Sisterchicks Go Brit! by Robin Jones Gunn Page A

deserted beach. Everything about the atmosphere in that used bookshop made me want to be smart. It felt as if millions of particles of knowledge were swirling around in the air. If I stood there long enough, some of them might land on me, sink inside, and enliven my brain cells.
    “I want to learn something,” I whispered, coming up next to Kellie.
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know. Something new. Something in the field of botany or Russian history or astrophysics. Well, maybe not astrophysics.”
    She smiled.
    “Doesn’t this place make you feel like a student? It makes me feel like I should engage my thoughts in something new and profound.”
    “I felt that way yesterday when we popped our heads into the Rabbit Room at the Eagle and Child. I hoped maybe I could catch some of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s leftover imagination particles,” Kellie said.
    I saw she had a book in her hand. “What are you buying?”
    She held up the cover so I could see her find. It was a well-used copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
. “For Braden,” she said. “He’ll love that the book came from Oxford. What about you?”
    “Just a few treasures.” I showed her my four books: Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre
in a 1947 hardback edition, and Sir Walter Scott’s lengthy poem
The Lady of the Lake
in a pocket-sized version.
    “Nice assortment,” she said. “All your British authors.”
    “Yes. Well, Scott was from Scotland, but the rest were from England.”
    With our treasures paid for and wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with a string by the clerk, Kellie and I stepped back outside into the chilly sunshine. Kellie had also purchased a map of Oxford, which she already had opened.
    “Where to now?” I asked.
    “I was trying to find Exeter College. That’s where Tolkien taught, if I remember what the cab driver said. It looks like it’s this way.” She pointed to the left.
    “Are you sure, Lady Ebb?”
    She gave me a smirk. “Would you rather take a taxi?”
    “I don’t think we can afford to take another taxi the rest of the trip after what yesterday’s gallivanting cost us.”
    “Then let’s walk. It will warm us up on this invigorating day.” Kellie picked up the pace. “Have you ever felt the air this crisp on your face at home?”
    “No, never. I love it. I just wish I had bought a warmer coat.” I noticed we were no longer strolling. We were women on a mission. Kellie took us around a bend, down an alleyway, and out onto a wide street with lots of cars and buses and an intersection with traffic stopped in both directions. It was by far the widest street we had seen in Oxford. The traffic light didn’t appear to be working. All the vehicles were taking their turns at hedging their way across the no man’s land in the middle.
    “We have to be getting close.” Kellie huffed and puffed as our power walk continued past more bookshops, woolen clothing stores, and a coffee shop alive with morning coffee drinkers and atable set up outside on the narrow sidewalk. Most of the shop’s patrons looked like they were college age.
    More students brushed past us. I smiled, imagining that some of the learning they had been stuffing into their brains might be leaking out and was therefore ready to light on the nearest head—mine!
    We turned a corner, and a large number of students were funneling into a small opening in a tall stone wall.
    “I think this is it,” Kellie said.
    “Should we follow them?”
    “What? Pretend we’re students?”
    “Why not? We can go back to pretending we’re Lady Ebb and Lady Flo, if you want.”
    With chins forward, we entered the stream of students passing through the creamy-colored, block-wall entry and into the courtyard. No one stopped us as we walked through the entrance. The sensation of sneaking in was delicious.

I nside, behind the high wall surrounding