While the drama of Damon and Nan was going on, a very similar drama was happeningâwith, of all people, Brad as its focus, along with a girl named Sylvia Townsend.
Sylvia, a junior like Brad and Damon, was a native of Pennsylvania. She frankly admitted to herself that she had come to this relatively little-known school because she thought it would be easier to get a degree here than if she had gone to some of the more prestigious colleges she had applied to (and gotten accepted by). She was something of a party girl and wanted to spend as little time holed up in the library or in her dorm room hitting the books as she could get away with.
Sylvia was of medium height (about five foot six), and no one could call her slender as a reed; but without in any way being heavy, she had plenty of fleshy curves in all the right places, and she knew how to dress in a way that was unmistakably attractive to the male gaze. Since high school she had had plenty of up-close-and-personal involvements with boys and men, and she had enjoyed them all; but she was a tad impatient, and got bored easily when the men she was intimate with failed to measure up to her standards of intelligence, cleverness, physical attributes, and other qualities she required in someone to whom she allowed access to her abundant assets.
Her plan worked pretty well: she sailed through most of her classes, and her natural gift for languages led her to major in comparative literature. But she was now facing an irritating obstacle. Westminster required a full year of science (and not any of the "soft" sciences, like economics or anthropology) for graduation. During the first semester of freshman year she had taken an "Environmental Science" class that seemed right up her alley: it was easy, but it was also boring, and she had neglected to take the second part of the class the next semester. Now, as a lofty junior, the idea of falling back into the company of callow freshmen and sophomores was repugnant to her, and so she had enrolled in an Intermediate Organic Chemistry course that she thought she could fake her way through.
But she couldn't.
The professor, a dour and fussy man named Albert Conant, seemed to assume all sorts of knowledge of chemistry that Sylvia simply didn't have. For the first few weeks she had managed to get by, but she soon realized that she was heading for disaster. Either she would have to drop the course (and somehow enroll in another one that was already well underway), or she would have to find someone to give her a crash course in some aspects of chemistry that she didn't know, so that she might be able to keep up.
And that's how she latched on to Brad Young.
She had recognized him from his exploits on the ball field; and while she had admired his physiqueâand found his broad shoulders, barrel chest, and honest face more than a little appealing when she was gazing at him in classâshe had initially passed him off as just a "jock" who was probably dumber than her at this particular subject. But to her amazement she saw that, although he seemed a little on the shy side, he spoke up frequently in class and answered the prof's questions in an easy and strangely modest manner that floored her.
Whatever his intellectual deficiencies elsewhere, this guy knew chemistry.
And so, when it was time for the class members to pair up into lab partners, she had all but lunged at him, seizing his arm and saying, "Say, Brad, let me be your lab partner!" (It didn't hurt, as she knew, that she was pressing her breasts into his arm as she pleaded with him.)
He peered down at her with something approaching alarm. He had hardly spoken two words with her, and this sudden approach by a notably attractive female took him aback.
"Um, yeah, okay," he said in a daze.
"Great!" she cried. "You might have to give me some private tutoring." She let the
double entendre
sink in as she intended.
"Wh-what do you mean?" he blundered.
"Oh, Brad, you must know that I'm floundering in this class. I think it may be a little beyond me. But youâGod, you already seem to know everything the teacher is talking about!"
"Not really," he said, looking away from her and blushing. "It's justâwell, I've been doing chemistry since I was a kid. My mom got me a chemistry set when I was eight years old."
"Yeah?" she said with a broad smile. "Well, good for your mom! I'll have to thank her sometime."
So they headed for the lab. The initial experiments were easy enough, although even here Sylvia had to pump Brad into explaining exactly what was going on, since she was clueless how some of the chemicals reacted with each otherâor, rather,
why
they reacted that way. It was all Greek to her. But, a week or so later, there came a time when they were mixing chemicals and Sylvia inadvertently poured a large amount of something into a beaker containing some other substance, and an immense cascade of foam flowed out of the beaker.
Brad's eyes widened with alarm. He shoved Sylvia out of the way, grabbed a small towel, and mopped up the bubbling fluid before it had a chance to drip down to the floor.
"Oh, God!" Sylvia exclaimed. "I'm so sorry!"
"It's okay," Brad said, trying to remain calm. "But that stuff is kinda dangerous if you get it on your skin or clothes."
"I'm so
stupid!"
she cried. "I don't know anything!"
Brad's response to this spasm of self-abasement was curious.
A dark look came over his face. Without warning he grabbed Sylvia by her shoulders and almost shook her, the way a cat shakes a mouse it is holding in its mouth.
"Don't you
ever
say that about yourself!" he said in an intense, almost hostile whisper. "You're really, really smartâI can tell. It's justâjust that you need some help in this one subject. You're not to blame for that."
She peered at him in amazement, and a little bit of fear. This gentle bear of a man wasn't, perhaps, quite as gentle as she had thought. But his words really touched her heart.
"You're really nice, Brad," she said softly. "But, um, can you let go of me? You're squeezing me a little too hard."
In horror Brad immediately released her, and she massaged her sore arms with some quick strokes of her hands.
"Omigod, I'm sorry!" he said, wincing as if he was the one in pain. "I didn't mean it!"
"It's okay," she said, smiling bravely. "I guess you don't know your own strength."
Brad hung his head in misery. And when Sylvia tentatively reached out to take his chin in her hand, she could have sworn his eyes were filling with tears. That shook her to the core.
Men don't cry over something like this, do they?
"You're a sweet, sweet man," she said, and bent forward to kiss him.
The kiss lasted a long timeâmaybe half a minute. It was a soft, gentle kiss, and strangely chaste in its way; but both Brad and Sylvia got a good dose of the other's body-scent, and both of their hearts beat a little faster.
When Sylvia pulled away, she saw that Brad's face was almost beet-red.
Oh, God,