Free Scoop to Kill by Wendy Lyn Watson Page A

are basically sociopaths.”
    I laughed.
    “No, really,” Reggie insisted. “My first year in grad school, I had a roommate, a doctoral student over in the psych department. One night after we finished grading a stack of finals, we broke out a bottle of tequila and started bitching about our students. He showed me the definition of a sociopath in one of his textbooks. I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something about being completely self-absorbed, lacking empathy, and being willing to lie and cheat to get what you want. Pretty much sums up most college kids.”
    It seemed like it came reasonably close to summing up most of the adults I knew, too, but I kept that observation to myself. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”
    Now it was Reggie’s turn to laugh. “Not harsh, just realistic. I had a kid last year actually lie about his mother dying to get out of a midterm. That’s some serious bad karma.”
    “Sounds like he was desperate,” I said.
    He shrugged his wild, spastic shrug. “Maybe,” he conceded, “but when I called him on it, demanded to see a death certificate or an obituary or something, he just smiled. Like ‘Oh, well, I guess you caught me.’ No tears, no apologies, nothing.”
    I broke off a corner of the brownie and popped it in my mouth. “Okay, so he was kind of a sleaze. But that’s just one kid. Surely they’re not all that bad.”
    Reggie sipped his coffee, slurping noisily. “That was an extreme case,” he admitted, “but I catch them lying all the time about being sick, having their cars broken into . . . and about halfway through the semester, grandparents start dropping like flies. Some of them are good kids, but they just don’t have any perspective, you know?”
    Now that was something I understood. It had been less than a year since Brittanie Brinkman had died, and I had had to come to grips with the fact that my ex-husband’s chippie girlfriend was more immature than evil. She just lacked perspective.
    “Especially these days,” Reggie continued. “Kids today have so much structure in their lives: every minute of their day is some scheduled event or activity; they’re told exactly what they have to learn for every test; and they all know they’re going to college when they graduate high school. At least the kids who end up at Dickerson know they’re going to college. They never have to make decisions for themselves, so they never have to make good decisions, you know?”
    I fought a smile at the notion of this boy in his midtwenties complaining about “kids today.”
    “So that’s what you do? Teach them to make good decisions?”
    “Me?” Reggie leaned back in his chair. His gaze grew distant, and one corner of his mouth quirked up in something like a smile. “Hardly. At best, I teach them to write.” He made some inarticulate sound in the back of his throat.
    “So if you don’t like teaching, why are you studying to be a professor?”
    It seemed like a reasonable question to me, but Reggie snorted.
    “I’m not studying to be a professor; I’m studying to be a scholar.”
    “Oh.”
    “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Most people don’t.”
    Well, la-di-freakin’-da.
    “Most civilians,” he said with a small smile, amused at his own joke, “don’t realize that college professors teach, but that’s only a small part of the job. Most of the job involves doing research in our field, publishing in scholarly journals and writing books.”
    To be honest, I didn’t understand the world in which Reggie and Emily lived, the world into which Alice was plunging headlong, but I did know that I had no patience for this sort of pompous BS. I was itching to show this kid that I wasn’t a total bumpkin.
    “It must be tough to do all that without grant money,” I said, and smothered my smile of triumph over the look of surprise on his face.
    “How did you . . . ?”
    “I guess I pay attention pretty well for a civilian,” I said.