The Cartographers(30)
And the sparks flew almost the instant they saw each other.
That second week, it was a Thursday near the end of our morning class, and we were all milling around near the front of the room as we waited for our instructor, Professor Johansson, to finish passing back our first assignments. Tam and I had fidgeted with boredom through the whole lecture—Wally and Francis had been rapt with attention, because it was all numbers and science and math—and we were so impatient to escape that Tam didn’t notice Professor Johansson had accidentally handed her the wrong essay until another student near us called out, “Well, if Tamara Jasper gets grades this good, I guess I’m happy to be Tamara Jasper!”
“What?” I asked, at the same moment that Tam looked down at the paper in her hands, and said, “You’re . . . Daniel Young?”
“No, that’s you,” Daniel said, grinning broadly.
Tam snorted, and her eyes dropped to his assignment again. After a long, surprised pause, she looked back up at him, mystified. “You wrote about fake maps?”
“Imaginary!” he crowed joyfully. “Not fake.”
We all glanced over at that. His essay was titled “Geography and Cartography in The Chronicles of Narnia.”
“You turned in an essay about maps in a children’s fantasy novel?” I asked, laughing.
Francis looked utterly bored with the entire conversation, and Wally looked miserable, as he always did every time it was clear someone else was about to join our friend group.
Daniel shrugged, still smiling, not at all embarrassed at how silly we clearly thought his essay was. “They’re as real as real maps. Just in a different way.”
“Well, you did get a B+,” Tam said, holding up his paper for him to see. “Not bad, considering.”
“Not bad at all, I do have to say,” Professor Johansson joined in then, offering rare praise. “A bit sloppy, but your arguments were very fresh, and very interesting.”
That got the attention of all of us. Professor Johansson was a legend in the department, the professor everyone wanted to impress, the mentor everyone wanted to have. And each one of us did end up impressing him, in the end—he read all of our papers and advised every one of our dissertations. We all grew close to him, but Daniel especially so. I didn’t know if it was because his own father had been somewhat absent growing up, or because they thought about things so differently, one a cartography traditionalist and one always pushing boundaries, but it was plain to see how much they enjoyed each other’s company. Later, it worked to our immense advantage, as well. Whatever we needed from Professor Johansson—an extension on a group project, support for a small travel grant, late admission to a conference, or, most of all, approval for our Dreamer’s Atlas idea—we just sent Daniel to beg him for permission. And we always got it.
Tam looked at the essay in her hands again and pursed her lips, intrigued. I could practically see the gears turning in her head. His ideas were clearly strange, but creative, and different from any of ours. Having him with us would only make us all smarter, better. I realized that I was already thinking the same thing, too. And Tam did like science fiction and fantasy—our dorm room bookshelf was stuffed with her cheap old paperbacks. She’d tried to foist several of her favorites on me, having already made Wally work through the entire collection years ago.
“Can I read it?” she asked him, holding up the essay.
“Sure,” Daniel said. “Want some lunch, though?”
“It’s ten thirty in the morning,” Francis objected, scandalized.
“I’m not hungry,” Wally murmured, but it was so quiet, I think I was the only one who heard him.
“I could eat,” Tam said, smiling.
By the end of that week, they were dating. So many furtive glances, and the sneaky ways they tried to sit or stand next to each other whenever we were all hanging out, so they could secretly hold hands. I don’t know who they thought they were fooling.
“I’m just concerned about our midterm project,” Wally complained to me morosely once during the early months of their relationship as we sat in the empty classroom we’d booked as a late-night study hall, waiting for the rest of the group to arrive. “She’s so distracted.”
“I know,” I agreed, even though it was a lie. Tam was never distracted about anything. I’d seen a draft of her part of the research on her desk in our room, and it was as brilliant as always. It was just that I wasn’t ready to admit that I was a little bit jealous. Tam and Daniel were both so outgoing, it would have been impossible for them to have languished in romantic angst for long—but Francis was just as awkward and nervous underneath his formal posturing as I was.
Eventually, Wally came around, of course—it was impossible to dislike Daniel, even for someone as cautious and quiet as Wally—and eventually, Francis finally worked up the courage to ask me out on a date, too. I’m convinced it’s because Daniel figured it out and told him to get off his ass before he lost his chance.
By the end of our second year, our group had become a darling among the professors. We were such an eclectic mix of minds, half of us concerned with the beauty and artistry of maps and the other half with the math and precision of them, so that every project we tackled became an electrified debate between the two philosophies, pushing all of our studies even further.