“So,” Theo was saying, “up until now, Lear’s plan has been working flawlessly. He’s divided his kingdom into three parts. He’s got this bright vision of how everything will work so ‘that future strife may be prevented.’ And all he wants now is proof that he’s giving his land to children who love him—‘where nature doth with merit challenge.’ And then what happens?”
Hands shot up, and students fumbled through sleepy, half-considered answers, but Auggie could have told them: Cordelia screws up the whole thing. That was the problem. Lear had a plan. It wasn’t a great plan—giving away your kingdom seemed pretty stupid to Auggie—but at least he’d had a plan. And everything had been going all right until Cordelia messed it up. The problem was that Lear hadn’t been flexible, hadn’t known how to adapt. Everybody had plans, and the universe made sure those plans rarely worked out the way anyone expected. The secret was to be flexible. Auggie had had a plan; he’d been on track to score at least one major endorsement contract, with some marketing deals still in the works, and then he’d screwed the pooch with that stupid car accident. But he’d been flexible. He’d come here to Wroxall. He’d kept producing content. In spite of the mess with Robert, Auggie had even managed to keep his name out of the news.
Auggie’s pen froze on the page. What about Robert? What had been his plan? He’d pretended to add Theo’s class. He’d pretended to be a pledge at Sigma Sigma. He’d approached Auggie, and they’d stolen a car together. And then he’d disappeared after that weird murder video showed up. Why?
Well, the answer was that obviously something had gone wrong in Robert’s plan. The question that was more interesting to Auggie was, what had he been planning in the first place?
“Everything’s going so well for Lear,” Theo said. “Goneril says that Lear is ‘dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,’ and Regan says that she loves her father so much that she declares herself ‘an enemy to all other joys.’ Lear is thrilled. Lear is so pleased. And when it’s Cordelia’s turn, she says, ‘Nothing.’ And Lear thinks there must be some mistake. He tries again to get her to say how much she loves him.”
Auggie was barely listening; his mind kept turning over Robert’s actions. What had Robert wanted? Why had he focused on Auggie? What had he thought he could get from him? Had it been blackmail? Some sort of weird obsession? Had he fixated on Auggie? Blackmail seemed the most likely; he’d been filming Auggie in the Porsche without Auggie realizing it. And then what had happened? Like Lear, Robert had seen his plan go sideways, and he hadn’t been flexible, hadn’t adapted.
“What Lear wants to hear,” Theo says, “is exactly what he bemoans at the end, when he is complaining about all the people who have flattered him. ‘They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.’ We should be sympathetic with Lear, right? Up to a point, anyway. We all want people to tell us that we’re special, that we’re important, that we’re everything. But that kind of attention has consequences. Even in act one, Cordelia tries to point out how flattery has skewed Lear’s ability to understand himself and his relationship with other people. She tries to explain that she loves her father as much as is natural, and that what her sisters have professed is a lie. ‘Why have my sisters husbands,’ Cordelia asks, ‘if they say they love you all?’ And then she goes on to explain that when she marries, half her love will go to her husband; Lear can’t be and won’t be the center of her universe. That’s a big problem for Lear; he wants to be told, over and over again, that he is everything to everyone.”
You should have had a backup, buddy, Auggie thought at the corner of his brain. You should have had a plan for when everything went wrong, because eventually, everything always went wrong. You got pissed at your friends and you wrecked a car. That was a major one. But little things too. You dropped your phone in the pool, and you lost a month’s worth of content because you hadn’t turned on cloud backups—
Auggie lurched out of his seat, shoving his notebook into his backpack. He grabbed his phone from the corner of Theo’s desk and shot toward the door.
The hall was empty; no Orlando. Auggie didn’t even care. He sprinted to the library, took out his laptop, and started searching for the online backup provider that Robert might have used for his phone.
12
The morning’s classes had gone well, Theo thought, with the exception of Auggie’s strange behavior in the middle of Civ 1. He ran through a mental playback of his lectures as he limped across campus to Liversedge Hall, checking for things he’d tweak next time, jokes that got a laugh, difficult passages that he needed to spend more time parsing. Yesterday had been physical therapy, and he leaned heavily on the cane as he made his way to the elevator and rode up to the third floor. After collecting his mail from the department office and giving Peg and Ethel Anne a quick wave—both of them called him Daniel again—he made his way to his office.
Dawson’s computer was on, which was rare, and the small room smelled like pot—which, unfortunately was not rare, at least, not in correlation with Dawson’s time in the office. Theo left the door open, powered up his computer, and dropped his satchel on the banker’s box that he still hadn’t dealt with. He was just settling into his desk when he realized he wasn’t alone.
The kid standing in the doorway was clearly an athlete: big shoulders visible even under the winter coat, the sweats branded with Wroxall’s seal, the big-man-on-campus air. He had thick, dark eyebrows and heavy scruff.
