I admire that.”
I felt a wave of heat wash up my face. That was quite a compliment coming from Cal, and I didn’t know how to respond.
“Now,” he said, picking up his fork and pointing it at me, “if you’re done playing detective, why don’t you tell me about that ice cream cake you’re making for tonight.”
I laughed, relieved. “Are you gonna pick nits with my cooking now, too?”
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Darlin’, I know when I’m outgunned. I can’t boil water without burning it. You cook. I eat.”
With everything I had on my plate, I seriously considered letting the American-lit final slide. But I don’t like leaving tasks undone, and the thought of failing without trying rankled.
So between brunch with Cal and the fund-raiser for Bryan’s scholarship, I found myself back in Sinclair Hall, waiting to take a makeup test.
I knocked on Reggie’s door, and he led me to a classroom on the first floor. It was significantly smaller than the lecture hall in which our class had met. Instead of the long stationary tables, the room was filled with rows of individual desks, all empty save one.
“Ashley?”
She looked up from her test. Her hair looked cleaner, her face less wan. She still wore sweats, but they seemed cleaner and the shirt matched both the pants and the scrunchy holding her ponytail in place.
She smiled. A thin smile, but a smile.
“I figured I ought to finish this stinkin’ class and graduate before I have a kid to tote around,” she said.
“Good girl.”
Reggie directed me to a chair several rows away from Ashley and set my exam down on the desk.
“You have two hours,” he said. “Do your own work. I’ll check in on you occasionally.”
I read through the test and answered the obvious questions, but I had a hard time concentrating. My mind had already jumped ahead to the logistics of the evening’s event, and I found myself jotting down notes about how much Dublin Dr Pepper I would need for the Pink Pepperberry milk shakes I was making for Crystal and Jason’s wedding.
I forced myself to focus on the longer essay question, and was staring at the whiteboard at the front of the class trying to formulate my answer, when I noticed the faint writing there . . . the ghostly residue left from some class of yore. It looked like a language class of some sort, because the words weren’t at all familiar.
Avec qui? Avec moi! Avec toi! Avec vous! Avec nous!
Avec qui?
I read the words over and over, something jarring loose in my poor, overstuffed brain.
Qui.
Of course! Q-U-I-T-A-M, the notation on Bryan’s calendar. We’d all assumed it was “quit a.m.” because those were words and phrases we recognized. English words and phrases.
But what if they weren’t English words at all?
I looked at my test, then back at the board, then at my test.
The little voice in the back of my head that makes me drive the speed limit (almost always) and floss every day (religiously) was screaming bloody murder. I couldn’t just walk out without even trying to answer the test questions. That would be wildly irresponsible, even if I didn’t have any real interest in the class in the first place.
I started writing, furiously, filling up several pages of a bluebook with an essay on themes of individual responsibility in Depression-era literature. I wasn’t going to win any awards for my keen literary insight, but I did enough to quiet my conscience.
I closed the bluebook, tucked the exam inside, and dashed out into the hall.
Reggie was strolling back toward the classroom, his hands in his pockets.
“You done?”
“Yes,” I said, handing him my exam. “But I have a question.”
I grabbed him by the elbow and steered him to the doorway of the classroom. “That,” I said, pointing. “What does that say?”
He glanced down at me like I was a crazy person—which, in fairness, I surely seemed to be—but then squinted at the faint letters on the whiteboard.
“It’s French,” he said. “‘With whom? With me! With you! With you! With us!’ It’s an exercise on pronouns.”
“So what does q-u-i mean?”
“ ‘Who’ or ‘whom.’ ”
“What about t-a-m?”
“My French isn’t the best, but that’s not a word I recognize.”
“Huh. But ‘qwee’ means ‘who’?”
He laughed. “Yes, but it’s pronounced ‘key’.”
I felt like I’d been sucker punched.
That was what Emily had been saying the night she called. Not Tim’s keys, but qui tam.
I still didn’t know what it meant, but the answer was so close I could