“No, no, no,” Mary-Abigail said, backtracking immediately when faced with Gracie’s challenge. “I mean, I think it’s a good thing he was paroled. I’m just wondering what he’s, like, going to do.”
“He can probably just get a normal job,” Gracie said, looking at her nails. “The academic job market is shit even for people who actuallycompletedtheir DAAs. Like, good luck to any of us trying to find tenure-track positions somewhere other than Bumfuck, Nowhere.”
“And I actually heard Bumfuck no longer offers tenure.” It was Valentine. Ellsbeth hadn’t seen him standing behind the girls. They all laughed.
“But isn’t Maxwell, like, still a felon?” Rachel asked. “I know he got parole, but you still can’t get anormaljob or whatever when you have a record.”
“Personally,” Valentine said, “I’m shocked they gave him parole at all. Have you seen photos of him? He looks like a creep.”
“Classic school-shooter vibes,” Gracie agreed.
Rachel was the fastest to pull out her phone. “Ohmygod, you’re so right,” she said. She flashed her screen toward the rest of the group, and Ellsbeth caught a glimpse of the photo. It was a mugshot of a teenage boy with dark stringy hair and familiar eyes.
“I’m just hoping he doesn’t show up here today,” Valentine said.
Rachel gave a mock-squeal and slapped his arm. “Why would he behere?”
“To see his mom, obviously! Of course Lennox is just doing this lecture like business as usual today. Ice-cold, that woman.”
“Did you know Rawlins was his adviser when Max was at Newlyn?” Gracie said. “They were apparently super close. I think Rawlins took a sabbatical after it all happened.”
“Well, yeah,” Valentine said. “So would I. If my student murdered someone.”
Ellsbeth stood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you talking about Maxwell Keene?”
They all turned to look at her.
“Yeah,” Gracie said. “He just got paroled, apparently.”
“Are youokay?” Rachel said. “I mean, no one has seen you outside of class for, like, weeks.”
“Oh.” Ellsbeth tried to hide the crumpled program and her quick-bitten nails. “I’ve just been working on my thesis. It’s been kicking my ass. And you know, winter.”
“Seasonal affective disorder,” Rachel said, nodding sympathetically. “What? It’s real!”
“Do you think Lennox will bring it up?” Valentine said.
“SAD?” said Rachel.
“No—her son,” said Gracie. “And not a chance. I don’t even know if she publicly talks about having a kid at all. Even if he weren’t a felon, it’s not like Lennox givesLeave It to Beavervibes.”
“What about the dad?” asked Ellsbeth.
“Oh, he’s a nobody,” said Valentine. “Something Keene. Bradley or Ben or something. You can google him. He wrote one book twenty years ago, about owls or falcons or something nobody gives a shit about. Lennox has his balls in a jar on her desk.”
An imperceptible shift in the energy in the room alerted people to the fact that it was time for people to take their seats. Ellsbeth scooted down the row to make room for the rest of the group.
Lennox approached the podium, her shoulders pulled back and a soft practiced smile on her face. Her hair was enviably thick, dyed an expensive chestnut brown. Even in her mid-sixties, fine lines tracing the corners of her eyes, she conveyed a sense of professional glamour that Ellsbeth had imagined was impossible outside of movie stars and French women. She was stunning in a perfectly tailored navy dress. Ellsbeth could only imagine how beautiful she had been in her youth, as a wunderkind professor at Yale. Rawlins had been at Yale as an undergraduate, hadn’t he? A nagging memory of an email Rawlins had once sent tugged at Ellsbeth’s fingers, and she tried to pull out her phone as subtly as she could while Lennox began her introductoryremarks. (Valentine was right: There was no mention of Maxwell Keene or the parole, just polite greetings and a segue into the recent promising developments in the field of perpetual motion.)
She searched in her email account. There were months of correspondence for her to scroll through between her and Rawlins, mostly about her thesis, but also emails that had been so intimate, so explicit that even just seeing familiar subject lines made her cross her legs. She tilted her screen to make sure no one nearby could see what she was doing, and scrolled all the way back to September. And then there it was.
When I studied under Dr. Lennox, she gave me an analogy that I have embraced: an adviser is a student’s opponent more than her ally.
Rawlins had studied under Lennox, possibly when he was an undergraduate. Ellsbeth’s face began to tingle strangely. Lennox continued talking, but nothing she was saying seemed to make any sense; the words simply did not connect to one another anymore. The letters on Ellsbeth’s phone inflated and blurred. She closed one eye, and then the other. Rawlins had studied under Lennox. He’d had an affair with a professor when he was an undergraduate. She had been a professor at Yale. Rawlins had gone to Yale.
And Maxwell Keene’s eyes looked very familiar.
“Sorry,” Ellsbeth whispered, standing. “I just—bathroom.”
