Then there’s a simpering note from Dean McGregor asking if I can cut Brad some slack in my seminar:He’s really looking forward to Cancún...
There’s one barely legible letter from the provost asking me to hire four more adjuncts for the fall.
Three students left handwritten requests for overrides for my fall classes.
I slump in my desk chair, staring at Everett Dane’s smoldering gaze and then promptly send each letter through the shredder. I try to finish grading my latest batch of papers, but my mind can’t stay anchored on my students’ semicoherent thoughts. I head over to the library to try to start collecting sources for a Brontë conference I’m speaking at in October.
But by midmorning, I’ve had a full-blown panic attack—racing heart, sweaty palms, vertigo—when I briefly thought I left Philip’s bird urn in the encyclopedia section. It turned out I stashed him in my bag when Bill Rhodes walked by. (I wasn’t going to expose Philip to Bill’s patriarchal toxicity.) After stowing the urn in my pocket, I hurry from the library toward my classroom building.
My phone dings.
Mirabel:Don’t forget my advice. Stay out of this.
I still see her in that too-tight dress, reeking of cigarettes. Seriously, with all this drama she’s drawing even more attention to whatever it is she’s trying to cover up.
I chew my lip angrily, trying to forget my hundreds of small problems amid my big looming problem: Philip is gone, and I have to learn to live without him.
I cut across the main campus lawn, passing a large white events tent. There’s a ribbon-cutting in an hour for the new glossy Student Support Services Center—a center we clearly cannot afford. Patrick told me that the new director is making three times what we do. I stare at the rows of empty folding chairs in the tent.
I’ll skip it.
“Dr. Wells!” Professor Evie Caldwell, head of the art department, hurries down the pavement toward me. She never actually earned her doctorate. Instead, she was given an honorary doctorate in the ’70s for walking around Berkeley wearing nothing but Post-it notes on her naked body and paper clips in her hair in what was supposed to be a profound artistic feminist statement. Something about women’s bodily presence in the workplace.
She stands far too close to me, and on her clothes, I smell the burrito breakfast meal she eats during midmorning meetings. She’s thin, and her thick, swoopy gray hair falls long around her shoulders.
“Did you attend the Fiscal Oversight Committee meeting this morning? The funding allocation for this Student Services Center isunbelievable.”
She resembles a fairy-tale witch. I picture her luring children to a cottage with a trail of candies. I should keep Heathcliff away from her.
“Are you listening to me, Dr. Wells?”
“What? Yes.”
She attempts to look empathetic. “I’m terribly sorry about Colin.”
“Philip.”
“Philip.I know you’re in mourning.” She glances distastefully over my black skirt and blouse. “But there are grave consequences if you can’t convince the provost to stop taking money from the humanities to give six-figure salaries to consultants and Student Services Center workers. It’s criminal.”
“It actually isn’t.”
“Whose side are youon, Dr. Wells?” And then shepokesher finger into my chest for emphasis before storming off. “Oh, and I would suggest that you be careful. You’re on Bill’s shit list.”
I realize how amazingly little I care that Dr. Bill Rhodes in philosophy continues to hate me and Patrick. I realize how little I care that Professor Caldwell also hates me.
I stand on the lawn, staring at the empty white tent, its sides rippling in the soft Carolina breeze.
For the first time in fifteen years, I don’t want to teach class.
I walk into my seminar, where we’re wrapping upPride and Prejudicetoday.
“Jesus—she’s still dressing like Morticia Addams,” Brad snorts to Ryan next to him. Anger flares poker-hot inside me, that unedited letter burning in my satchel. Best to ignore Brad and focus on my twenty other students. As least two want to be here. Kayla is smiling and attentive in the front row as I arrange my notes on the lectern.
I try very hard to lose myself in the material. I try to remember why I tolerate campus politics and committees—it’s because I love teaching these books. But I’m not feeling it today. I keep playing with the jet necklace at my throat as I lecture, but I can’t block out Brad unashamedly texting and chewing on a Dum-Dums sucker, the stick hanging out the side of his mouth. I see Mirabel. I see Henry’s handsome face too close to mine. And underneath it all, I feel the goddamn awful heartache.
“Is it a happily-ever-after for Lizzy Bennet by the end?”
“No?” Kayla offers hesitantly.
