"I manage to keep out of the way of most of them."
He grinned. His mouth was full lipped and wide, matching the proportions of a prominent nose that had once been broken and an unruly mass of black hair. Only the eyes were too small for the face, but that might have been due to the habitual squint against the sun of a young man who spent a great deal of his time outdoors.
"You professors kill me," Boyle said. "What was on your mind, Prof? A poem or something?"
"Something I heard."
"Yeah? It must have been good," he said offhandedly, "to make you walk in front of the only damn car on the street."
"It was," I said.
The small brown eyes regarded me curiously and I wondered if their glint held amusement or something deeper.
"Well, you better be careful," Boyle said. "Hearing things like that won't do you any good if you're dead."
I read menace into the words, but it was belied by the faintly contemptuous grin on his face. He had the habitual cockiness which I had often seen in the professional campus athlete to whom public adulation has come too soon, before the mind is mature enough to discount it. The attitude was always irritating.
"That's a nice looking girlfriend of yours," I said, perhaps too casually. "Isn't she a physics major?"