Free Please Don't Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos Page B

before I started the lifeguard job, I'd driven to Ann Arbor to meet with somebody in the admissions office. Her name was Janice and she seemed to be about my age. She was dressed in a Michigan T-shirt and a khaki skirt, and had short blond hair cut into a bob. She kept tucking her hair behind her left ear as she talked. She spoke very fast and her legs were very tan. I wondered how she got so tan in that little cubicle. She had just graduated from Michigan herself, and recommended the school highly. I had expected somebody older, somebody in a smart business suit, behind a big desk in a plush office, but Janice was sitting in a small cubicle at a desk piled high with manila folders. For some reason, the casualness of the office made me more nervous than ever. I was wearing my only suit, despite the heat. Janice kept referring to me as a nontraditional student. She assured me that the university could accommodate my needs.
    "What do you mean by nontraditional?" I asked.
    "Well, you know," she said, "somebody who isn't coming to us straight from high school, somebody whose educational career may have a few gaps. A 'returning student,' we sometimes call them."
    "Right," I said. "My grades are pretty strong. There's a C on there from my first semester, but that's because my film class was not exactly fairly graded."
    "Will you plan to live on campus?" she asked.
    I hadn't really thought of it. Maple Rock was less than an hour away, and I figured I couldn't afford to get my own place. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what Janice wanted me to say.
    "Sure," I said.
    Janice put together a neat little packet for me and slid it into a shiny blue folder embossed with a golden block M.
    "This packet has everything you need to get started," she said. "And my business card is in there. Feel free to e-mail me if you need anything."
    "Right," I said. I didn't have an e-mail address, but I knew that was something I should keep to myself.
    "I have a good friend who goes here," I said. "Sonya Stecko."
    "I can't say that I know her," she said. "But there are more than forty-thousand students at Michigan."
    "Right," I said.
    "You do know that we also have a satellite campus in Dearborn?" Janice said. "It's closer to your house. And it also is a little less overwhelming than this place. It's huge here."
    "Right," I said.
    As I was packing up my backpack, Janice said, "What do you think your concentration will be, Michael?"
    "Concentration?" I said. "I think it will be pretty good. I concentrate pretty well."
    "No," she said. "That's what we call a major here—a concentration."
    "Right," I said. "Philosophy."
    "Oh," she said. "Wow. I sub-concentrated in philosophy. Who is your favorite?"
    She was killing me.
    "Um, I like most of them. It's hard to have a favorite," I said. My mind was blank. I couldn't think of one major philosopher. Finally, I managed to croak out the name Marx.
    "Fabulous!" she said.
    I pretty much ran out of there to avoid more conversation.
    "Best of luck," Janice called after me. "I'll be rooting for you. And remember, we offer campus tours every Wednesday at noon."
    I'd noticed, in recent months, a tendency for people to root for me. I wasn't exactly sure if this was because I was somehow charming and endearing or that I had a wimpy patheticness that encouraged people to cheer me on, like some wheezing last place finisher in a marathon.
    The reason I had told Janice that I was interested in majoring in philosophy was because that summer I was taking something called Introduction to the Great Philosophers, which was taught by a friend of Father Mack's.
    Father Mack was an old high-school friend of my mother's, and he'd been transferred back to a parish just outside Detroit. He came over a lot on Saturdays to do things around the house or take my mother out for pie and coffee. He was the kind of guy who had trouble hearing the word
no
. If he came over and offered to cook us hamburgers or replace the bathroom sink,