Page 18 of Love and Other Paradoxes

He stared. “What are you doing with Hamish and Clive?”

“Celebrating,” said Rob with a grin. “These two just helped me foil an attempted assassination.”

“How?”

“Stunned him with the Highland cow and then ran him over with the bus.”

“Great. Congratulations.” He looked back, reconfiguring his impression of the man on the stairs. “So that was your nemesis?”

Rob snorted. “You think I could get Darcy with a basic combo like that? No. Next time we meet on the battlefield, I’m going to have to whip out something truly unprecedented.” He threw Hamish and Clive at Joe, who completely failed to catch them. “How about you? Did you submit to that poetry thing I told you about?”

“Aye, I did.” He went on into his bedroom.

Rob followed him expectantly. “And?”

He let himself smile. “I got in.”

Rob’s face lit up. “Nice one, Greeney! So who did you write a poem about?”

“Oh. Uh—just this girl.”

“‘Just this girl,’” Rob proclaimed, hand on his heart. “There’s the competition-winning eloquence I’d expect from our future poet laureate.” He went to sit on Joe’s bed. “Does ‘this girl’ have a name? Or does her perfection defy our mortal labels?”

Joe smiled dreamily as he sat down to check his email. “Her name’s Diana.” There were no further communications from Love Poems for Tomorrow, but there was one from Dr. Lewis, his Director of Studies. The subject line was a question mark. The body of the email was empty. “Why is Dr. Lewis sending me blank emails?”

Rob looked over Joe’s shoulder. “Maybe she’s wondering why you’re not at your supervision.”

“What?” His heart skipped. He checked his watch, cross-referencing against his crumpled mental timetable. Rob was right: he had been supposed to meet Dr. Lewis forty-five minutes ago.

He leapt up from the desk, banging his knee. “Fuck! How do you know my schedule better than me?”

Rob watched him scramble to gather the neglected philosophy books from the windowsill. “I’m an Assassin. It’s my job to know everyone’s schedule.”

“Assassin’s not a job,” he retorted, running for the door.

“Neither is poet!” Rob shouted after him.

He thundered down the steps, then ran through to the next court and up another flight of stairs to arrive panting by the door markedDr. J. Lewis.

“Don’t waste more time knocking,” a resonant voice said from within. “You’re already late.”

He stepped inside. Dr. Lewis’s rooms were like an eccentric,disorganised museum: from her collection of replica Benin Bronzes, staring regally down from sixteenth-century West Africa, to her sousaphone, which she played in a jazz band on the weekends, to the bust of Wittgenstein with a suction cup dart affixed to one side of his face. In a throne-like armchair sat his supervisor, her usual brightly patterned dress contrasting with an expression of steely disappointment. “What happened?”

His insides cramped with guilt. Dr. Lewis knew better than him what it was like to come to Cambridge from a nontraditional background, and it meant she was usually willing to cut him some slack. But today, it looked like her patience had run out. He fumbled for an excuse.I was having coffee with a time traveller, while valid, would pose more questions than it answered. A fragment of his conversation with Esi came back to him, along with a vivid image of her face.We can’t change it.“Determinism.”

Dr. Lewis pushed back her salt-and-pepper locks. “That’s your excuse for missing our appointment? Determinism?”

He nodded.

She took off her glasses. “Aristotle save me,” she murmured. When she looked up, her eyes were bright with anger. “You know what my problem with this place is? Well, one of my many problems. Students who think they have the right to waste my time. Worse, the ones who try to look clever while doing it.”

He panicked. “No,” he blurted out, “it’s not an excuse. I—I saw something that proved to me that the future is already written.”

She sat back, like she was taking what he said at face value. “Okay. And, what, that means you were predestined to be late today? You had no control over your actions, so you can just chalk it up to fate?”

He squinted, sensing he was walking into a trap. “Yes?”

“No. This is typical of you, Joe. You have a tendency to make leaps of logic that aren’t justified by the evidence.” She cleared her throat. He recognised the signal that his line of thought was about to be vivisected. “Imagine you know your future.”

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