Alice2

Drops of rain dribbled from the sky, splashing Leala in the face with freezing water. Suddenly, she did not feel like being on top of the stadium anymore. Leala tried to wipe the rain off her face, but as soon as she would wipe away one drop of rain, two would take its place! The rain came down harder and harder until she felt like she was almost drowning in it! Leala gave a little scream and shut her eyes in fear.
When she opened them again, she was laying next to the pool, with her two friends faces hanging over her head, grinning. Each friend held an empty water bottle, the contents of which were still streaming off Leala’s face. Leala was not horribly upset, though, because as mischievous as her two friends were, they would never have the adventures that she did in the Castilian rabbit hole and U.T. Wonderland with Bevo.

[Fast Forward…]


It was precisely that dream that Leala remembered on her first day of college at the University of Texas at Austin and holds with her every day thereafter. She kept dreaming the dream every so often throughout her time at college, and the dream evolved with her. The plot continued to get more and more convoluted as Leala’s studies got harder and harder. One night, after shutting down her computer and crawling in between her down comforter and her sheets, Leala dreamed.
She was in her second year now, a veritable hot shot. Leala’s consistent good grades confirmed what she had already known (of course that she was a very smart, brilliant, clever girl). She knew her way around the classroom, and she understood what it took to get a good grade in a class. So, Leala was piddling along through UT as if college-life was second nature to her. That is, until she decided to enroll in Jerome Bump’s nineteenth century literature class. Well, actually, the class was also about art and architecture, but Leala was sure that those subjects would be hardly talked about. “He will probably make me buy a lot of brand new books that we will use one quote from the entire semester,” Leala thought to herself. But she registered for it anyway.
The class material was pretty interesting and Leala was very, very glad that since she was in college now, she could use bigger words in her sentences! The other students in the class were nice enough, too, although they were all a bit off their rocker. Of course, the very first thing to do when attending a new class was to make everyone’s acquaintance. As she did that very thing, on the first day of class, Leala noticed something very strange about the classroom: whenever the students, and the professor, spoke their names, they came out backwards! For example, Brent’s name came out “Tnerb,” when he spoke it aloud. This was awfully strange to Leala, who figured herself among the few normal people in UT Wonderland. Imagine her surprise when she opened her mouth and “Leala” came out “Alael!” No other words came out backwards, just names. So, for the entirety of the semester, Leala answered to Alael.
The professor was a very likeable man with various hats, which he wore to class, during class, and one would suppose, after class as well. Leala wondered if he wore them in the shower too, but she would never ask. His most favorite, it seemed was a wheat-colored cowboy hat with a piece of paper stuck to it that read: “10/6”. The class secretly called him the Mad Hatter (which of course came out Dam Rettah). He wasn’t called “mad” simply for wearing his hats; the professor could only speak one word: Oxford. So, when he lectured, the poor mad sounded like “Oxford, Oxford, Oxford, Oxford, Oxford….” Somehow, the class understood what he was saying even if page after page of their notes were filled with “Oxford, Oxford, Oxford, Oxford, Oxford….”
Leala liked this class very much and would recommend it to anyone who cared to ask her opinion. Her classmates were very inventive and they came in all sizes. Leala was never sure if they came naturally that way, or if they had eaten something to make themselves the sizes they were. She thought surely Martin wasn’t really that tall or Jessie that short. In fact, she wasn’t altogether certain about anything in this classroom. The rules here were like nothing Leala had ever seen before in any of the classrooms she had ever been in. In this class, the students wrote journals, went on field trips, took virtual tours on the computers, and even meditated once in a while. Actually, the class was about to go outside to sit under a tree to meditate right now.
Leala clunked all of her books into her backpack and mentally cursed the professor for assigning reading from both of the course packets, which were both quite large and heavy. As the students settled down onto the grass outside, some in the sun and others in the shade, Leala found a spot at the very edge of the tree. When she sat down, leaf-shaped shadow puppets danced on her face; she closed her eyes. The next sounds she heard were…
“LEALA! Leala…Courtney, go wake her up. No, no don’t just shake her. Do something funny. Draw on her face, nothing permanent.” It was Professor Bump’s voice, and Leala recognized it right away, luckily before Courtney could reach her face with the blue marker she held in her hand. Dang it, she must have dozed off during another of Bump’s Oxford slide shows. This time he had caught her. “Oh boy,” Leala sighed, blowing out a breath, “here we go.” But, Professor Bump didn’t do anything to her, because he was a kind, forgiving, wonderful teacher.
Yeah, right!! Leala’s little napping incident earned her twelve weeks of shoveling longhorn, donkey, pig, dog, and deer manure at his ranch. Lesson learned.






Works Cited:

Bevo. Apr. 2004. Internet. (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/E603/web/brette/project2.html)

Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
1960.

The Castilian. Apr. 2004. Internet.

Texas Crockery Serving Bowl. Apr. 2004. Internet.

ADA Restroom Sign - Women. Apr. 2004. Internet. http://www.trimcobbw.com/trimcocatalog/Signage/508.htm

Little King Texas Youth Cheerleader Set. Apr. 2004. Internet. http://www.universitycoop.com/ePOS?this_category=189&store=108&form=shared3%2fgm%2fbrowse%2ehtml&design=coop

Shot Glass - Short with Steerhead. 5 Apr. 2004. Internet. shared3%2Fsearch%2Fsearch_results.html&design=coop3&KEY=shot+glass>

Science Lecture Hall. 5 Apr. 2004. Internet.


Sun Deck. 5 Apr. 2004. Internet.


Longhorn Flip Flops. 5 Apr. 2004. Internet.


Metal Route Sign. 5 Apr. 2004. Internet.

Limited Edition D.K. Royal Memorial Stadium Replica. 5 Apr. 2004. Internet.

Stadium. 5 Apr. 2004. Internet. < http://www.mackbrown-texasfootball.com/pages/superstadium.html>

Home

Oxford

The novel

second part