comforting thing I’ve ever fallen asleep to. I’m asleep for a total of forty seconds when the Jeep stops at Bottom of the Hill, a ratty but awesome convenience store a block from where I’m taking my exam. George runs out, grabs a large coffee as Travis wakes me up.
“Drink this,” George says. “You’ve got five minutes.”
“How on earth did you make it back to New Brunswick so fast?” I say.
“Don’t ask,” George says. “Just be glad you slept through the worst of hyperdrive.”
“I got her here, didn’t I?” Molly says, eyes wide like she’s just done a gram of crystal meth.
I down the coffee like water, pinch my own cheeks. Now I’m thinking like Toni Morrison. I’m emoting like Chinua Achebe. I’m plotting like Marge Piercy. I’ve got this. Modern Novel. I eat Modern Novel for breakfast. I am a fucking connoisseur of modern literature now. Bring it, asshole English exam. Bring it.
We’re parked on Hamilton Street now, near Murray Hall where my exam is. I down the last gulps of my coffee. Travis takes my car keys and says he’ll be back to get me at ten.
“Be back at nine thirty,” I say. “I won’t be longer than an hour.”
“You won’t?”
“Nope.”
Now that I’m here, I know I’ve got this. I look like I’ve been in a car wreck, I know. I feel like it, too. But there’s no English exam they can give me that I can’t ace in an hour if I’ve read the books. And I have. Some of them multiple times.
Travis hands me my backpack and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear before he kisses me, completely unexpectedly and very sweetly on the lips.
“Go get ’em, champ,” he says.
And now I’m totally awake. I’m fucking euphoric. Or delirious. Either way, I’m ready.
I roll into class and I look like shit, I know. My hair is probably—well, I have no idea. I rake my fingers through it and comb it back behind my ears. I’m in yesterday’s clothes, including underwear, and I try not to think about that or how I might possibly smell right now. I haven’t brushed my teeth in . . . never mind. See, I expected to make it home, sleep a few hours, take a shower before coming here. But that’s not how it worked out, obviously. Sometimes shit just barely works out, and this is one of those times.
Professor Cocksucker looks dubiously at me and hands me my blue book. He probably assumes I was up all night snorting lines of coke and fucking six different guys from bad home environments, not up all night because I had to bring the rock to Baltimore and then possibly save a trucker from dying of food poisoning on the road. I had shit to do, is what I’m saying. What did he do last night? Sleep. And what good did that put in the world? Exactly.
These exam questions are not terribly difficult, but they’re not basic, either. I have to think about them, but my thinking brain is totally wired and online from the coffee and all the crazy shit that has happened in the last twenty-four hours. I am inspired right now about life, and thinking that what makes these stories so good, so vital, is not that they are or aren’t real or relevant, but that when you read them they make you feel like you lived them. They give you an experience that you just can’t otherwise have. That’s why books like these are so powerful, why they mean something. I can’t live in tribal Africa and experience what happens when the Christians come. I can’t be a black slave at the end of the Civil War. But I can read Beloved. Fuck, it’s the least I can do on that front. Good stories do something like what good rock and roll does, they make you feel something. Sometimes it’s something new. Sometimes it’s something familiar, but you feel it for a new reason. And I do realize that listening to good rock and roll and reading good books don’t by themselves put food on the table. They don’t put a roof over your head. But they give you a reason to keep drawing air. Survival just for survival’s sake is fine if you’re a virus. A microbe. If you’re human, there should be a point to survival, and if love and art aren’t it, then I guess I don’t know what is.