Summer School

That I was going to marry Summer Thomas was a certainty. I just needed to meet her, and then everything else would fall into place.

Both of my friends thought she was plain, but they were looking at her boobs and ass and legs and hair and that sort of thing, completely missing her eyes and that elegant neck and those expressive hands with long, thin fingers. Summer was a beanpole, I couldn't deny that, long, lithe, and lean with little points for breasts and a straight drop from her shoulders to her ankles.

But those eyes!

You'd think gray eyes would be cool and composed, but hers were nearly explosive, pulsing with energy. Kind of like Storm, but not as scary. Her brows were wispy, dark like her hair, but her eyes were light, and they pulsed and crackled and danced.

And she was really smart in a way that Taco and Jez and I were not. I mean, sure, we could make any computer sing. Literally. For our first group project in InfoSci 200 we used one of the voice majors in the music program to code the machine to sing "Habanera" from Carmen. But Summer could take an idea and spin an elaborate web anchored on its fundamental meaning, expanded to its social implications, and cautioned about its unconsidered consequences. We may have been artists, but she was a fucking magician, and I could never see how she did her tricks.

I'm pretty sure I first saw Summer Thomas at the dorm social our freshman year. Taco and I had chosen each other as roommates. We were both just seventeen and majoring in what the university called information science but what was really kick-ass coding. I must have seen Summer, though at the time I wouldn't have noticed her. She is a beanpole after all, and my tastes before I knew her typically ran, like most boys, to the buxom.

It was the end of those three awesome months between high school and college, and though I gave my best efforts in high school I came to college not just a virgin but with lips yet unpierced by a woman's tongue. I asked a lot of girls out in high school, where I learned first-hand that dating is not a numbers game when you land on the husky side and you sport prominent acne and your interests tend to science fiction and fantasy. Playing the French horn didn't bring as much music cred as I hoped either. And while I can do a lot of quality thinking, my mind and my mouth pretty much refuse to work together in real time so I am not a great conversationalist. Still, I did have dates to three of the four homecoming dances and both junior prom and senior ball, though all of them were "as friends." And sadly my dates really meant that too. A handful of pecks on the lips was the sum total of my sexual history entering college.

I first noticed Summer Thomas when we had a second-semester 20th Century American History class together. She was an econ major, so we both needed the humanities credit. Everyone noticed her on the first day.

"We'll cover the Great Depression," the TA said, reviewing the syllabus, "and how World War II pulled America and the rest of the world out of the economic malaise -- "

"Excuse me?" A long arm and graceful hand went up in the first row.

"Yes?"

"Will we also be covering FDR's abandonment of the gold standard and the Federal Reserve's subsequent action to expand the money supply to provide liquidity and encourage investment?"

"And you are?"

"Summer Thomas."

"That might be a little too detailed for a survey class like this one, Ms. Thomas. Perhaps you can take an economics class that deals with the policy decisions of the Roosevelt administration during that time."

"But those were the critical actions that stopped the economic free fall and laid the foundation for the economic recovery, slow as it was. Shouldn't we know the entire context for such a critical time in history?"

"We can certainly address that when we get to it." The TA remained composed without committing herself or, more importantly, the professor to anything not already planned, but Summer had served notice.

I was so smitten.

Like most coders, I flatter myself an iconoclast and subversive, but I do all my chicanery in private, and my keyboard could care less what I actually type. Summer said things out loud and gave zero fucks about who might be offended. She wanted the real scoop, spin be damned, and that made me so hot for her.

Sadly I had Biology -- one of my science requirements -- right before history, so I could never get to class early enough to sit any closer than two rows away from Summer. And of course I never spoke in class, so she didn't even know I was there. I tried to accidentally run into her around the dorm, but I never got a handle on her schedule. Having just two friends -- especially introverts like Taco and Jez -- to use in my quest for an introduction didn't do much for my cause either. So the second semester ended with me just as far away from my hoped-for future wife as when it started.

And then . . . glorious serendipity!

I didn't have the patience to wait four years for my degree. I graduated high school in three years, which included enough AP credits to put me almost a semester ahead in college, and since the hard-partying social scene held no appeal for a too-young, physically-unimpressive specimen like myself, the sooner I could get through the learning part and on to the doing part the better. Which is a long way of saying I enrolled in the summer session.

There is absolutely nothing better than summer school in college. Except for maybe sex, but being a virgin I had to go with summer school.

The community of fellow travelers is pretty small, so your relationships get deeper faster. Students are motivated -- you have to be pretty motivated to give up your summer for study -- but there's still plenty of time for hanging out, because you're only in class for a few hours a week. Professors and TAs are far more laid back without all the extra people pushing on them. Even the parties are smaller, more intimate and more mellow, and they happen on the porch or the front lawn instead of crammed into a house. Plus the days are long, and the dress code is flip-flops, shorts, and t-shirts. Or, if you're a woman, spaghetti straps and daisy dukes, which is simply the best look ever.

I took two classes, Information Ethics, Law & Policy that would never have attracted enough students during the regular year -- coders are mostly an amoral bunch focused on impressing each other with radically creative code without regard to larger considerations like whether or not it helps real people -- and an English literature class to finish off my Humanities requirements. There were six people in my Info Ethics class and just four in American Lit.

But one of the four was Summer Thomas, if not proving there is a God at least registering a point in His or Her favor. Then again if there is a God there's a devil as well.

I was so stunned to see Summer in the class that I turned beet red and went mute. Of course she looked up to see me enter the room and caught my reaction in its entirety. And the casual flick of her eyes -- those beautiful eyes! -- back to her book just confirmed that she saw me and dismissed me in the same moment. I then stubbed the leg of a chair as I walked by and tumbled into a seat at the far end of the table. I hoped I made it look like I intended to sit there, but Summer ignored me.

Fred Baylor and Javy Martinez were the other students in the class, and assistant professor Temma Cort taught us. Temma realized the first day that none of the four of us were ever going to study literature once these ten weeks were up, so she went with the minimum demands while still honoring the syllabus. Fred was more socially inept than even me, and Javy seemed to be hot for teacher, so at least I didn't have to watch while one of them tried to seduce my future bride. Class discussions were miserable enough.

Code doesn't allow a lot of ambiguity. It either does what it's supposed to do or it doesn't. Everything is either a zero or a one. It's an incredibly creative endeavor, and there is an art to it, but it's highly structured and pretty cut-and-dried in the end. It's right if it works. In other words, coding is not at all like literature.

Info Ethics was no picnic for me, but at least I could fake it even if I didn't really get the professor's questions. If I'm honest, my answer to every single hypothetical situation he presented was simply, "What would happen if I got caught?" It became crystal clear that punishment was an effective deterrence for questionable behavior, at least for me. But I was completely lost in English.

Fred may have been a dweeb, but he was nearly Summer's equal when it came to interpreting each author's work. Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, it didn't matter. Summer and Fred got way more out of each assignment than I could dream of. Even Javy guessed right some of the time. But two weeks into the course I had yet to add a single meaningful contribution to our discussions, and with only the four of us I had nowhere to hide. My complete lack of awareness confounded Temma, but as the days passed Summer seemed almost fascinated that I could be such a dolt.

My stress was building daily, and with Taco home to work for the summer and Jez off to the Jersey Shore with her family, I had no one to commiserate with. Still, it was summer, and I did enjoy walks around campus in the evening, when the sun was down but the muggy air held the sultry heat and lightning bugs flickered on and off. Those walks helped my frustrations with my classes slide off me like the trickles of sweat sneaking down my back.

The school opened only two dorms in the summer, and I hadn't learned yet where Summer was staying. I wandered around at different times of day and night, but my reconnaissance yielded no intelligence. It did give me a lot of time to think though, and I realized that as relaxed as summer felt, the season was deceptively short. I didn't have much time to press any advantage I might gain, because the campus would be inundated with students in just eight more weeks. And my plan to woo Summer was hardly off to an auspicious start.

I do pride myself on my thinking, and with no friends to distract me I had plenty of time to consider my strategic options. The problem was Summer. She was way too smart to fool, and since I was already in the hole with her I couldn't chance a failure.

What to do?

The idea that ultimately presented itself as the best path forward terrified me. But the more holes I tried to find in it the more I realized that it was the only way I might succeed. And so I waited until the end of another excruciating discussion, this one about Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" -- which I fervently prayed was not an omen -- and slipped over to where Summer was gathering up her stuff.

"Um, Summer?"

Her eyes -- those gray eyes! -- turned to me, and what registered was curiosity. Not in a oh-what-interesting-and-novel-thing-do-we-have-here kinda way, but rather in a way in which you might regard a mosquito just alighting on your arm. Right before you slap it into oblivion. I rushed on to forestall that crushing slap.

"I was hoping you could help me out a bit. I am so lost in this class, and I really don't know what to do. You seem to understand everything we're talking about. If I bought you an iced coffee would you have time to maybe help me get into the right frame on this class?"

The truth. It's subversive, right? But throwing yourself on the mercy of a stranger demands a lot of vulnerability, and that's not something I relished. Still, I had no other choice if our fated marriage was to be.

A lot of processing was happening behind those incredible eyes. I think she quickly realized that I was sincere, but it took her far longer to decide whether there was any hope for me. Finally she nodded.

"I have a half-hour right now."

Yes! I almost hid my relief, but then I remembered my strategy was about truth, so I let my shoulders drop and my breath rush out.

"Oh, thank God. You have no idea how much this means to me." Completely true, but no need to elaborate further.

She gave a brief tight smile and shouldered her backpack. We walked together to the student center. Well, she walked, I trotted along to keep pace with her long strides. I went to the counter for two iced coffees while she found a table that wasn't too grungy. The downside of the relaxed summer is that nobody worked super hard, including the people who cleaned the tables in the student center.

"I don't know why this is so hard for me. I'm not usually so thick." Summer stared at me. I guess I didn't really give her much to react to. "I mean, I can make a computer do pretty much anything, but I just cannot make sense out of a poem."

"Why don't you program a computer to make sense of the poem then?"

What?

"Uh."

Summer completely fried my brain with her second sentence to me ever. Could I do that? Use a computer to analyze a poem? What would happen if I got caught?

"Uh."

I suppose I could do that. But first I'd need to understand what to program. There must be source material about every poem ever written. Compiling that amount of data would be huge. Maybe start with a period of literature. Like whatever we were going to study next in American Lit. But I couldn't just regurgitate what someone else wrote -- that would be cheating, and I knew exactly what would happen if I got caught doing that. Not that automated cheating wasn't appealing, it's just I'd like to get my degree. But back to the task at hand. I'd need to compile a shitload of critical analyses and program some AI to keep everything on the rails. The database would need to be coded to keywords, and the code could query the database on those keywords and bring back critical assertions of each analysis, then synthesize the content and incorporate the three most common interpretations. It wouldn't need to write the critique, just provide the main points. Wow, this might work. Summer is a fucking genius!

Summer? Oh, shit, I'm supposed to be talking to Summer.

"Uh."

"You said that. Then you went away somewhere."

"Sorry. You just blew me up."

"It was fun to see you go off like that. You have really transparent eyes. I could see all those synapses firing in your brain as you were thinking. After seeing you in English I didn't know that you had a brain."

Ouch. I mean, I knew I deserved that. But it still hurt.

"I'm actually kind of smart. I just don't get writers. Especially poets. Why can't they just say exactly what they mean so there's no confusion?"

"Why do you think they aren't saying exactly what they mean?"

What? This woman thought like no one I had ever met. My slack jaw betrayed my complete confusion.

"You want them to communicate in a way that you find accessible. Which is normal, if a little self-centered. Instead, they're saying what they want in the way they need to say it, so the onus shifts to you to make sense of it. Instead of insisting that the writer fits their message into your box, you have to figure out how to get into their box to get the message. Make sense?"

I am actually kind of smart, recent evidence notwithstanding. But Summer was on a whole different plane.

"You're a fucking genius." She stiffened in surprise. I didn't mean to say it out loud, and certainly not with the awe that I did. But now it was out there. And it was true, at least to me. "Sorry. It's just five minutes talking with you has my brain firing in eight-thousand different directions. That's never happened before. How come you're learning instead of teaching?"

Maybe it flattered her, but she smiled. Her eyes were stunning, and her uninhibited smile was very nearly their equal. I almost passed out from the glow.

"You're used to thinking of things in just one way. I'm not exceptional."

"That's bullshit!" She stiffened again. What was wrong with me? I had no self-control. But it was true, at least to me. "You're the most exceptional person I've ever met."

She cocked her head and looked into my eyes, which sent me off into fantasyland again. Those gray eyes, crackling with energy, lively, engaging, honest, they hypnotized me. I saw our future together, a long life of love and exploration and --

"Your mental forays are a little disconcerting when we're trying to have a conversation."

I've never been a gibbering idiot before, but that's what I felt like now.

"Uh, sorry. I'm just, well, you send me places I've never seen before, and it's thrilling and scary and wonderful and I'm just babbling now. Sorry. I don't know why you affect me like this. You're incredible."

"Thanks," she said, more businesslike than I thought my gushing warranted. "But back to American Lit. If you want to get anything out of the class, you need to put yourself in the author's place. Like today's poem. Think about what she wants you to know. Every artist is trying to tell you something. Not too get too Buddhist about it, but open yourself to their message. There's really no secret. It's just listening."

"Okay. I'll see what I can do." I hesitated, but in the spirit of honesty I decided to take my shot. "Can we meet for coffee again?"

"Why?"

"Um, to talk more. I'm not kidding when I say you're the most exceptional person I've ever met."

"But why would I want to meet with you?"

"Uh."

"I may stimulate your thinking, but -- and I don't say this to be mean, just to make a point -- this conversation hasn't given me anything new to consider. If we got together again you might get a lot of insight, but I'm not sure I'd get anything out of it at all. And I'm just as relevant as you. My time is just as important."

Wow. Super direct. Harsh even. But super clear too. She really had a knack for cutting right to the chase. I so loved this woman, and I needed to suck it up.

"Okay, fair. Thanks for your help today at least. You've given me so much to think about."

And she had. On one hand I felt like shit. She had basically told me I had nothing to offer her. Which cut deep. On the other hand, she was totally right. She blew my mind six ways to Sunday, but I had given her absolutely nothing in return. In my defense I wasn't processing well because my mind was blown six ways to Sunday (Dad always said that, but what did it even mean?), but it seemed only fair that she got at least as much out of our future marriage as I did. My heart fluttered as I watched her stride away, but my mind was already working on what I needed to do to prove myself worthy of her.

The first thing I needed to do was get a clue about American Literature.

Thinking about literature as a coding problem wasn't going to do me much good. Fortunately "The Red Badge of Courage" was relatively short, so I could read it twice before class. The first time would have been plenty, and I was just as lost as I was for Dickinson's poem. It just seemed like a lot of senseless posturing, fighting, and running away. Like war ever solved a problem. It just eliminated possible outcomes until only one remained. But that wasn't going to do me one bit of good during the next class, so after a decent night's sleep on cool sheets softened by humidity and a little bit of my sweat I read it again, this time asking myself what Stephen Crane was trying to say.

I still had no real idea, but if I believed young Henry Fleming then the story was about a guy obsessed with what other people thought of him, hoping they saw him as brave and not just a regular dude who runs away from death and then way overcompensates. But I also saw something that might help me show Summer that I really was her dream guy dressed up in a heretofore unappealing package.

"Crane was showing the horrors of war, the toll war takes on the individuals who fight them. The characters were just cannon fodder for the generals and they were the ones who bled and died for the distant decision-makers."