You’d think graduate students would be better behaved, right? I mean, we’re adults, we’ve done the college partying thing. We’re there to get our degrees, basically, and that’s about it. At least, that’s the theory. And while, for the most part, my experience doing graduate work was like that, there was one particular incident that veered so far off the path of “appropriate” it probably would have gotten all three of us kicked out if we’d been caught.

We were taking Human Sexuality that semester, almost our last-one more semester and we’d all have a Masters in Psychology. There were three of us who missed the “audio-visual” portion of the class. I happened to have jury duty. I don’t know what Matt and Laurie’s excuses were, but I had a feeling they were probably together doing something they shouldn’t have been. They were both married-to other people-

but we all knew what was going on between them.

Our professor was a typical California crunchy-granola type, very soft-spoken and sweet. I think we all found it a little disconcerting to be talking about vaginas and penises and erectile dysfunction with a woman who could barely speak above a whisper. I remember her always fighting with her long, frizzy brown hair, pushing it behind her ears, pulling it back into ponytails that hung halfway down her back. She fidgeted. She made me nervous, even if the topic really didn’t.

I think that was the reason she insisted on the videos. She was in love with the videos as a teaching tool, or really, replacement was more like it. Matt and Laurie had passed notes through the erectile dysfunction video the week before, and I’d worked on the paper I had due for Marriage and Family.

Not that parts of the video weren’t interesting. The last one had been intriguing.