The Tree of Knowledge, Daniel Miller [unputdownable books txt] 📗

without her having to ask. It was a simple act, offered with his usual distracted half smile, but to Eva, it felt like someone had thrown her a life preserver.

As they left the classroom that day long ago, Dilbert tenderly joked, “I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to do math when you have paper.” Eva remembered giggling and then being mortified as a snort jumped out of her nose. Dilbert had blinked, pleased at her reaction. From that moment on, she always tried to sit next to him in Professor Turner’s class. How absurd she must have seemed to him, like a little puppy following him around. But Dilbert never showed an ounce of impatience or condescension. He always greeted her with a kind, if distant, “Hey there,” and patiently helped her whenever she had a question.

Before her fifteenth birthday, Eva begged her mother to allow her to invite Dilbert to her quinceañera. She remembered her mother’s slow, condescending reply. “Evi,” her mother said with a sigh, “he’s not a teenage boy. He’s an adult, a university student, and he doesn’t have time to go to your quinceañera.” The girl had screamed at her mother and told her that she didn’t understand, and that Dilbert was her friend and that he wanted to come. After days of alternating between her daughter’s sulking and screaming, her mother finally relented and told Eva that she could invite him.

“Just don’t get your hopes up too much, Evi,” her mother cautioned.

The next day after class, as Dilbert packed up his bag, Eva, eyes trained down and voice wobbling, invited Dilbert to her quinceañera. The words floated out of her mouth, coated in hope. A hope that evaporated as soon as Eva saw Dilbert’s confused reaction.

“Oh.” Dilbert hesitated. “Thanks for the invitation, Eva, but I’ve got a lot going on this weekend, so I probably won’t be able to make it.” He hurriedly packed up his bag and walked toward the lecture hall’s exit. “Have fun, though. Don’t eat too much cake.” And then he was gone.

Eva stared out the door of the lecture hall in disbelief. The cold silence of the room exposed the crushing feeling of rejection and abandonment. She had loved Dilbert and invited him to the most important event in her life: the moment when she would officially become a woman. And he had discarded it with a smile as though she had been handing him a coupon at the supermarket.

Standing stock-still, Eva wept. She cried in silence, not daring to break the solemnity of the enormous, empty lecture hall. She cried until her chest hurt and her shoulders ached from the shaking. After every tear had gone, she removed a tissue from her bag, wiped her eyes and nose, and resolutely turned a cold stare toward the ceiling.

“Never again,” she whispered to herself. “Never again.”

Eva physically shook the memory from her head, brushed past two administrators on break, and entered Fine Hall. The Society did not believe in nostalgia. Rule seventeen: “Time is the scarcest resource that one has, and it should not be wasted on considering the past unless it improves one’s ability to predict the future.”

Freeing her mind from the fog of nostalgia, Eva sauntered into the Math Department office. The gangly student behind the desk was busy with his cell phone. She coughed discreetly.

The student’s eyes bulged as he gazed upon the striking woman in black before him. His voice cracked as he asked, “How can I help you?”

Eva suppressed a smile as she pictured how easy it would be to manipulate this poor boy. But now was not the time for pranks.

“I’m here to see Professor Puddles.”

The boy frowned at the thought of disappointing the goddess. “Unfortunately, Professor Puddles just left.”

“Oh, I was really hoping to catch him. I’m an old friend of his. Do you know where he went?”

The student giggled. “You can’t be an old friend of anyone. Maybe a young friend.”

Eva stifled an eye roll and smiled at the boy. At least he isn’t as bad as the guy on the airplane.

The student continued, “I think they were headed to Professor Turner’s hou—”

Eva ran behind the desk and stared out the window before the student could finish.

As she gazed upon the buttoned-up Professor Puddles hurrying toward the parking lot with his marshmallow-shaped, height-challenged lackey, Eva couldn’t believe that this was the man she had worshipped as a teenager. Dilbert had been manly, slim, and dapper, whereas Professor Puddles was average, nerdy, twiggy, and awkward. Dilbert’s glasses had given him an air of intellectual sophistication, but Professor Puddles’s specs seemed bookish and outdated. Dilbert was a hero; Albert Puddles was simply a man . . .

A man that was now in Eva’s way.

Chapter 10

Angus Turner resided in a beautiful, old brick home just a five-minute drive from the main campus. The crushed-rock driveway arced in a gentle circle up to the front of the house and then away again. Trees towered around the circle’s entrance and gently tapered off toward the house, giving one the feeling of traveling through a dense forest to find something magical on the other side. Albert eased the car into Turner’s driveway and smiled in admiration as the sun sparkled off the brick facade and slanted roof.

This is a man of order, a man of tradition.

And indeed he was. Professor Angus Turner came from a long line of Massachusetts academics dating back to the founding of Harvard College in 1636. His great-great-great-grandfather had verbally sparred with the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Henry James. From the time he was a child, Turner wanted nothing more than to teach. In junior high, little Angus would hold tutoring sessions in mathematics and the classics to help his classmates. His tall, lean frame would bend down as he calmly explained this or that theory.

His choice to attend Princeton came as quite the shock to the rest of the Turner clan, who had simply assumed he would