“It’s fine. Flirt with me indoors next time though. I’m on a schedule,” Darcy said, shrugging it off, though the lingering disappointment on her face made Teagan’s chest hurt for having put it there.
“No, really. If you’ve got time, tell me about the trees.”
She sighed again. “I don’t. I wish I did, truly, but I don’t. You can go back. I won’t hold it against you.”
Teagan looked at the clippers. “No, I’ll keep working,” he said. “No worries.”
“You say that, and it’s like I start thinking of how I shouldbe worried. Is this a bad idea? Are you going to brew moonshine from the wild raspberries or stab yourself with the clippers?” she asked, frowning at him.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m set for the rest of the day.”
Darcy gave him a long look, as though she doubted his ability to remain safe without her supervision, but after a moment she patted the bear spray on the backpack in farewell and left, walking off in the direction of the residence, just short of a jog. He watched the sway of her round hips as she went, wishing he could look away.
seven
Darcy leaned forward and put her nose six inches away from the screen of Rachel’s laptop. It didn’t help. She read the last sentence of the third exam question again, her lips moving as she attempted to wrest meaning from the shotgun blasts of unfamiliar words.
She was going to fail this exam.
The exam format was timed, closed book, short answer. A worse format could not have possibly been devised—not least because the exam software didn’t have a screen reader. Darcy had just ten minutes left, and she was only on the third of the five questions. There were little red squiggles under many of the words in her answers, but she couldn’t tell whether she’d misspelled them or if the program simply didn’t recognizeheterozygosity.
Darcy entertained the modest plan of hurling the laptop out the window, stripping naked, and running into the woods to eat grubs and tubers with the bears. It was as good a career plan as she’d managed so far.
She was going to fail this exam, in this required course, which meant she wasn’t going to have enough credits to graduate for at least another year and a half.
A growl bubbled up in her throat around the spiky lump of shame and embarrassment that had formed as she fought with the test questions. She probably knew the answers. She knew them! If anyone had sat down and asked her what was the fundamental driver of biodiversity in isolated populations, she thought she could have explained it very succinctly and conversationally. But she doubted any professor at OSU even knew her name, let alone that she might not have failed Ecological Genetics if they’d given a different sort of test.
At some point soon, she was going to need to accept that this degree was never going to happen. She was wasting taxpayer dollars. Maybe the government would reallocate some money to wilderness conservation if they didn’t have to keep paying GI Bill funds to OSU for classes Darcy was going to fail anyway.
She imagined her senator twirling his mustache: “Can we afford to reintroduce gray wolves to the Southern Rockies? Oh, no, looks like Darcy Albano still needs eight hours in Vertebrate Biology after all these years. Let’s build a highway that we’ll name after some dead asshole who voted against civil rights instead.”
Eight minutes left. The fourth question refused to divulge its meaning to Darcy even as she forced her eyes to march sequentially through each of the words.
She could have spent the day bossing Teagan around in the woods. That would have been a more productive use of time, or at least one that left her feeling competent and desirable.
Darcy heard someone coming down the hall. Probably Rachel or Dr. Goedert, there to inquire when Darcy was going to finish the mowing. She prepped a really nasty rejoinder—one that would specify an anatomically unlikelyplace where they might store the mower in the future—then swallowed it down. If she wasn’t ever going to finish her degree, she couldn’t afford to piss off next year’s potential employer.
When the door opened, it instead admitted the willowy perfumed figure of Sloane Van Zijl. She was wearing a long floral maxi dress under an oversized knit sweater, and she looked more put together than Darcy ever had in her life, despite Sloane’s two weeks’ residence in a tent.
“Oh,” Sloane said, apparently surprised to see Darcy in front of the computer. “Hey. Are you busy?”
Darcy checked the time. Five minutes left. She hadn’t started the fourth question. It was a lost cause. She’d failed the exam.
“I’m done,” she said unhappily. She closed the laptop so hard the screen rattled. “What do you need?” The girl looked a little taken aback, and Darcy made a conscious effort to put her customer service face on. If she never finished college and made her way into a conservation job, she was going to need to get a lot better at keeping tourists happy if she wanted to stay in Yellowstone. “Can I help you?” Darcy asked in a more conciliatory voice.
“I was just seeing if you knew where Teagan was,” Sloane said. “He didn’t come to pottery class.”
Darcy reflexively looked out the window, but she couldn’t see the trailhead from her vantage point.
“I provided some alternative programming,” Darcy said, trying to sound authoritative. “He’s doing trail maintenance. Wilderness therapy. He’s a hard case, but I’ve got it under control.”
Sloane chewed the inside of her cheek. “Wilderness therapy is good for him, right?”
“I’m sure it’s at least as good as pottery class at curing alcoholism,” Darcy said.
Sloane gave a small roll of her eyes. Darcy knew Sloane was in her early twenties, but she looked younger, and the expression was pure teenage brattiness. Sloane curled and uncurled her fists, dissatisfied with Darcy’s reassurances.
“Okay, but Teagan hasn’t gone to any of the art classes, and he blew off group therapy this morning, and after Rachel told him he can’t eat tropical fruit anymore because he’s a Virgo and he’s prone to inflammation, he went off and ate an entire mango for breakfast,” Sloane said earnestly.
