Mooching over, I grabbed the nearest book and curled up, waiting for knowledge to miraculously osmote from page to brain. Because that was totally how it worked.
Nik stirred in his duvet cocoon. “How’s it going?”
“Terrible.”
“What have you got to worry about? It’s English lit.”
He wasn’t actually being mean. My course had a reputation for being easy—probably deservedly, since the earliest lectures started at eleven and, while they weren’t presented as optional, hardly anyone went to them anyway.
“Yes, but how am I supposed to revise every book written in English from 650 to the present day. That’s”—my voice went a bit shrill—“not reasonable.”
“Can’t you prioritize the important ones or something?”
“Do I look like Harold Bloom?”
“I’d be able to tell you if I knew who that was.”
I could have explained The Western Canon, but nobody deserved that. And Nik, whose full name was Niklaus Johannsson-Carrington, was my best and oldest friend. We’d been on the same staircase in my first year and stuck together ever since, despite having nothing in common (except maybe the time he’d been drunk enough to let me wank him off).
He was reading Materials, whatever that meant, and constantly getting internships at MIT. He was also captain of the first VIII (which I thought was a rowing thing), played football for the men’s seconds, and had recently returned from Uganda, where he’d been part of a team that was repairing a health center. All of which made him the perfect person to do fund-raising telethons…except for the temporarily-sounding-like-Emperor-Palpatine thing. That would have probably been pretty off-putting.
“In Stephen Fry’s autobiography—” I began.
“Which one? The man’s written more autobiographies than you’ve written essays.”
I mimed being stabbed through the heart. “Impugned! But he said he did well at Cambridge by memorizing a set of first-quality essays and then shoehorning them into whatever question happened to be on the paper.”
Nik nodded. “Sounds like a good plan.”
“With one minor drawback.”
“What?”
“I haven’t written any first-quality essays.” They were mostly seconds and upper seconds, and one returned to sender because it was about Finnegans Wake, and I’d written it stoned at half four in the morning when the book had taken on this terrible clarity and I’d been briefly convinced that maybe I was brilliant after all.
“You can still memorize what you’ve got.”
“Except they’re so banal and half-arsed it hardly seems worth it.” I sighed. “I swear to God, I found one that opened ‘Bleak House, the Victorian novel by the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens’…Oh my God, I’ve wasted three years of my life.”
“You haven’t wasted them,” Nik said consolingly. “You just haven’t done any work in them.”
I made sad otter noises.
“Seriously, it’ll be fine. Worst-case scenario is you get a two-two.”
“Worst-case scenario is I fail or get a third.”
“And imagine how glamorous that’ll be.”
“I won’t look like a loser?”
“No, you’ll look like a misunderstood genius.”
Nik’s voice was getting even more sinister and whispery. Great, I was essentially making a sick person comfort me. “Maybe you shouldn’t be talking. Does it hurt?”
“No, but it’s weird as hell. It’s like my voice has just disappeared.”
I offered a sheepish smile by way of apology for being self-absorbed. “Did you make a dodgy deal with a sea witch? Don’t you know, you’ve gotta kiss de girl.”
