Chapter 13

Nikki's turn:

Cindy and I spent a good bit of time going over what had happened when she went to Auburn for interviews. Tomorrow was my turn. My Dan and I had even made a special point of meeting Mizz Patel for dinner. Cindy's right. The lady is a delight. So is her husband. I love their accents, too. And yes, she does know the family that's leasing a slot in our little strip mall for an Indian restaurant.

Cindy and I have had a great time since we moved into the same RV park. Aside from the fact that we sort of feed on each other's intellects, our two husbands are freed up a bit to, you know, actually work on things. In the meantime, we both got into the books together. Cindy showed me some of the math that she'd been playing with. When I told Dan what Cindy was playing with, he laughed, with a little bit of a nervous edge.

"What you two are talking about as playing is material that brings ninety-nine percent of the population to its knees."

I kind of laughed. "A lot of that population doesn't want to work with numbers at all," I said. I remember helping kids during the last school year, how some of them really wanted to learn and some of them just wanted to get enough knowledge to pass the tests. Cindy and I had talked about that too.

"I couldn't be a teacher," Cindy said. "I can teach. So can you. But real teachers don't have the choice we had, to only work with kids who wanted to be there learning. How do you think we'd handle walking into a classroom every day knowing that half the kids in it don't want to be there at all, and some of them do not have the good upbringing to keep from disrupting it for others?"

"I saw that with my own eyes," I said. "I know you have seen it too." That was just one conversation. We had others. We snagged a pair of Dans. That's almost always worth a giggle. Imagine! One of my best friends in the whole world, and her husband is a Dan, just like mine.

"Okay," I said. "Which one of you is gonna school us on, what's that term, Cindy?"

Cindy gets this grin when she's being all precocious about technical stuff. "Ladder logic."

My Dan looked at her Dan. "Buddy, did I just hear a fourteen year old girl ask for a class on ladder logic?"

Dan Richards shook his head. "Yeah, she's been doing that to me for almost a year now. If you mention something to 'er, you'd better be ready to either educate or get an education."

My Dan smiled. "Yeah, three days with Nikki and she was pointing out components on a on-line diagram."

"See!" Cindy giggled. "He actually DID marry you for your brain!"

Maybe so. And I did marry him for that. And a whole long list of other things, too. Decent guy. Responsible. Caring. According to my school friends, 'geeky hot', even to the point that one of them actually had the hots for him. And Dan found out when she put a move on him, and he's decent enough to let her down ever so gently.

So today Cindy and I are in our trailer and the guys are in Cindy's. They're working up some stuff on a documentation project. I'm cooking and talking Cindy through everything I'm doing.

"You were fortunate you had your grandma to teach you things like this. I know how to boil weenies and make mac and cheese if I have the box," Cindy said.

"I just know a few things, Cindy," I said. "Grandma showed me how to set up to do a few things with some simple ingredients and techniques. Once you get comfortable with that, you can pop out meals really easy." Cindy knew my whole story, about me waking up the first morning I'd stayed at Dan's house after the hurricane, how I'd gone in the kitchen and fixed breakfast for him and how he'd said it was the first meal in the place that he didn't cook himself. I knew Cindy's story too. And we both knew exactly how far ahead of getting married we'd been in our guy's beds.

And tomorrow I was going to go to Auburn and get interviewed. That's Dan's fault, you know, that whole 'Nikki's smart' thing. I really didn't know before Dan. I did know that I could sit off to the side of the classroom and half pay attention and make B's and C's and with those grades the teachers stayed off my back and Mom never got called to school. All it took was Dan saying, "Nikki, you're smart. Use it." And here I am.

But I'm in the trailer showing Cindy stuff. "Onions. Take an onion the size of a tennis ball," I said. "Chop it up. Heat the pot, put a little oil in there, then turn the heat down and let it get brown. You gotta do it slow."

"Is that sauteeing?" she asked.

"No, with sauteeing, you can crank the heat up. All you want to do with sauteeing is get the onion to sort of turn translucent. This is caramelizing. Different texture. Different flavor. You'll see. And the grease? That can be from the bottle. Or you can brown your meat if it's got enough fat, and use that grease. It's a whole different flavor." Dumping knowledge on Cindy is like dumping water on a sponge. She just soaks it up. Dan says I do, too.

So the four of us had rice and gravy. I was raised on the dish as were both Dans. It's pretty much a Cajun staple. Cindy was familiar with it. She looked at Dan 1.0, her Dan. "You make this, right, baby?"

"Yes I do," he said. "And this is a good one."

"Different than yours?" I asked.

"I try to keep some green onions around, chop 'em up and put 'em in near the end of cooking," he said.

"I do that too, but I didn't have any." I made a mental note adding another item to the shopping list for the week's supplies.

We didn't have leftovers this time. A cook likes that.

Monday morning Dan and I were up at seven and on the road to the campus to meet Mizz Patel at her office at nine.

"Good morning, Nikki," she said when we showed up. "Good morning, Dan. I'm sure that Cindy has given you her assessment of what happened to her." Aneeta smiled. "We are asking the same of you. Based on your information, though, we will bring in a gentlemen who heads our technology department tomorrow afternoon so that he may speak with you."

What could I say? I just smiled and said, "Yes, ma'am. I'm ready."

"Oh, Miss Nikki," she said, "This is not a test. We already look forward to having you with us at Auburn. We are only trying to determine where you will be when you enter our program."

"I only hope I place as well as Cindy," I said.

Mizz Patel smiled. "Ah, yes. Cindy is special. And she made the point of calling me several times about, as she calls you all, 'her sisters'." She turned her attention to Dan. "Mister Granger, Cindy tells me that she and Nikki networked a process control computer. How much help did you give them?"

Dan laughed. "I brought it home from an upgrade project, along with a stack of manuals. I turned Nikki loose on it. The only instruction I've given her was the things necessary to allow her to work safely around electrical power."

She looked at me. "I had to learn to measure voltages and currents and how to solder and crimp and a lot of other little manual tasks. And how to read the drawings and apply that information to the equipment before me. Cindy already knew some basic programming, so she started me off on that part." I giggled. "I automated the cat feeder."

Mizz Aneeta (lovely name!) smiled. "You will do well to talk with Mister Kevin Gales about some of that." She looked up. "Hello, gentlemen. Please come in."

Two men came in. Cindy told me what to expect, or rather who to expect. They introduced themselves The taller, older white guy was first.

"I'm Dr. Brendon Wilkins," He said. "And you're Dominique Granger. Nikki."

"Yessir," I said.

The short guy was obviously from the sub-continent. He had that lilting accent to go with it. "I am Dr. Ranjeet Ramathani, Miss NIkki."

"Pleased to meet you," I said.

"It's 'Mizz", Ram. Nikki is married," Doctor Wilkins said.

"I am sorry, Mizz Nikki. I do remember reading that in your application." He turned to Mizz Patel. "We will take her to the office with us." To me he said, "Please come with us. And If you will call me Ram, I will call you Nikki and our conversation will be happier."

"And I'm Bren," Dr. Wilkins said. "Now, what exactly is your connection to Mizz Cindy Richards? We got emails from her about you."

As we walked, I giggled a little. "Cindy is my adopted sister. Our meeting has been one of those truly serendipitous events. We communicated daily almost from the first meeting, when she lived here in Alabama and I lived in Louisiana."

"Adopted?" Ram asked.

"Unofficial, of course, but we have much in common. We both graduated high school prematurely. We are both married. Both to engineers. Electrical engineers."

"Curious," Ram said.

I smiled. "If you think that's something, then perhaps Cindy has mentioned a Christina Addison and Susan Ellerbee?"

"Those names do ring a bell. Cindy says..."

"They're both coming to Auburn, too. In Electrical Engineering. Both have ACT's thirty and above. And you really ought talk to them. Tina's husband is an electrical engineer and Susan's husband has his bachelor's in engineering technology and he's going to be at Auburn, too."

"Gosh," Bren said. "Are they as young?"

"No, Tina's seventeen. She beat the school system out of a year, which is really something since she was a high school dropout. Susan is as normal as one can be."

"Does Mizz Patel know about these young ladies?" Ram asked.

"IS Cindy bashful about sending emails?"

"Then Mizz Patel knows. I will remember to ask her about them after we conduct your sessions. Or perhaps we will bring her to lunch with us."

They brought me into a nice office with a big whiteboard. "Okay," Bren said. "I'm sure that Cindy told you what to expect. So let's get started."

I broke a sweat. In Cindy's words, 'weapons of math instruction', indeed. I am glad I spent those evenings and early morning hours bulldozering my way through some of that on-line stuff. I'm glad that Cindy and I scared our husbands with math talk. And these two gentlemen caused me to dig deeper than I ever have been in my life. Up to this point, it's been high school. I've always been comfortable that I knew what the curriculum desired and I'm really not bragging, but it's been easy. Not today. I had no idea where these two were going. We started out with trig and high school calculus.

"Told you we shouldn't waste time on this," Bren told Ram. And they kept going. They'd write something on the whiteboard and ask me to talk about it, then they watched me solve equations and derive solutions and talk about principles behind my methods. What made me sweat most was being asked "How do you KNOW what you're doing is correct?" and finding out that "How could it be any other way?" is not the correct response. I had to learn quickly to layer my solutions step by step. I thought I failed miserably.

Lunch was pleasant break but I couldn't unwind the tension very much. I know Dan could tell. On the ride there he said, "Just do your best, baby," he said. "I'm with you forever."

"But what if I'm not up to all this?"

He snorted. "Come on, Nikki baby! "You're not up to what? You're supposed to be waiting to start your junior year of high school. You're already accepted here for college Today is low stakes. Anything you get out of this week is extra."

I took a deep breath and just slumped against him in the truck. When he dropped me off at the building for the rest of the interview, Bren and Ram were coming up the sidewalk. I worked up a smile and met them.

"Relax. Be calm, Nikki. We are friends," Ram said. "You look uncomfortable."

"This morning has been the most difficult academic experience I've ever had," I said.

"And you've done quite well, Mizz Nikki," Bren said. "Do you feel abused?"

"Kind of," I said.

"Imagine yourself one of our graduate students standing for an advanced degree, the culmination of six years of university, all hinging on what we ask and he says. Are you like that?"

I thought for a second. "I guess not. I'm not missing it by much, though," I answered.

"Relax, Nikki. You're doing fine. We learned something from Cindy. We're going to continue the interview if you're up to it."

"Bring it on," I said, steeling myself for more.

I was mentally exhausted when we called it a day.

"Go home, rest, enjoy your evening. When we see you in the morning..."

"You'll have a little written test for me, I suppose."