(eng) Pamela Dean by Tam Lin

Author:Tam Lin [Lin, Tam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

"Skate first, then eat?"

"Okay."

They worked out the details. Janet considered asking after Dartmouth, but they had never used the telephone for extended conversation, and there seemed no real reason to begin now.

He came by to collect her at ten the next morning. Lily, unfortunately, let him in, and bringing him into the kitchen where Janet was brushing Vincentio, she remarked, "Did you have a fight with Nick?" and then ran up the stairs laughing maniacally.

"Who's Nick?" said Danny, in the resigned tone he always used of Lily. Vincentio skidded across the floor and tried to knock him down, but he countered this move absently.

He looked just the same: short, sturdy, brown, with a head of silky black hair that seemed not to belong to him. He had gotten new glasses since she saw him last; she wasn't at all sure that gold wire-frames suited him.

"Somebody I'm going out with," she said. "Another English major."

"Good." Vincentio sat on the floor and panted; Danny rubbed his ears. "You never did get me to read Jane Austen."

"Are you going out with anybody?"

"I never really saw the point of it," said Danny.

Janet, who had spent the past ten days learning the point of it, looked at him carefully and saw that he meant it. She considered and rejected a number of commonplace remarks, most of which sounded as if they ought to be addressed to a child of ten, not to any of one's peers—let alone the one who had been, until she went to college, the only really perceptive and intelligent friend she had. "Well," she said, "that'll save you a lot of time."

Danny laughed. "That's the only nice thing anybody's said to me on the subject since I left."

"You're just backward," said Janet, "are you gay, you don't know what you're missing, I can introduce you to somebody."

"Yep. Let's go. The onion rings are calling me."

The onion rings were greasier than Janet remembered them, but served well enough after skating in the icy wind. Over them, she and Danny discussed what college was like.

Danny would have liked Dartmouth well enough had there been no other freshmen there; his classmates, or at least all the ones in his dormitory and classes, appeared to have been raised in such strict households that they used the freedom of college to get drunk every night, play poker all afternoon, and hang around with whatever sorts of members of the opposite sex their parents had most resolutely forbidden them. Janet suspected that it was these circumstances rather than any really strong character trait that had made him say he didn't see the point of going out with anybody.

She commiserated with him, which was easy enough to do when the worst trial in her immediate circle was Tina.

"Oh, well," said Danny, finally looking rather embarrassed, exactly as he had long ago when she asked him how his broken arm felt. "Maybe they'll grow up by the end of the year. Or I'll meet some upperclassmen; or some of the ones I know will realize I'm not bad for a fresher.

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