Chapter 8

CHAPTER

8

PRESENT

I pop a cartridge of dark roast into the Keurig. The machine grumbles and black coffee trickles into a mug that says #1 TEACHER on it—Reagan thinks her birthday gifts are funny. They do make me smile. “So I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I say over my shoulder as I tear open packets of sugar and dump them into the mug, “what are your thoughts on party planning?”

Over at the table, Belinda Jones looks up from her sudoku booklet with a thoughtful frown. She’s a small and lithe woman, her box braids pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. Her microwave meal has filled the faculty room with the tangy aroma of teriyaki beef and broccoli. “I threw a surprise party for my ex-girlfriend, like, five years ago.”

I drag out the chair beside her, metal legs grating on the laminate floor, and take a seat. I use my sleeve to sweep some crumbs onto the floor before planting my elbows on the table in front of me. “How did that go?”

“Fine, I guess,” she says, returning to her puzzle. She always fills in her sudoku with glitter gel pens—a bold move, if you ask me, but she never seems to get them wrong. “I kind of forgot that she scares easily. She punched her boss in the throat.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You invited her boss to her surprise party?”

She holds up her hands, gel pen laced between her fingers. “Hey, I said it went ‘fine,’ not great. Mistakes were made.” She fills in a square. “We all had a good laugh about it over drinks, later.”

“I could use some more people on the gala subcommittee,” I say. “We’re meeting once a week. Location to be determined.”

She stabs a piece of broccoli with a plastic fork. “Who’s we?”

“Professor Harrison and myself.”

She gives a mildly interested mmm as she chews, twirling her fork in a circle. “He’s the visiting lecturer or whatever.”

“Visiting scholar,” I say.

“What’s he doing on a committee?”

“He’s doing me a favor.” She shoots me a questioning look, and I loose a breath. I figured I might have to explain this part. “We went to this sleepaway camp together, when we were teenagers. Up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

By the way her eyebrows are climbing even higher on her forehead, I get the impression that her curiosity isn’t quite sated, but she does me the mercy of dropping it, at least for now. “So, what do you need from me?”

“I need you to come to the subcommittee meetings.”

“What time?”

“Fridays at four.”

“Can’t,” she sighs, nudging a piece of broccoli around her bowl with a fork. “I meet with my Krav Maga instructor on Fridays.”

I sip my coffee, trying to think up a way to convince her. It’s not easy, recruiting colleagues to a subcommittee that doesn’t actually benefit them. Sure, there’s the altruism of raising scholarship money for students who need it, but even that proves poor motivation for faculty who are already overworked and underpaid.

Bel is my only hope. We’re both young women in a relatively male-dominated department, and there’s a sense of camaraderie in that, even if our friendship has never quite extended beyond the workplace. “Nothing’s really set in stone,” I say. “We could meet at a different time.” When she doesn’t look convinced, I sigh. “And it would be kind of nice to have you there. As a… buffer, of sorts.”

I can tell by her expression that she’s intrigued, but she doesn’t ask what I mean by that. She gets up and crosses the room to toss the broccoli beef container in the trash. “Do you want my honest answer, or my work answer?”

“Honest answer, always.”

“Honestly”—she plunks down into her seat and drags the sudoku back in front of her—“I’m adjunct. I don’t even know if I’ll renew my contract next year. I’m not sure I can justify devoting the extra time.”

I sigh. “Can’t fault you for that.” It’s looking like it’s going to be just me and Teddy this Friday, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s already Tuesday and he still hasn’t texted me about the location, nor have I bumped into him around campus. Habitually, I check my phone. “Fiddlesticks,” I say, pushing out of my chair. “I’ve got class in five minutes.”

I dump the rest of my coffee down the sink and rinse the mug beneath the faucet, stowing it in one of the overhead cupboards. Bel watches me with an unreadable expression as I grab my jacket from the back of a chair and tug it over my ruffled blouse.

“Text me when you figure out a location for the subcommittee,” she says. “I’ll see if I can pop over. At least feel things out before I outright reject it.”

“Appreciate you,” I say, and then I’m out the door.

HIST-102 is my least favorite class to teach. Nothing against the subject matter—the first few weeks of the semester usually overlap somewhat with my specialization in Tudor history—but it fulfills a core requirement for most majors, so the tiered lecture hall is chock-full of unenthusiastic students who wouldn’t be here if their advisors hadn’t pushed it on them. But seeing as I don’t yet have tenure, I don’t get priority when it comes to selecting classes, hence my third semester in a row slogging through World History Since 1500 .

I hand off the sign-in sheet to a student in the front row. Lecture halls have a way of feeling a little cold and detached—especially when compared to the intimate Socratic seminars I grew accustomed to in grad school—and Britteridge 130 is no exception. It’s a large, curved room like a movie theater, the folding seats filled with disinterested faces lit by bluish laptop screens. A bulky ceiling-mounted projector hangs at the center of the room. Last semester, I had to ask one of my taller students to pull down the projector screen for me, but only after a demeaning thirty seconds of me standing on tiptoe like a kid straining to reach the candy jar on top of the fridge.

Today, I eschew the projector in favor of scrawling key points on the whiteboard, dry-erase marker squeaking. We’re covering the early days of Spain’s colonization of the Caribbean right now—subject matter that’s probably more up Teddy’s alley, but I do my best to make it engaging and interesting. I enjoy teaching, but general ed courses always manage to make me feel like I’m holding students against their will, so it’s a bit of a relief when the clock tower above the administration building chimes three. Students are already zipping up laptop bags and slapping their notebooks closed.

“Before I let you go,” I say, and some of them sink reluctantly back into their seats; others hover with backpacks slung over a shoulder. I use the butt of my dry-erase marker to tap the bottom left-hand corner of the whiteboard, where I’ve copied down a series of due dates. “Your first reading responses are due next Thursday. Chapters twenty-two and twenty-three, half a page each. These aren’t going to be graded, but they’ll give me a feel for where you’re at.”

Hands spring up like dandelions. Can’t help wondering where this participation was during lecture. I point to a student in the third row whose name I haven’t memorized yet, a willowy young woman wearing a long-sleeved volleyball jersey emblazoned with the U of I Raptors’ mascot: a goshawk in flight.

She lowers her hand. “I assume we’ll be writing in Chicago?”

“Yes, thank you for reminding me. I want you to treat these reading responses like you’d treat a paper. Cite the readings. Give me a couple footnotes. For many of you, I assume this is your first time writing a history paper at the college level, so I want to get a feel for where you’re at. If you have any other questions, my email and office hours are on the syllabus.”

Thus dismissed, the students form a bottleneck at the classroom door, stampeding toward freedom. A couple of them mumble Thank you, Professor Fernsby or Have a good week, but for the most part, they keep their heads down and avoid eye contact.

In the middle of packing up my things, I reach into the front flap of my messenger bag to check my phone. I always mute it during lecture, but it doesn’t matter, because no one’s texted me anyway. I unmute it and stow it back in my bag before grabbing the dry eraser to wipe down the whiteboard, reaching for the upper left-hand corner of the board, where a student left a note last week about a Manga Club meeting that’s already passed.

“I’ve heard if you stretch extra hard, you might actually grow an inch or two.”

I settle back on my heels and glance over my shoulder. Reagan is standing behind me, no makeup on and her hair in a messy topknot. I breathe a laugh, finishing up with the whiteboard and setting the eraser aside. “I thought you were in class.”

“Canceled. Professor Masrood emailed this morning.” She leans forward, arm resting on the desk, and picks up an orphaned Bic pen, closing one eye as she lines up her shot. “I’ve got an hour until my next class so I figured I’d come bug you.” She tosses the pen like a mini-javelin and it lands in the pencil holder with a ceramic clatter.

“I’m just about to head back to the Hall of Letters.”

“I’ll join you.”

“Isn’t it, like, super uncool to be seen walking around with an instructor?” I ask, ducking my head to loop the strap of my messenger bag around my neck. Another thing that’s uncool, according to Reagan: messenger bags. It’s like a forward slash between your boobs, she says.

“Hey, you’re the one who’s embarrassed to be seen with me, not the other way around,” she reminds me. I shoot her an exasperated look. Not entirely true—it’s more her driving that embarrasses me than anything. “Besides, it’s a beautiful day.”

She’s not wrong. The weather when we step outside the Britteridge Center is bright and cool. The tips of the leaves on the maples in the quad, a verdant green during the summer, have turned gold to herald the changing of the seasons. We stay on the sidewalk, passing by students kicking around soccer balls or lounging on beach towels in the grass. I’m reminded of my own time in undergrad, carrying moving boxes up the steps outside La Plata at the start of my freshman year—and everything else that happened that night.

I shake the memory. “What do you want for dinner tonight?” I ask. “There’s that Thai place I’ve been meaning to try. I was thinking we could order in, maybe watch something on—”

When I turn to gauge Reagan’s reaction, I find that her attention has diverted to her phone. She’s texting, manicured nails clacking against the screen. “Actually, I’m meeting up with a few classmates tonight. We’re trying to get a study group going.”

“Making friends already,” I observe. “What are their names?”

Reagan tucks her phone in her back pocket, lips curved in an amused smile. “Are you going to ask to read my diary, too, Mother?”

“Sorry. I’m just curious. I haven’t met any of your friends.” I worry sometimes whether she’s hanging around the right people. But the trouble with Reagan is that her friends have always seemed to change every few weeks, so there’s no way to even keep track, let alone impart any unsolicited wisdom.

“Sure you have. Nat’s in one of your classes.”

“I don’t know who Nat is,” I admit. I haven’t had enough time to memorize new names. “But I’ll keep an eye out for her. Do you know which—”

Reagan’s phone chimes, and I pause—no point talking if she’s going to be too wrapped up in answering messages to actually hear me, but she makes no move to check it. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

“Yeah, because I’d totally leave notifications on,” she says dryly. I give her a blank stare. “It’s not mine, ” she clarifies, eyebrows raised.

“Oh. Must be me, then.” I pat around my messenger bag until I find my phone and withdraw it.

Teddy: 116 Bridge St, Irving, MD 21532

Teddy: For the meeting on fri

I furrow my brow at the screen. Strange that he’s sending me an address as opposed to a room number. Bridge Street is downtown, a good six or seven blocks from campus, but I haven’t really familiarized myself with all the businesses there because I have no social life. I tap the address to pull up the map. The Falconer, 4.2 stars. Beneath that, in the business category, my worries are confirmed: it’s listed as a bar and grill. I tap out a quick reply.

Clara: This address is for a bar

Clara:??

“You’re texting Professor Hottison?” Reagan asks over my shoulder.

I angle the screen away from her, swatting like she’s a mosquito buzzing in my ear, but she manages to dodge my hand. “Didn’t Mom ever teach you that it’s rude to read other people’s messages?”

“Mom doesn’t know texting etiquette,” she reminds me. “She still thinks ‘lol’ means ‘lots of love.’” I concede the point with a dip of my head. It’s an exaggeration, but only just. We pass Martin Hall, where construction is ongoing—at the moment, a two-man team is hauling a crumbling roll of carpet padding through the eastern door, making way for whatever shiny new flooring they plan to install. “What’s going on with you two, anyway?”

“I’m supposed to meet him Friday for a subcommittee meeting.”

“At a bar.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Would you like to give another dramatic reading of my journal while you’re at it?”

“Diary,” she corrects me, her expression a tad too smug for my liking. A memory surfaces of a nine-year-old Reagan standing barefoot on the glass coffee table in her pajamas, reading a particularly angsty passage from my teenage diary while I was home from college for the holidays—apparently, she’d been rooting around my room while I was away. Mom didn’t even try to stop her. She sat on the couch, glass of Shiraz in hand, roaring with laughter over the fact that teenaged me had tried to use sanguine in a sentence. And that Reagan had then tried to read it out loud, but she pronounced it like it rhymed with linguine.

“You know, if I were a lesser woman, I’d almost think you were overdue for a good old-fashioned sibling beatdown.” Not that I ever gave her those when she was little. Our age gap was too drastic. But now we’re both adults, so maybe it’s overdue.

“I’m just saying”—she holds up her hands—“he’s asking you for drinks. That’s totally a date.”

“Maybe things are different with dating apps these days, but in my world, drinks between colleagues don’t have to mean anything.” When she opens her mouth to argue, I rush to cut her off. “Please, just drop it.”

Reagan sniffs. “Maybe if you showed some interest in someone else, I could bug you about them instead.”

I don’t have a retort, because she’s right. Maybe, if my life was the slightest bit interesting, she’d find something else to pester me about. And really, it’s my fault for bringing up Teddy with her in the first place. She probably wouldn’t have even recognized him after all these years, had I not said something beforehand.

My phone chimes again.

Teddy: Yes

Teddy: Happy hour til five on Fridays

Not much of an explanation, but at the very least, drinks will help break the ice. A nice public setting to slice through the tension. I copy the address and send it to Bel, even if it’s a long shot. The more, the merrier.