“I am.”
“And if you were to go on this trip, what do you think you could offer?”
Chills break out over my body, though I’m not sure why. “I love it here. It’s the only place that has ever felt like home. I can talk extensively about the athletic department? And… campus life? Maybe the study center?” When I’m unsure and nervous, I tend to sound like I’m asking questions as opposed to answering them.
“You’re exactly the kind of student we’d like in this program, Mr. Skeeter. There was no mistake in choosing you to represent the school, the students, and our mission.”
My breath whooshes out of me as I stare at her.
CHAPTER 4
KENDRICK
Four months later
Martha’s teeth against the bone she’s chewing on make me cringe. It’s like when you accidentally bite into a chicken wing and come away with a piece of bone between your teeth. The way it grates down your spine and makes you shudder.
Yeah, like that.
She loves her bones, though, and thankfully, she doesn’t chew on them long. Ten or fifteen minutes at most before she’s bored with it and needs something else to entertain her.
We’re sitting in the backyard. My round table sits on a patio beside a small fishpond. While it doesn’t get nasty cold as it does in the north of the continent, the fish stop moving around so much in the colder months. They’re finally beginning to wake up and swim around more.
Martha loves to watch them swim. She’s been excitedly bouncing around the pond when she notices them moving again.
Our trip to Iceland departs in two days. This is the first time I’ve felt truly excited about something in a long time. I love all the work I do with the school. Reaching the goals I set has its own special thrill.
This is different, though. Heading overseas to meet with a school interested in emulating the same kind of queernormative environment that RDU boasts is exciting for so many reasons. In a world bursting at the seams with people in power wanting to dehumanize individuals because they don’t fit into a mold, places like RDU need to become more prominent. More accessible. We need to make our voices louder to rise above hate.
I know we can do it. RDU is a shiny beacon that sends highly educated, well-trained, and talented individuals into the world. Their success is a direct reflection of the environment RDU created. It also loudly busts through the stereotypes of what makes a queer person and what they’re capable of.
Queer people can become pilots, military leaders, fashion models, architects, professional athletes, and so much more. Unlike the message of as recently as fifty years ago, there is no guaranteed unhappy ending because someone is queer. That’s the image we’re fighting to change.
Rainbow Dorset is a leader in this area, pissing people off every single year that the most NFL drafts come from our queer school. That alumni are accomplishing great scientific breakthroughs, are brave heroes on the front line, and are winning awards despite the bigotry in all industries.
That’s the message I want to spread throughout the rest of the world. Not just extending through the US. Another Rainbow Dorset University needs to be built on the East Coast of the US, preferably smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, where we can disrupt their hate-filled holy love.
However, that’s a different kind of mission. Right now, I want to go global.
When I first conceptualized CAP, I’d begun doing research to locate colleges and universities that were already queer-friendly. Not just in name but in practice. I went about identifying administrations that were forward-thinking and progressive. Itwas also important to locate universities that didn’t have a strong reliance on government dollars.
The writing on the wall is clear when it comes to certain government administrations all over the world. Ultimatums are abundant. Fall in line or we’ll cut you off, legal or not. One of my first missions when becoming provost was to make government dollars redundant and unnecessary.
I’m proud to say that within eight years, we replaced the need for government subsidies in preparation for a time when a bad egg might try to hang funding over our heads. That time hasn’t come, and so we continue to use some funding and keep our reserves protected for a rainy day. RDU is ready to be cut off entirely from the government money pool, and we’ll not sink even a little.
There are many benefits to being a private college. The ability to cut ties with toxic officials is one of the biggest perks. We’re ready. One of my tasks in creating our first sister school is working with them to become entirely financially independent, so if a need arises in which they’ll no longer be receiving funding from their governments, they won’t miss a day.
On paper, þórðargleði University had all the hallmarks of being the perfect candidate. It also made sense that they become one of our first trials because Iceland is ranked one of the top countries with LGBTQIA+ progressive rights and protections.
I was further convinced that þórðargleði University was the first place I wanted to partner with after talking with their provost, Magnus Albertson. You can always tell when a person is saying what they think you want them to say in order to get what they want. You can smell bullshit a mile away. Magnus’ enthusiasm and eagerness were apparent in every conversation.
After almost a year of planning—getting CAP up and running, finding funding, organizing support—and beginningdiscussions with a school, it’s here. The inaugural ambassador trip is just a couple of days away.
For perhaps the hundredth time, I’m looking over everything. We have a budget, of course. As part of the ambassador program, we chose a diverse group of students who would represent as many parts of RDU as possible. Athletics, trades, mathematics, sciences, arts… I knew that if I wanted theexactstudents built for this role, finances couldn’t factor in. The ability to afford this trip narrowed my pool of applications exponentially.
Thus why the budget was perhaps most important. I needed RDU to fund it. Which meant finding sponsors for the trip. It worked out well enough, I think. Each individual even comes on board with a goodie bag filled with merch donated by our sponsors—and advertises for them as well.
Then there’s the itinerary. It’s filled with school events, meetings, and such, but I’ve also built in free time. They’re in Iceland after all. I want them to be able to enjoy the foreign country. Hell, I wanted to enjoy the country. Iceland has been a bucket-list place to visit for as long as I can remember.
