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over after dinner. I'll write him back now, and maybe he'll answer by then.
    Lina wanted to be alone for now so she could compose her first answer carefully. She didn't want to get caught in any traps she couldn't write her way out of.
You are Larissa,
she told herself. She grabbed a silk scarf from her dresser to put herself in a glamorous mood.
You are twenty-two. You're super-smart but not show-offy about it. You're beautiful but nice. You are perfect. You're Dan's dream girl.
    Dear Beau,
    May I call you that, for short? Beauregard sounds so stuffy.
    No, delete that last sentence,
she decided. She didn't want to insult him in the first paragraph. She changed it to:
    Beauregard takes so long to type. I was pleased to receive your e-mail.
    Now what? Answer his questions. But how? She needed to do a little research. She went online and Googled “Jarmusch” to find out who that was. Jim Jarmusch, a seminal independent filmmaker who started out in the 1980s. First major film,
Stranger Than Paradise.
Often works in black-and-white. That was enough info to start with. Now, where was she studying?
    She found a film department at Berkeley, so that was a possibility…Santa Cruz was too far away…Aha. San Francisco State had a grad program. Perfect. She knew the city fairly well, since Carlton Bay was only an hour north of it. And her father, a banker, went to work there every day. Now back to her e-mail.
    Dear Beau,
    May I call you that, for short? Beauregard takes so long to type. I was pleased to receive your e-mail. I have a few free moments to write you back before I'm off to a cafe to read up on film theory. I'm studying for my masters degree at San Francisco State. The film department here is so intellectual. We watch black-and-white movies all the time. I guess you must have seen
Stranger Than Paradise,
if you like Jarmusch. I love black-and-white movies, too. Of course, Quentin Tarantino usually works in color but I like his movies as well. Actually, I guess most movies are in color these days. It's hard to find a good one in black and white.
    So anyway, I grew up in the Bay Area, and that's about it. Please write back soon—I'd love to read more about your life. What is the school where you work like? Do you have any favorite students?
    —Larissa
    Hello Larissa,
    Feel free to call me Beau. Can I call you Lara for short? Like the heroine of
Doctor Zhivago.
Now there's a good movie, and in color, too.
    (Your e-mail was so funny! “I guess most movies are in color.” I'm glad you have a sense of humor. All my favorite people do.)
    Let's see, you asked about the school where I teach. Well, it's an interesting place. It's a public high school, pretty progressive. Or, as the principal says, it's an “assessment-driven, cross-curricular, inquiry-centered school designed to maximize the students’ competencies as impactfully as possible.” My friend Camille and I call him Rod, because he's got such a stick up his butt. Not to his face, of course. We want to keep our jobs, at least for now.
    Anyway, it's supposed to be a magnet school for the smart kids in the area, but this is a fairly ritzy town, and all the parents think their kids are geniuses. So they prep them for the test to get into the magnet school and a lot of them get in. But most of them are far from geniuses, trust me. I do like some students better than others, but I try not to let it show.
    The teachers are a mixed lot. There's this one poor old geometry teacher named Mildred. She's got a glass eye, she's overweight, and she's getting up there in years—she's got to be close to sixty. The kids call her “Mildew” and “Sleep-Eez” behind her back, but she's actually a nice lady. The art teacher is this odd, super-skinny guy with a long mustache. He's hung over almost every morning and he smokes like a chimney, but he's good for a laugh. He's been at the school for twenty years. At times the bitterness shows. God, I think I'd shoot myself if had to