She rolls her eyes. “Please. You wouldn’t help me if I crawled on my knees and begged.”
A wave of students rushes past them. He smirks. “Try it and find out.”
She shoulders past him with a grunt. “I’ll save my breath.”
The next day, she arrives at Professor Olivier’s class before Cassius, and there’s a paper face down on his side of their desk. She glancesover her shoulder and around the room before sneaking a peek at what he’s working on.
Claudia, Claudia, ever naughtier. I knew you couldn’t resist the temptation to read this. Your obsession knows no bounds.
She groans. His attentiveness is ruining her plan. When she first decided to model her studies after him, she never expected him to take any notice. He refuses to look at her in class. He doesn’t speak to her in the Treaty. He shoulders her in the hallways as if he truly can’t see her when she’s standing right in front of him. Why is she snagging his eye now? And how can she use that to her advantage?
Dipping her quill into their inkwell, she writes below:
It’s not an obsession, MacLeod. It’s a rivalry.
He laughs when he sits down and reads it, but they don’t speak.
The next day, another note is waiting on her desk.
You will never win in a rivalry with me, but I’ll enjoy watching you try.
She writes back:
Doubt me all you want. I perform best when I have something to prove.
In the middle of Olivier’s lecture, he writes back:
Well, lucky you; you have yet to prove anything.
Seething while he snickers next to her, she responds:
I’ve proven that I can distract you. Right now, you’re not paying attention to the lecture. You’re not thinking about anything but me.
Olivier confiscates Cassius’s response, so Claudia has no idea what he said. She gives herself permission to pretend she got the last word. This is the first of hopefully many victories.
The more Claudia studies, the more confident she becomes in class. She’s raising her hand, answering questions, and loudly questioning answers from others—especially anything Cassius says.
It doesn’t always work out well. For instance, earlier today, Cassius said that Plato’s theory of the souls was “worth deliberation.”
“Plato says deliberation is guesswork,” Claudia fired back.
“He certainly does not.”
A jolt of excitement ran through her body. She was right and she knew it, and there’s nothing more exciting than starting an argument you know you’ll win. “Yes, he does.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Yes,” she hissed. “He does.” She pulled out her book of Plato’s dialogues and flipped to theSisyphus, which she’d annotated. “Right here, Plato writes—”
Cassius didn’t even look. “No, he does not.”
She was about to throw the book at his head. “It’s literally right here in my hand! I’ve underlined it and everything!”
“I’m not negating the object in your hand. I’m negating your assertion of Plato’s authorship. Yes, the dialogue exists. Yes, in the dialogue, Socrates and Sisyphus, king of Corinth, discuss what little control humans have over fate, and how our deliberations cannot change what must come to pass. But—” He takes the book from her hand and flips to the useless pages in the beginning. (An Introductionin nonfiction is just an opportunity for an author toposture, and Claudia always skips it, along with any prologues in fiction. Just get to the damn point, right?) Cassius continues with, “It’s since been proven that Plato did not actually write the dialogue, and you would know that if you took the time to read the foreword and new introduction, but clearly, you thought yourself bright enough to skip crucial content of the work.”
Claudia snatched the book from his hands and read the line he pointed to.
While we elected to include theSisyphusin this collection, it is widely known that it was, in fact, authored by one of Plato’s pupils, and it was not—
