Not today, Satan—as Trish still said, even though she started listing her religion as Yoruba after taking a West African Studies class her sophomore year.
With a sigh, I grabbed a wad of napkins to try to clean up the mess as best I could.
Then I felt his eyes on me.
I looked up to find the reason my attacker claimed I was violating a restraining order. Artyom Rustanov. Sitting at one ofthe campus rec center’s long tables surrounded by his hockey player friends.
Way less than 100 feet away and close enough that I could hear his teammates snickering as the guy who’d ruined my food took a seat at the other end of the table and began high-fiving the other dudes like he’d just scored the winning goal. Just in case there was any doubt about why they were congratulating him, they helpfully pointed at me so anyone within hearing distance could also laugh as I cleaned up the mess their teammate had made me make.
At least Tommy wasn’t among the players at the table.
I guess I had that one microscopically tiny thing going for me.
But I didn’t feel anything remotely close to lucky as Artyom watched me clean up Trish’s ruined comfort food with that cold sneer I was beginning to know all too well. Had I only imagined him smiling down at me softly in that Berlin hotel room? At this point, it felt like a hallucination.
Anyway, that night, I went through Culver’s drive-thru and brought back cold cheese curds and a half-melted mix-in custard for my grieving roommate.
After a disastrous attempt to study at the off-campus Caribou Coffee on Sunday—the barista was a huge Yolks fan—I did my best to study at home. Because, apparently, nowhere was safe from Artyom Rustanov’s wrath.
“Maybe Claudia was right….” I said to Trish on Monday night when she emerged from her grief cave to find me struggling through chapter three ofDawn. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to finish this book before tomorrow’s class. I should probably just drop it.”
“No! You can’t let the terrorists win!” Trish insisted.
“But…”
“No buts. Only cans!” Trish grabbed my laptop off the coffee table. “Here, I know, like, all the illegal sites for cliffsnotes. That’s all you need to bullshit your way through one class. Then you’ll be set because the rest of the books are on audio.”
“Yeah, but Artyom?—”
Trish stopped me right there with a noisy huff. “Okay, Claudia ain’t shit. Fine. I can live with that—after lots and lots of crying, Tracy Chapman, and Culver’s cheese curds. But we are not going to let Ick Rustanov have the library with your last name on it, the campus rec center, and the freaking Clara Quinn class. Girl, you are going to have to fight for your right to take an esoteric class about Black women sci-fi writers. Do it for the culture!”
Her words made me rally a bit, and her offer to read the illegal cliffsnotes to me felt like a great idea...
...until I woke up the next morning underneath the blanket Trish must have laid on top of me after I fell asleep—promptly, apparently. I had not one memory of anything she read. And it was only fifteen minutes before the start of class.Fuck, fuck, fuck!
After throwing on a bright pink Gemidgee Animal Shelter hoodie, the only top I could find in the bedroom floor pile I’d mentally labeled “Sort of Clean,” I dashed through the bitterly cold morning to the other side of campus and barely made it there… over three minutes after the start of class.
Clara Quinn, who was lecturing in front of a slide with a vintage cover ofDawn,featuring two White women on it, paused to say,“Speaking of disrespectful… You may show up to the class on time in the future, or you may not bother showing up at all. I do not allow students to walk in late to my seminars.”
“Sorry, Ms. Quinn,” I mumbled as I rushed to take the only empty seat left at the table.
Unfortunately, it was located right next to Artyom Rustanov.
After shadowing social workers in Minnesota’s rural county system for only a week, I was deeply aware of what a privileged existence I enjoyed as the able-bodied adopted daughter of a multi-millionaire. But seriously, fuck my life. Fuck it so, so hard.
“Is she even allowed to sit next to him?” I heard someone whisper as I sat down. “I thought he took out a restraining…”
Luckily, before they could finish, Clara Quinn began lecturing about how the first cover ofDawnwas whitewashed because the idea of Black women in the sci-fi space was so relatively new back then that the book’s original publisher didn’t believe it could sell with the book’s Black protagonist on the cover….
It was a worthy lecture that deserved our full attention. But I could barely concentrate because instead of listening to Clara Quinn speak on the injustices of late 20th-century publishing, most of my classmates were openly glancing between Artyom and me, sitting side by side. I could almost hear their minds wondering if the stalking rumors were true.
“I’ll give that honor to you, Ms. Carrington.”
The sound of the last name I was still trying to live up to jerked my attention back to Ms. Quinn, who was looking at me expectantly.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
She pinned me with a disbelieving squint. “You didn’t hear me ask you to stand up and read the passage I’ve been talking about for the last five minutes?”
