Higher Education Read Online Free

streets, wondering why it is I don’t seem to feel like crying .
    Jessica, after threatening to move off campus and tell the housing office that I’d been keeping snakes in our room, then lapsed into a silent treatment which had me thumbing through Dante’s Inferno in an effort to see where she derived her methodology. Finally, after two days of her icy glances and stubbornly pursed lips, I cornered her in the bathroom, planted my body as a barricade against the door, and swore to her that I spent the entire night retching into Tim’s baseball helmet, which, as far as I was concerned, was only the merest distortion of the truth. Relenting, she snickered at my woeful face, and then we shook hands in a manly sort of way and I took her out to Steve’s for ice cream.
    But with Bryan it seems that it’s more than a simple case of pique. Our freshman-year friendship began in a shared fondness for tiny dark cafés, crashing Fogg Museum art openings, the Talking Heads, and picking the raisins out of the granola tin, and was nourished over the semesters by long telephone conversations at all hours and by our study sessions holed up in his room at North House, him tinkering with a score for composition class, me at my notebook muttering over my Roget’s. All this easy camaraderie has somehow been displaced by a tense void between us, looming wider every day; and it’s all the more trying since Tim keeps phoning me, and I haven’t got much to say to him, except perhaps to inquire if he’s ever heard the old expression about loose lips sinking ships.
    And so I stand here by the salad bar with my yogurt getting warm, Carlos offering no refuge, and out of the corner of my eye I can see Beatrice and Alicia in their matching leather trousers rustling my way. Grimly I consider handing over my tray to the dishwasher and bagging dinner entirely. Homemade baklava, chérie . I try to recall what I had for lunch today. Did I have lunch today?
    Then I spot Michael and Walt at a small round table not fifteen feet from the salad bar. Quashing a sigh of relief, I drift toward them as if my destination had been ordained before birth, taking care to avoid all unnecessary and potentially fatal eye contact en route.
    After setting down my tray, I pluck a chair from a nearby table and slide into the seat. “Thank god.”
    â€œHowdy, you long tall drink of water,” Michael says, half-rising and tipping an imaginary ten-gallon to me. He’s from Texas and can get away with things like wearing pointy Tony Lamas and opening doors for women. Not many people would guess that he’s attended East Coast prep schools since he was ten. “How are you, gal?”
    â€œOh, I can’t complain.”
    â€œMiranda,” Walt says, shaking his head at my tray, “don’t you know what nutrition spelled backwards is?”
    â€œNoitirtun.”
    â€œR-e-l-i-e-f.” Michael winks at me.
    â€œM-o-n-e-y.” Walt is waving his fork for emphasis. Little brown blobs of gravy dot the tabletop.
    â€œOh, Walt. You’re beautiful when you’re angry.” Smiling, I wipe a little globule of gravy off my arm. After untold hours of computation, Walt has determined exactly how much food he must consume at each sitting in order to get full value for his board plan, which, as for most Harvard students, boils down to three all-you-can-eat meals a day. He does fairly well with lunch and dinner, but breakfast proves to be another kettle of fish, as it were. How much oatmeal, after all, can one person eat? Walt compensates for his physiological limitations by smuggling out several single-serving boxes of cereal a day, thus, he insists, getting his money’s worth from his meal plan. This satisfaction is never plainer than when he is showing off an entire wall of his room lined with row upon row of carefully stacked Rice Krispies, Cocoa Puffs, Sugar Smacks, Bran Buds, and Special K