Page 3
He’s not wrong, but wow.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJ: RE. POTENTIAL ASSISTANT PROFESSOR?
ALEX,
NICE CV. WE’D BE HAPPY TO HAVE HER. THANKS FOR THE OFFER, BUT WE HAVE PLENTY OF MONEY TO THROW AROUND.
JOHN
DEAN OF CLASSICS, PRESTON UNIVERSITY
P.S. WHEN ARE YOU PLAYING TORREY PINES THIS SUMMER? LET’S HIT A ROUND, TALK ABOUT WHO OWES WHO AND FOR WHAT.
I wrinkle my nose at being bartered like a side of meat. “I don’t find this satisfactory.” I fold up the paper and set it down on his desk.
“Why not?” Alex asks, his eyes wide, crazed. “Why won’t you leave? Preston is a rung above. Major, moving into Ivy territory. You’d be back in the Northeast, near Princeton, your alma mater. The department is massive: they’ve combined MedRen, as well as Greek and Latin and the other non-European studies, so they share a budget that puts ours to shame. You’d love it. It’s a perfect opportunity.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?”
“If your students and faculty are complaining about me making the program more difficult, why are you trying to pass me off to a competitive school? If you’re concerned about your ranking, you would be keeping me here.”
Alex’s face goes blank. He hadn’t expected pushback.
The reality is that I would love to get the fuck out of this rainy, cold, miserable state and move on to Preston. Think Columbia or Yale but nestled just outside Boston—close enough to major cities to have influence, but not so close that urban sprawl and rent hikes overtake the school’s mission and force them to accept more students than they can easily fit. Their Classics department, which covers not just Latin but my specialty in Old Norse and Icelandic, overtook Duke’s Medieval department last year in rankings. But there’s no way I’m going to tell Alex that he’s actually helping me out. I’ve seen him scoping me out in the hall, his eyes wandering when I’m with students and he thinks I’m not paying attention. He’s a lech and I hate him, not solely because of his lechery but because he pretends his morals are shinier and better than everyone else’s.
He’s as smarmy as the rest of them, and I’m not indulging him.
“I want to k-keep you here,” Alex says, his voice carrying a soft stutter, “but my staff is on the edge of mutiny. Please, you have to stop—doing whatever it is you’re doing.”
“And what am I doing?”
“You—I don’t know, but—I can’t ignore it anymore. They work with you and then they’re gone. I can’t—I can’t keep losing professors, Marcella. Please, go.”
I grin at him, pulling my oxblood lips wide. My teeth glimmer. “Why are you so worried about a couple of boys, Dean Hansen?”
I can’t help it. I want him to fear me and what I can do. I’m riding right up to the line I drew in the sand myself: to never tell anyone what I am, especially not a mortal man.
“I—I—” he stammers.
I stand up, tracing a languid path around his overfilled office, plucking a book off the shelf and tossing it at him. He scrambles, catches it. “Are you so worried about the dick measuring here that you’d kick out your star instructor?” I grab another, throw it, draw closer. He misses this time, and the spine splits as it hits the ground.
“We don’t—”
“Don’t you want to have someone here who scares the shit out of you?” Another book. It hits the floor.
He starts to back up toward his window.
“Don’t you want that star power? No matter the cost?” This book hits him with a satisfying crunch, and his nose starts to bleed.
He groans and covers his face, his voice muffled behind a hand.
