—J. Ford
I called her and asked if I’d ever see her again. She said I could see her now: She was at Malcolm X Park.
The park teemed with bike riders and people on picnic blankets. Janine was on a bench, airy peach scarf blowing around her neck, chucking baguette bread at pigeons, their gray heads bobbing like their brains were short-circuiting. One flew in my face. I screamed.
“You’ll scare them,” she said.
“I don’t understand why they have to be so gross.”
She sighed. “Sit, sit. How are you, dear?”
“I’m all right. How are you?”
“I’m alive.”
The paper bag crinkled in her hand as she passed it to me. I broke off a piece of bread and threw it as far as possible so the pigeons would go away, but it hit the back of a man’s head.
“I’m sorry they fired you,” I said.
“I’m not.”
I looked at her. “You’re not?”
“No! The university did what cowards do.” She laughed. “But someone’s got to be unafraid, don’t they? We can’t all afford to be afraid. What a luxury that would be. You saw, though, that they released those students who’d been detained, one at Columbia, one at Tufts?”
This must’ve happened while I was in jail. I let myself feel hopeful though I knew it wasn’t because of our lock-in. That didn’t matter. Someone’s shouts somewhere had been heard.
I told her I was leaving the program because I’d lost my scholarship. I left out the part about being expelled.
“Nonsense. We’ll figure something out. When were you set to finish?”
I swallowed. “In 2033.”
She looked at me for a long time. She said the next word with her entire face.“What?”
I explained that I could only take a class a semester because of my financial situation.
“What was your plan with this program? Were you ever going to finish it?”
I felt so stupid my words caught on themselves. “I just thought if I kept taking classes, I could write a novel and get published and then with that money pay to finish the program. I don’t know.”
“How much were you paying out of pocket?”
I paused. “Two thousand dollars per semester.”
“And this is foroneclass?”
I nodded.
“Two thousand dollars is too much for a writing class.”
This was easy for her to say. She’d been the one teaching the two-thousand-dollar classes.
“But if I hadn’t done the program I wouldn’t have met you.”
She smiled sadly, reaching into her purse for a cigarette. “Meeting me was not worth two thousand dollars.”
She tapped the ashes onto a glass tray on her lap. I was going to miss her regal profile exhaling smoke. “You have a career ahead of you, do you know that? You don’t need that silly program.” Smoke tumbled from her lips when she said, “I don’t either.”
