Schooling the Jock (Nerds Vs Jocks #1) - - Eli Easton Page 0,22
shifted into the fast lane to pass a truck. “Fine by me. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s plugged into pop culture.”
I felt Dobbs give me a look, but he didn’t say anything.
When he finally spoke into the sound of tires on the road, he said, “Okay, I’m going to ask you questions. Answer as fast as you can.”
“Uh, really? I mean, I’m driving and—”
“That’s good. It’ll provide enough distraction to relax your mind. Most people don’t even realize how much crap they know. Okay. First question. This property names sets of protecting groups that can be deprotected independently.”
“What?” I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. “I wasn’t ready.”
“Next clue on the same question: This property of the Bloch function implies that it holds for Wannier functions at different lattice sites.”
Shit, the guy wasn’t even reading. He was just reciting from memory.
“Um…,” I trailed off. I had no idea.
“Third clue, same question. Carolyn Bertozzi prefixed this property with bio to describe click chemistry that does not disturb living systems.”
“I-I don’t—” My brain whirled on my fraternity brothers making fun of the SMTs and Dobbs in particular. Freaking Poins. They think they’re so smart. But the feeling in my gut wasn’t amusement. It was fear, like looking at a final exam and realizing you don’t know any of the answers.
Relentlessly, Dobbs pushed on. “Fourth clue. Same question. When the orbital quantum number equals zero, this property of the hydrogen atom’s spherical harmonics makes an integral vanish.”
I glanced at him, and there was a tight smile on his face like, Yeah, show up the stupid jock. Put him in his place.
“No? Fifth and final clue. Eigenfunctions of a Hermitian operator have this property, which—”
It was like my brain responded the way it had when the kids in high school used to laugh at my crappy farm clothes and hick personality. It rebelled. The words appeared on my lips before I realized I knew them. “Bioorthogonal chemistry.”
Dobbs actually gasped. It was soft, and he covered it with a cough, but it was a gasp for sure. “Uh, right. Good. Ten points.” He took a deep breath. “Realize somebody from the other team might have rung in on one of the earlier clues.”
I just nodded and hoped the darkness covered the smile I couldn’t completely hide.
Next, he asked me a question about a character in a story that had the words “Be Just” carved into his back by his own torture machine. WTF? But I answered Kafka when one of the later clues mentioned Metamorphosis and turning into a giant bug. I scoffed, “Everybody knows that.”
“Yeah they do, and someone would for sure have rung in much sooner.”
That’s one way to put the jock in his place.
Dobbs said, “Next question. What book advocates for a type of philosophy which forms include existential, missionary, and imperialistic?”
“The Joy of Sex?” The words were out of my mouth before I heard them in my head, and I couldn’t hold in the laugh.
His head snapped toward me as if he thought I was serious, but then he grinned. “Wise ass.” He kept chuckling. “Do you know the answer?”
“No clue.”
“Utopia. But it’s a philosophy question and one of our guys is pretty deep in that subject.”
“How do you just know these questions off the top of your head?”
“I use them to train the teams. After a while, they just stick. Let’s keep going.”
He kept asking me questions out of a memory he could have packaged and sold for good money. Some of them I got, some I didn’t, but the sense that he was beating me over the head with my own stupidity lightened up, so maybe I wasn’t doing as badly as he expected.
After over an hour of questioning, my brain hurt. Dobbs pointed at a lighted sign ahead. “That looks like an all-night Starbucks. My treat.”
I made the hard right needed to grab the next exit. There was a three-sixty loop, then a hard right onto a feeder road, three stop signs that seemed to turn us in a circle, and a brick archway. By the time we found the Starbucks parking lot, we were both laughing at the absurdity.
I shook my head. “That was harder than your freaking Quiz Bowl questions.”
“I felt like we were in a maze in the Hunger Games!” Dobbs agreed. “Good navigation there, Knox.”
His praise made me feel inexplicably warm—probably because I’d spent a lot of the last hour feeling like a dumbass.