Dating is Murder by Harley Jane Kozak

short, but he was scrappy. How am I gonna be able to sleep nights, knowing about this?”
    Doc. How extraordinary. I hadn’t thought about Doc for hours.

10
    F redreeq wasn’t kidding . Worrying about me had disrupted her sleep, she said, calling at seven A.M. “Let’s shop,” she suggested.
    “I can’t,” I said. “One, I can’t afford to, and two, I have to be at SMC at nine-thirty.”
    “That’s fine. I gotta get the kids to school and, anyway, nothing opens till ten. Westside Pavilion. Eleven. Be there.”
    SMC, or Santa Monica College, was one of those places that did for me what shopping malls did for Fredreeq. When I was young and impressionable, I saw the film
Love Story
and developed a yearning not just for Ali MacGraw’s glossy black hair and pea coats but for college campuses. Circumstances like money and family issues diverted me from getting a degree in the normal fashion, but did not keep me from enrolling in classes in various odd learning institutions. Part of this was longing for a legitimacy I felt belonged to the college-educated. Part of it was that I aspired to an actual career, like a teacher, not a series of jobs I’d invented or fallen into or the kind that could be done by a really gifted chimpanzee. Mostly, though, I took classes for the thrill of being on a campus. Even at Santa Monica College. There was little ivy, the grass was patchy, and the bathrooms utterly frightening, but Friday morning as I strolled to the counseling office, I could, without too much trouble, hear piano music in my head and picture autumn leaves swirling around me.
    This semester, in lieu of an actual class, I was developing a strategy to get a degree. To that end, I’d acquired a counselor, Mr. Pinneo. Although it was our third appointment, Mr. Pinneo had not invited me to address him on a first-name basis. Probably this was a sound tactic with normal college freshmen, as Mr. Pinneo, like Dr. Theodora Zagan, looked about twenty.
    “More transcripts, Wollie?” he asked, scratching his nose ring. We were in a tiny cubicle he shared with several people.
    “Yeah.” I handed him the envelope. “I remembered an astronomy course I took eight years ago through DuMetz Community College. We met in the desert in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers. As you see, I got an A.”
    Mr. Pinneo studied the document. “I’ll run it by my supervisor. I’m not sure it meets the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum requirement for your physical science. It might. Then again, it might not. Best thing to do meanwhile is sign up for a math class. Any of those in your past you might’ve forgotten?”
    “No,” I said. “I barely took any in high school. But I’ve been studying the course-sequence chart in the catalog, in itself pretty challenging, as some course numbers go backward, meaning that Math 81 precedes Math 20—but anyway. Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Pinneo, and I hope I am, because by my calculations, I need to take Math 81 or 81T, then Math 84, then Math 31 or 31T, then Math 20 and 21 or 41 and 52, at which point I’ll be caught up with normal college juniors.”
    Mr. Pinneo took from me the weighty catalog and peered at it. “You’re right.”
    My heart sank. “And I have to take these courses one at a time, in sequence.”
    “Unless you test out.”
    “You mean the math-assessment test. I did that, remember? You have the results.”
    Mr. Pinneo shuffled through a file that was extensive, considering I had not yet registered for classes. He withdrew a sheet of paper. “Yeah. Not real good at math, are you?”
    “No. But after that test, I got a math tutor.”
    “Good. How’s that going?”
    A vision popped into my head of Annika, with her mechanical pencil, drawing for me Galileo, Newton, and Einstein as happy faces: Quantification, Gravitation, and Relativity. “It’s—it was going well,” I said. “So how long before I should take the assessment test