Free Campus Tramp by Lawrence Block Page B

& P —you know, Editor and Publisher —and there are jobs all over the damned place.”
    But when she would try to get him to talk about a newspaper job he would shift the subject.
    “Hell, who wants to write news-copy for a lifetime? Boring goddamned job, Linda. Maybe I’ll try free-lancing or something. Or publishing work—go to New York and hunt up some kind of editorial assistant work. That might not be bad.”
    What it boiled down to, she knew, was that Don didn’t want to do much of anything. He refused to make plans for the future and he refused to worry about it, and this attitude didn’t make her any too happy.
    For one thing, she had a feeling that whatever plans Don had didn’t include her. Time and time again she told him how much she loved him, and although he didn’t exactly dodge the issue she knew that he had never told her that he was in love with her. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, but he didn’t say anything to her one way or the other.
    It wasn’t hard for her to tell that he meant more to her than she meant to him. She tried to tell herself that this was natural—that she had never had a lover before while Don had had many women. But she couldn’t help feeling there was more to it than that.
    And it scared her. If anything happened between the two of them, if suddenly he didn’t want her any more, she didn’t know what she would do. He was her whole life—nothing else mattered to her, and not only didn’t she see how she could live without him but she had trouble remembering how she had managed to live before the two of them were together. She couldn’t imagine sleeping without him sleeping at her side, couldn’t imagine living through an entire day without seeing him and talking to him. And she knew that this was dangerous.
    But she worried less and less as time went by. She would live with him and love him, and in time he would come to need her as much as she needed him. She loved Don Gibbs and she was determined to wind up married to him.
    But there was plenty of time for that.
    For the time being she would wait. She would have him at the Record office, at the Landmine, and in bed. She would spend every minute with him.
    And, eventually, she would marry him. She was sure of it.

CHAPTER SIX
    THERE WERE TIMES WHEN LINDA hardly realized that she was going to college.
    This was primarily due to the fact that she was hardly going to college. While she hadn’t stopped going to classes, the ones she attended were few and far between. She went whenever there was a test, after having stayed awake all night before the test cramming her mind full of the stuff she was supposed to have learned already. It was tough at first, cramming like mad all night and then staying awake the next day for the test. But she found a way to do it—coffee at first, to jolt her mind into an awake much coffee.
    Then there was dexedrine. You just took one little pill and you were awake for hours—not high, but very definitely awake with no trouble at all, your mind keen and your body in fine shape. Of course she didn’t want to make a habit of dexedrine, but taking it once a week or so couldn’t hurt, and it certainly did make it easier to keep her eyes open and her mind on what she was doing.
    The combination of cramming and dexedrine kept her up to par in her courses for the next two months. But she knew inside that she wasn’t getting all she should be getting out of her courses. She was missing the lectures, and what reading she was doing was confined to the more essential material. Reading somebody else’s lecture notes and skipping over the underlined material in somebody else’s textbook wasn’t any way to get an education. It might get her through exams but that was about all it would do for her.
    Well, what did it matter? She didn’t much care about an education, and what Don was teaching her was a good deal more along the line of what she was anxious to learn. She knew that she was developing