At first I don’t process what the bureaucrat in the statement necklace across the desk from me is saying. After all, I’m three minutes deep in a daydream about that necklace, which is so aggressively big and multicolored that I’ve pictured the bureaucrat in a kind of medieval fairy tale/ancient war epic mashup in which it figures heavily as some kind of magical token of her as yet undiscovered powers. I’m trying to find a way to work in a unicorn, but so far, no dice.
“What?” I say, once her punch-to-the-gutwords sink in.
She looks over the rim of her plastic-framed glasses, primary school red, two teeny-tiny rhinestones on each winged tip. It’s too much, what with the statement necklace. Plus someone who accessorizes this much should be morefun than this.
“You,” she begins, stretching out that one syllable before continuing. “Cannot. Graduate.” It’s the kind of tone that I’ll bet she has to use a lot on panicked, desperate undergraduates, the ones who come in here looking for a reprieve about their unacceptable GPA or some honor code violation that’ll keep them from their diploma. She’s got to enunciate every single thing. She’s got to speak slowly to cut through their narcissism or their naïveté or their general unwillingness toaccept reality.
Says the twenty-seven-year-old woman who was just thinking about a unicorn.
“There has to be some kind of mistake,” I say, repeating words I’ve already said once today, barely an hour ago, when I’d sat in a similarly uncomfortable chair across from my academic advisor. He’d looked at me with a gentle, consoling expression, handed me my three-page degree application, and said, “We’ve got a problem here, Greer.” I’d stared down at that slim stack of paperwork with a thuddingsense of shock.
“There’s no way,” I’d said to him as I’d taken it with a shaking hand, already gathering my bag. “I’ll go check at the registrar’s office. There’s no way I’ve gotten this wrong.”
If there’s one thing I’ve gotten good at in the two and a half years since I won the lottery, it’s paperwork. The lottery itself involves a fair amount of paperwork, sure: disclosures and waivers and verifications of all kinds. Yes, you can use my name or image to promote the state lottery. Yes, I sign verifying that I am who I say I am. No, I do not dispute the other two claimants to this ticket. Yes, I can provide an authenticating letter from my bank; no, I don’t owe any back taxes orchild support.
But what I’d chosen to do with my winnings—that too had been paperwork city. Some of it had involved an accountant (four pages of paperwork just to meet with him, by the way), some of it had involved an attorney (no paperwork for that, since Zoe had done all her work for me for free), and some of it,mostof it—the paperwork connected to my getting this long-postponed college education—had only involved me. Applications and essays, overload permission slips, internship filings, independent study proposals. Regular tracking of my coursework, to show I was right on schedule for…this.
This degree application. The one that verifies I’m walking across a stage at the end of the summer, diploma in hand with a full-time, health-insurance and retirement-plan supported professional job waiting.
The one that says I’m finallyfree.
“There’s no mistake,” Necklace says, setting the application on her desk and folding her hands on top of it. “You needan art credit.”
“But I took—”
“You took two arthistorycourses,” she says, cutting me off. She’s probably heard a version of my story a million times. Students lost in the bureaucracy of the university, little scheduling mistakes that mean trouble later. “One of those needed to be a studio art. The practice of art, not just the study of it.”
“Okay, but—”
She cuts me off with a palm-out gesture before I can make a case for myself. Before I can show her the records I kept from every meeting with my advisor, including the one in which I’d selected the second art history course to fill a requirement. Shouldn’t he have warned me? Shouldn’t he have stopped me, pointed me in a different direction? Even as I think it, I know I’m wrong. Maybe he could’ve done a better job, but I know the buck stops with me. I know this is my mistake, myresponsibility.
“Ms. Hawthorne. You have managed to very nearly complete a degree program in social work with a minor in social welfare in”—she looks down again at my application, scanning the top—“about two and a half years, which is an incredibly impressive feat. This is a minor hiccup, one you can remedy with a single semester of per-credit-hour payment.”
She breaks off here to give me a pointed look at the wordpayment, and I wonder if maybe she’s one of the few people in this city who saw the frozen, shocked smiles on my and Zoe’s faces when we’d taken that paperwork-approved promotional photograph for the lottery, sans publicity-shy Kit. Of course Necklace wouldn’t know how little I have left of the cardboard check I’d held that day. “I know this is a disappointment,” she says, “but you shouldn’t feel at all ashamed.”
Ashamed?That’s the least of it. I feel like a failure. I feel stupid and careless, and worst of all, I feelweak. I’ve done everything right the last two years, but all of a sudden I feel like the Greer who’s never been able to see things through, who’s been too tired or too sick to finish what I start, the Greer who needs help with even thesmallest tasks.
“Ihaveto graduate,” I say, hating the way my voice has risen to a desperate, almost keening pitch. “I have a job waiting for me.”
She sighs, cuts a glance over to the clock that I know is hanging on the wall above me. The lobby outside her office is packed with students, and I sympathize. The timing for me couldn’t be worse either. That I had to find this out onthisFriday, of all possible Fridays, feels like particularly bad luck.
I squint at her necklace, trying to work out the stones in there. If there are any opals stuck in between what look mostly like acrylic, oven-baked blobs, there’s a bad luck reason for this, maybe.
Necklace lets out a gusty sigh. “Your job requires that you have the degree at your start date?”
I don’t see a singleopal in there.
“Yes.” It’s not a lie. It’s part of my contract, in fact, another piece of paperwork I’ve recently signed. I’m giving her a look likeI’mthe unicorn, the never-before-seen student creature she’s going to make an exception for.Use your undiscovered powers on me,I’m thinking.I’ll even wearthat necklace.
She grabs a pen out of a cup on her desk, flips my degree application over, and scribbles a few lines of text before handing it over. “This is the name of the chair of the studio art department. Below that is the name of the chair of our academic standards committee. You might be able to make an appeal.”
Inside my bag, my phone pings with a text, and I know I’m out of time, at least for today. Waiting in my car I’ve got a suitcase, a garment bag, and a small wooden box of good luck charms—borrowed, blue, new—for Kit. I don’t know how I’m going to empty my head enough of this problem to get through the weekend.
“I’ll get in touch with them right away,” I tell her, standing from my chair. My knees feel like they’re made of jelly donuts. “Thank you.”
Before I can turn away, hustle out the door, and take out my phone to address whatever logistical crisis related to this weekend has come up in the last hour, she clears her throat. She lowers her red glasses, so now they’re resting on a thin gold chain on top of the statement necklace. My eyes blur with the garishness of it. I couldn’t picture a unicorn if I tried.
“He’s a photographer,” she says, and everything in my line of sight is replaced with an image in my mind, one I try not to think aboutall that often.
