, which was at 9. Technically, we only needed one semester of a natural science, but there was no way I’d stop halfway. The other half could be an elective or something else. If nothing else, Honors classes were valuable in and of themselves.

Jas split off from us halfway there. Her class (World Literature I) was in the amusingly named ‘Academic Building’ (as if the other buildings were somehow not ‘academic’). We had to head to Heldenfels Hall (whoever Heldenfels might have been), which was near the golf course.

Fortunately, I’d been able to schedule Golf after Chem and the associated lab. It was a minor scheduling miracle, really! Jas, Angie, and Paige were all in the same golf class. We would make an interesting foursome, no doubt.

No, they hadn’t gotten the cute skirts, sadly.

Honors Chemistry honestly looked to be something of a blast, which almost surprised me. Dr. Johnson, our professor, was a pretty laid-back sounding guy. He started the class by saying something eerily similar to what my first-life Chem prof had said on our first day. It was also true, and probably no one aside from me would know just how true it was.

“I’m going to tell you many, many things that are wrong over the course of this year,” he said. “Not very far wrong, mind you. Most of the time, things will be very close approximations of the absolute truth. Still, freshman chemistry — honors or not — is about teaching you the essence of things, not the details. We’ll drop a bunch of significant digits. We’ll ignore all sorts of corner cases. Even graduate students spend most of their lives being ‘close enough,’ so of course freshmen will.”

Everyone nodded at that as if they understood it. I nodded, too, but mine was more because I was pondering whether Dr. Johnson had hung out with my UT chem prof at some point and swapped ideas. He definitely wasn’t the same guy — I was sure of that. I couldn’t remember my long-ago prof’s name, but he hadn’t looked anything like Dr. Johnson.

“One thing you’ll learn about me quickly is that — blowing my own horn for a minute — I’m pretty good at teaching. However, I’m quite lousy at writing tests and grading,” he said.

That got a chuckle.

“I’ll warn you that the A/B cutoff on one of my exams last year turned out to be 35. Most honors students have trouble with that.”

There were some frowns. I’m sure he was right — most kids who made it into this class would be upset, perhaps nearly devastated, to see ‘35’ written on a test paper, even if that was a low A. Knowing it might happen would soften the blow, I hoped.

“Because of that, and because you are honors students — which didn’t happen by accident — the A/B lines on my tests are set at 50%.”

That got a bit of buzz. We all knew that most college classes were graded on a curve to some extent. Heck, in many cases our high school classes had been. A 50% curve was nearly unheard of. Still, these were honors students. Half of them making A’s made sense. Ideally, you would do that by making tests that had half the students at 90% or higher, but that was apparently not Dr. Johnson’s forte.

“Pay attention,” he said, chuckling. “There’s a lot more to learn in college than the things in the book. Oh, I want you to learn what’s in the book, but three-quarters of you aren’t going to be chemists or chemical engineers. I know — I’ve checked the roster! That doesn’t mean you can’t learn things in this class that will benefit you, no matter what you do with your life.”

He got some nods and some quizzical looks.

With that, we launched into the class proper. It turned out that we were ‘beta-testing’ the textbook. We were the first class not taught by the book’s authors to use it. He expected glitches there.

Chem lab was mandatory and an important part of our grade, and safety was included in the grading. Get the right results but fail to use the vent hoods, goggles, and so forth, and your grade would suffer.

I had a feeling this might be one of those classes I’d remember. So many professors just blasted out information. Dr. Johnson felt a bit like a Tom Myerson, or how Tom Myerson would be if he had to lecture to one hundred twenty students, not talk directly with twenty-five.

I could work with this.

Paige looked just as thrilled with it, which made me happy. Chemistry wasn’t her thing, either, but we both needed a natural science, and chemistry suited us more than the others. Angie, Cammie, and Mel were taking physics — Mel because it would suit her in engineering, Angie because it was highly math-centered, and Cammie because Mel was taking it.

In any case, Honors classes were hard to come by. This would serve both of us well that way.

Dr. Johnson also reminded us of something that none of us much cared for. Next Monday was Labor Day, but it was also a class day. Apparently, A&M had decided to use the day off somewhere else, so we would be in classes as usual while most of the country was off enjoying themselves.

Our chem lab was run by a teaching assistant (or ‘TA’ — a term every college student became extremely familiar with quickly) named Sarah Chen. She was, fortunately, not the stereotypical impossible-to-understand TA. Based on her accent, I suspected she grew up in Texas just like we did. She seemed very sharp and well-suited to being a TA. Not only that, but she was friendly and outgoing, at least so far. I hoped that would continue.

I should know — while I could hardly tell anyone in the class (other than Paige), I’d been a TA a few times, many more years ago than my current age. Some of my fellow TAs had been terrible. I, myself, was mediocre. Mediocre is sometimes the best you’re going to get, so I’d done okay with the students, by and large.

There were many reasons I hadn’t gone into academia. One of them was that I was mediocre as a TA. I knew my limitations.

That said: different life, different me. Perhaps I would be a TA again. Perhaps I would be good at it, too.

We had half an hour to kill between chem lab and golf. Paige and I filled that time by walking around this corner of the campus.

Just across the street, almost between Heldenfels and the golf course, was a complex of four dorms and a dining hall. Our meal cards would let us eat there if we wanted to, and sometimes we would.

Two of the dorms were for women; the other two were for men. A&M had no co-ed dorms in 1984. During the day, visitation was allowed. Most likely we knew some people in one or another of them — we weren’t the only Memorial students here — but we didn’t know who, or where they were.

Also in this corner of campus was the Computing Services Center, where they kept the mainframe computers (there were at least three) and the big printers. The student computer labs were in the library and the engineering building (which I would be visiting tomorrow).

After a bit, we spotted Jas heading over. We caught each other up on our classes. By the time we’d finished that, Angie had arrived as well. They’d enjoyed their first classes, too, but it seemed like Paige and I had the best professor, at least so far.

Golf was ‘fine.’ None of us were super-excited by our instructor, who was a somewhat bored grad student, but then he probably wasn’t excited by anyone in the class, either.

It probably didn’t matter. We weren’t going to turn into Tiger Woods (not that anyone else would have known who that was). What we could do was become half-decent, and nearly any instructor could manage that.