The Owl & Moon Cafe: A Novel (No Series) Read Online Free PDF

vis-à-vis…”
    Vis-à-vis. In relation to, face-to-face, concerning, Lindsay thought. What a great term. She would try to use it in her lab notebook. If she ever got a B from Dr. Ritchie, she would throw herself off the Bixby Bridge.
    “—our national epidemic of drug abuse,” Dr. Ritchie finished. “Now, I want to be sure that you girls comprehend what I’m saying. If we were to study drug abuse properly, to take Country Day’s holistic, interdisciplinary approach, it would quickly become obvious that there is more to the issue than mere science. As such, this would make a far too complex topic for your upcoming science projects, particularly within our short time frame. Let’s brainstorm….”
    The room was warm, and Lindsay, having fallen asleep in the nurse’s office, had awakened too late to get her lunch from her locker. She yawned, and let her mind wander, picturing a terrible storm with a blue-black sky and jagged yellow lightning moving through the lobes of her brain. Instead of rain, prize-worthy Science Fair ideas hailed down into her cluster diagram, a way of arranging your ideas nonlinearly, which Lindsay had learned in her second year at Country Day. Clusters weeded out the bad ideas, until all that remained was the best choice.
    Last year, when Sally took the blue ribbon, Lindsay wondered where she’d gone wrong with “The Human Genome Project and Future Implications.”
    “Yours is nice, honey, but it lacks ‘the wow factor,’ ” Gammy Bess had said. “Just look at the cookies we sell at the café. People always reach for the one with the most chips first.”
    Sally’s project was so great Lindsay couldn’t find a single fault with it. “The Effects of Soil Rotation on Salinas County’s Agribusiness.” Since the migrant workers had struck, Sally even had a video loop of interviews in Spanish that she had translated herself.
    Allegra had sniffed at it, saying, “Whatever happened to growing tomato plants to music?” and they went out for ice cream to soften the blow. Lindsay’s mother had been teaching that night, so she missed it.
    Lindsay clicked the lead mechanism on her mechanical pencil. She wondered whether her mother would be home that night, or stuck in faculty meetings she said she hated but Lindsay bet she secretly liked. Otherwise, why not get a job that allowed you to come home at the same time every night and read a book, or watch NOVA ? Sometimes she pretended Dr. Ritchie was her mom. They both ate red licorice and drank Diet Coke first thing in the morning, but somehow Lindsay could tell that Dr. Ritchie’s life was more interesting.
    Lindsay imagined her peeling out of the parking lot on her orange moped, headed toward something better than teaching, like a boyfriend. Dr. Ritchie’s boyfriend would look just like Carl Sagan, smart, kind of thin, and with a craggy face that was always smiling. He would have a cat named Stephen Hawking, or a big yellow dog named Marie Curie. They would stay up all night doing experiments. Lindsay wondered if they would have sex.
    She knew all about sex, and it worried her. Sex sounded like a very tricky thing. First off, the diseases you might get could kill you. Just look at what was happening in Africa. Then there were accidents that resulted in pregnancy, and the pro-choice or pro-life question. Lindsay was pretty sure her mom had only had sex that one time, because she’d gotten pregnant with Lindsay when she was twenty-one years old, and as soon as Lindsay’s father found out, he left to take a job in another state. She knew his name: Professor Ephraim Cantor. He didn’t write or visit, send money or call. Her mom said that was fine with her; he didn’t know what he was missing, so poop on him. Every once in a while Lindsay wanted to write him a letter, and maybe send him her school picture, but Gammy Bess always talked her out of it, saying “Let lying dogs sleep and you won’t get bitten.”
    It wasn’t like Lindsay missed