“Whoa,” I said to an indulgent Samantha, after I finally found his junior-year mug shot (she hadn’t expected Dylan Gellner’s 1450 and dating history to be worthy of an entire afternoon’s discussion). “He looks like he just got home from his bar mitzvah, and like his mom lays out his clothes in the morning while he reads Dostoevsky for fun, or whatever.” What I conveniently left out was my recognition of Dylan Gellner’s rather arresting eyes: large, obstinate, and startlingly deep ebony. Amid the blank (often stoned) gazes of our classmates, Dylan Gellner’s peepers betrayed a serious something that my teenage self did not yet understand but could not stop thinking about.

“What do you care?” asked Samantha, twisting her perfectly straight cocoa-brown hair into a quick bun and dipping a pita into some tzatziki. “You have a boyfriend. A nice one.” This was true. His name was Travis; he was a head taller than me and perpetually shiny (but I say that in a sort of affectionate way). He had a disconcerting habit of sticking his butt out about three feet when he hugged anyone, and he was indeed very nice. He was a hip-hop superfan and computer enthusiast who got in early decision to MIT. What I was too classy to tell Samantha was that Travis’s primary usefulness to me (and mine to him) was for the drawn-out but eventually successful dispatching of virginity. Still, she was right. I had a boyfriend, and I was busy with all sorts of shit, such as being captain of my noncompetitive jazz dance squad, working as managing editor of the school paper, and applying to liberal arts colleges that, like me, were too iconoclastic to care much about such conformist trifles as SAT scores. I promptly resumed ignoring Dylan Gellner and his 1450 and his weird, penetrating stare. Until he stole my seat in AP Civics.

Advanced Placement Civics, with Mr. Rasmussen, was widely known in South Eugene High School as the easiest of all the APs (if not the easiest of all classes, period).

“I am seven months away from my pension,” Rasmussen would remind us fairly regularly, with the subtext being that he no longer gave a single flying fuck about whether or not we actually understood what “social cleavage” was, or whether we got high in the parking lot before class and giggled about “cleavage” for fifty-five minutes. All you had to do to ensure an A in AP Civics was bring Mr. Rasmussen a cup of coffee now and then. Sure, technically there was no food or beverage allowed in the halls or classrooms of South Eugene High School. And yet, if one wanted to get out of even AP Civics’s most basic “discussion” of American government and jurisprudence, one could get a sort of Rasmussenian papal dispensation to go off-campus and get a giant cup of Joe, to be shuttled brazenly through the proctored halls (“It’s for Rasmussen!”) and directly into the classroom, where college-bound twelfth-graders would be finishing a ten-minute “silent period of contemplation” (i.e., naptime). If you wanted to go ahead and take the AP exam at the end of the year for fun, you had Mr. Rasmussen’s sincere blessing, but if you thought anything that transpired in that room in the preceding nine months would earn you college credit, you were gravely mistaken.

Unsurprisingly, there were no assigned seats in AP Civics. (“Sit wherever you please. Don’t even come to class if you don’t want to; don’t do me any favors.”) Still, as has been true through the ages and will be for time immemorial, in the first week or so of school, students claim “their seats” and remain more or less tethered to them for as long as the class is in session. (It’s like it’s their blankie, a security object that protects them from the cliques and the multiple-choice tests and the permanent processed-meat smell of the hallway.) So you can imagine my outrage when one day I tromped into AP Civics wearing my finest outfit (a Guatemalan-print vest, polar-fleece sweatpants, and Tevas), only to find Dylan Gellner’s keister parked in my seat. Thus the first words I ever spoke to the first person with whom I ever fell in love were “Hey, that’s my seat,” and the first word he spoke back to me was “Tough.” As he said it, he smiled a little, and those odd eyes of his flashed at me, and I had the means, motive, and opportunity to give him a good staredown in person for the first time ever. Dylan Gellner had matured considerably since his junior-year picture, and now, to my annoyance, possessed a chiseled jaw and five o’clock shadow that matched his shock of endlessly thick, jet-black hair, which in turn matched those goddamned eyes.

Hmmm. Mr. 1450 was cute—and it appeared, in a sort of fifth-grade kind of way, flirting with me. Being now in possession of a real-live sexually active relationship, I was an undisputed expert in courtship rituals, and the correct response in this delicate situation was to turn on one heel, huff to the other side of the room, and refuse to speak to or acknowledge Dylan Gellner again—until radical politics turned everything tits-up, as it has been known to do.

It was mid-February, and, according to Mr. Rasmussen, the perfect time for the students of AP Civics to learn how Our Democracy worked. And what better and more accurate way to do this than immediately bifurcate the class down acrimonious party lines? Two-thirds of us were gazing out the windows—placed just above student-head-level so that we could see outside only if we craned our necks—at the blue sky, anathema for Oregon that time of year. Ah, to be anywhere but a twelfth-grade civics classroom; to be sitting at the outdoor tables of a coffee shop, nursing the same small cup for four hours as we read the personals in the free Eugene Weekly. (“Solipsist seeks solipsist for rubdowns, astral projection, light anal play. No fatties.”)

My friend Lisa—Travis’s friend, actually (the girlfriend of Travis’s friend, technically), who was far better-looking and more popular than I was, with supple muscular legs, pillowy lips, and what I would later learn to term “bedroom eyes”—had just passed me a note, proclaiming her desire to spend the weekend watching Monty Python movies and smoking weed.

“Rebecca,” said Rasmussen, midway through a halfhearted sentence about the correct process for ratifying a party platform. “Is that a note? Jesus tap-dancing Christ.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rasmussen,” I said. “We were just comparing the difference between simple anarchy and anarcho-syndicalist communes.” (Technically not completely false.) I shoved the note in my pocket. I thought I heard an impatient snort from the back of the classroom, somewhere near Dylan-Gellner-o’clock. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

Rasmussen put both his hands on my desk and leaned down so that I could smell how recently he’d enjoyed his last cup of coffee (not very; possibly the source of his sour mood). “Rebecca?” he said. “I don’t care.” He returned to the front of the room and picked up a stack of Scantron forms.

“Here,” he said to the whole class. “Fill out these questionnaires about your political beliefs. I don’t care if you’re honest or not. Just do it.” This clearly had the added benefit of cutting into about thirty more minutes of teaching time, during which Rasmussen would be able to daydream about cigars.

“What are these for?” asked Jacob, who sat next to me. He was a smart-ass I’d befriended in trig sophomore year when he antagonized our teacher so cleverly that half the class got notes sent home about our behavior problems. (“Rebecca herself doesn’t have a problem,” Mrs. Kuroda had clarified to an aghast David and Sharon Schuman. “But she’s encouraging the bad kids.”)

“Just fill it out, Jacob,” said Rasmussen. There were twenty-four questions, and all of them had to be answered with either full agreement or full disagreement. There was no political gray area in AP Civics, just as there was no gray area about anyone’s desire to do actual work in AP Civics.

All the statements were either somewhat conservative (“I believe in limited government”) or downright reactionary (“I believe there should be no restriction on firearms whatsoever”), and every time you agreed with one, you got a point. If you scored 12 or above, you moved to the right side of the classroom, toward the hall, where the AP Civics Republicans would nominate a candidate and mount a mock election campaign. Under 12 and you went leftward toward the windows, where you and your fellow AP Civics Democrats would presumably copy the Bill Clinton agenda verbatim and attempt to rerun on it. (Everyone in our class was an exact replica of his parents’ politics, except without the added gravitas of having lived through the Nixon administration.) As Violet and Alyssa, the two beautiful and popular students Rasmussen “entrusted” with his “grading” so as not to have to rouse himself, returned from the Scantron machine in the teachers’ lounge (and, coincidentally, a quick pit stop at a coffee shop ten blocks away), they motioned me over.

“What?” I asked. They pointed to my Scantron.

“You got a zero, Rebecca.”

I was such a knee-jerk baby liberal that I was the first person in the history of Mr. Rasmussen’s class ever to score 100 percent left-wing answers. And, it turned out, I was in some interesting company.

“And check it out,” said Violet, violating every paragraph of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. “Dylan got a three.”

When it came time to split up, Rasmussen read off the names of everyone else in the class, until only Dylan Gellner and me were left.

“What about us, Mr. Rasmussen?”

“You two? You’re so far toward the window that you’re out on the lawn.”

With the rest of the class laughing at us, Dylan Gellner and I had no choice but to make eye contact for the second time in our lives—and this time, he nodded approvingly.

“Who,” he said to the other lefties, “wants to split off from the Democrats and be Socialists? Besides you, obviously, Rebecca.”

“Dammit, Dylan, that is not the point of this exercise.”

“Mr. Rasmussen, I respectfully disagree. We are to draft a political platform based on our actual beliefs, correct?”

“Allegedly, yes.”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah,” I said. “Just because it didn’t work out for Ross Perot doesn’t make us beholden to the two-party system! Now who’s with us?”

“Forget that,” said my friend Tamia, who worked with me on the newspaper and was one of the very few black students in extremely white South Eugene High. “I don’t want to pay fifty-two percent of my money in taxes.”

“But we’d get so much stuff for it, Mia!” I said. “Much more than we could buy with our own paychecks. Better roads, better schools—what are there, forty kids in this class? I mean—”

“Save it for the debate, Schuman,” said Rasmussen.

“Really?”

“Yes, fine, you two pains in my neck win. Do your socialism. Just get to work.”

Jacob defected immediately—far better chances for smart-assery in a rogue party—as did Violet, Alyssa, and Lisa (there was no socialism section in our textbook and no Internet yet, which meant an assignment with no reading).

“So,” said Dylan Gellner, as we yanked a set of desks free from the false binary of the left-right continuum. “I assume you want to be president, Rebecca?”

“Are you shitting me?” I asked. “I can’t take that kind of pressure. Jacob should do it. He’s got charisma.”

“Fine,” said Dylan Gellner. “You be vice president. I’ll run the campaign. Just don’t fuck it up, like you fucked up your essay on Heart of Darkness.”

I raised my eyebrows. “How do you know about my essay on Heart of Darkness? You’re not in AP Lit sixth period.”

“Yeah, but Bumstead put it on the overhead in third, too.”

“Those are anonymous!” I said.

“I recognized your voice.”

Mr. Bumstead had actually put my essay on the overhead as a good example, but I had other things to worry about, namely: What did Dylan Gellner mean he recognized my voice?

Dylan Gellner shrugged. “I read a couple of your newspaper columns.”

I had recently sent an unsolicited set of clippings from the high-school paper to the features editor of the local daily, auditioning myself to be their “first-ever voice of a local high-schooler, talking about our issues from our perspective!” They’d bought the spiel, largely because they realized they could get away with paying a child fifteen dollars per submission—and as a result, my chubby little visage was briefly on the side of newspaper boxes, and I made the morning announcements, and so for like a week, before everyone realized that (a) high-school kids don’t read the paper and (b) ripping off Dave Barry does not “current issues from a high-schooler’s unique perspective!” make, I was high-school famous.

“Your Valentine’s Day piece was pretty good,” said Dylan Gellner, as I realized I’d been staring at him while my mind adjusted to the fact that I was on his radar. “But mostly because you made a ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ reference.”

“I what?”

“‘Heart-Shaped Box.’ The song. Nirvana.”

“I don’t know it.” I made a mental note to pick up In Utero, which I had been boycotting because Nirvana had (a) completely sold out, and (b) had the nerve to cancel a show for which I had tickets the year before.

“Ahem,” said Jacob, who, like everyone else at the table, was still present and at least somewhat interested in our socialist revolution. “Do we or do we not need to come up with a plan to beat the Democrats? They’ve already got a speech drafted out, and it calls us ‘moochers’ and ‘looters.’”

We went back to our campaign, which, largely due to our successful derailment of the original assignment, won in a landslide. And, more important, Dylan Gellner and I now possessed a tacit understanding that we would work together during all future civics projects, the next of which would bring about two watershed events: Dylan Gellner would come to my house, and Franz Kafka would enter my life.