Page 1 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

Chapter One

I am a realist. I’m pragmatic, responsible for my own choices. I don’t put much stock in fate, luck, karma, destiny, horoscopes, serendipity, superstition, or wishing on shooting stars and blown-out birthday candles. While no one can anticipate every disruptive traffic jam or deadline-obliterating head cold, I’ve been raised with a firm understanding that most problems arise due to insufficient forethought or preparation. Generally speaking, I agree. However, in this particular case—the case of throwing my entire life into uncharacteristic disarray—I blame the sinkhole.

I was cycling to work this morning, passing through a quiet intersection while silently singing along to a pop song I’d never publicly admit knowing all the words to, when my bike wobbled. I veered right, but not fast enough to pedal away from the horrific sound of rending pavement. The street tilted. My bike lurched. The back wheel caught in a newly formed crevice. I leaped off and scrambled away just in time to watch a gaping void appear and swallow my bike whole, its ensuing crash so muffled it might’ve fallen to the center of the earth.

While a nearby pedestrian called the incident in, I caught my breath, crept closer, and peered into the darkness. I couldn’t see the bottom or my bike, just a thick cross section of rent pavement that dropped into nothingness. And all I could think was, if something that solid, that reliable could fall away without warning, engulfing whatever was passing over it, what was I doing in a job I found increasingly demoralizing by the day, living in a city too unyieldingly urban and far from the ocean to ever truly feel like home, renting an expensive apartment whose only unarguable assets were its excellent water pressure and its convenient location above my favorite Thai restaurant, while staying in a relationship with someone my embarrassingly small friend group referred to only as “that guy you sometimes have sex with”?

While all of these questions have logical answers I’ve retread many times with a series of not-quite-the-right-fit-for-me therapists, those answers vanished when I saw the sinkhole. When I knew not just in an abstract sense but in a visceral, heart-pounding way that at any moment, even the soundest foundation could crumble without warning. That I could die without warning.

And so, less than an hour later, I found myself standing in my department chair’s office.

“What do you mean, you’re quitting?” Carl asked me. He’s a sixty-seven-year-old man who cultivates a professorial look with plaid bow ties and elbow-patched tweed jackets. He’s also married to a woman who used to be his grad student. It’s his third marriage, all of them with his former students. It’s possible my lack of respect for Carl also led me to this point.

“I mean, I’m handing in my notice,” I told him, standing at the foot of his big oak desk with its brass banker’s lamp and old globe bookends, every accoutrement screaming I’m an academic! as though anyone who entered this office would require extra context clues.

“But we’ve already budgeted for next year,” Carl replied.

Priorities, I guess.

“I’m sure you’ll find someone else to cover my usual classes. Or this could be a good time to consider alternatives. Our students have diverse interests that go way beyond eighteenth-century warfare and the ethical contradictions inherent in the Enlightenment.”

“True, true.” Carl scratched his chin in a way that implied he wished he had a full beard instead of a barely there mustache. “It’s all about social media and pop culture these days, though your class about Mary Read and Anne Bonny is still oddly popular.”

I forced a smile, but it was lackluster at best. I don’t find it “odd” that students want to learn about women who disguised themselves as men to join pirate crews. I’m also pretty sure the diminishing numbers in the department’s required survey courses have little to do with a lack of pop-culture content and are largely related to thirty-year-old syllabi that still suggest rich white men did everything that ever mattered and Christopher Columbus was a heck of a guy.

“I’ll take two weeks to wrap up outstanding administrative work,” I said. “I should also be able to clear out my office by then so you can repaint it for my replacement hire.”

Carl chuckled. He didn’t laugh under his breath. Or snicker. Or snort. He chuckled.

I have a personal loathing for people who chuckle.

“We can’t recruit someone with that tiny little closet,” he said. “It doesn’t have a window. Or heat. And it’s nowhere near the other offices.” He chuckled, again, while I imagined throwing the space heater I had to buy for myself at his shiny bald head. “We’ll get the dean to find us a new space. That conversation is long overdue anyway.”

I continued seething in silence, a practice I’d been forced to master lest I actually start throwing things. When I was recruited, I was told the available office space was nonnegotiable. I’ve been using that space for seven years. I never even got a name plaque for the door.

“Then I guess it’s all settled,” I said. “Nothing else to cover.”

I was baiting him, of course, willing him to say something like We’ll miss you or Thank you for your dedicated service to the department. He could. He might. He even studied me for several seconds, as though, perhaps, he was considering the right words to mark the moment.

“Are we supposed to get you a card or a goodbye gift or something?” he asked.

I counted to five. Took a deep breath. Tried to forget all the times I’d been consulted about social protocols, as if my greatest professional assets were not my extensive knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European history, my commitment to my students, or my thorough and efficient service work but rather, knowing the appropriateness of providing lunch at an all-day retreat. I’ve also been asked at several meetings if I’m taking notes for everyone.

“A card won’t be necessary,” I said. “I’ll work out the details of my departure with HR. You can focus on sorting out that memo about a new office space.”

Carl nodded, completely missing my exasperation, which meant either I was doing a bang-up job of hiding it or he had yet to grasp any reason I might’ve had to be exasperated. Probably both. As a woman working in an otherwise all-male department, I’ve learned that exhibiting exasperation only leads to my being pegged as angry and unreasonable.

Am I angry? Often. Am I unreasonable? Rarely, if ever.

I love teaching history, especially history that surprises my students and gives them new context for what’s happening today. The interconnectivity. The cycles that repeat. The variations in those cycles that demonstrate proof of positive change. The artistic explorations and scientific discoveries that spark intellectual curiosity, inspire awe, and expand our understanding of life. The successes and the missteps. The ways the journey of a single individual parallels events with massive global impact, and vice versa. All of it demonstrates who we are as humans, across eras and borders. Pre-technology, people wanted a lot of the same things we do now. Safety. Comfort. Community. Knowledge. Creative fulfillment. Self-actualization. Sex. Love. Social inclusion. A bigger car, carriage, or castle than their neighbor. People aren’t perfect, far from it, but studying centuries of effort at making things a tiny bit closer to perfect has always given me hope.

Then I’d get an announcement that all four of my male colleagues were receiving raises while I—the only woman on the full-time faculty in the history department and the only member to publish in the last five years—got overlooked. Again. Or I’d spend my office hours advising stressed-out students I barely knew, but whose desperate emails to their faculty advisors went unanswered. Or I’d watch my colleagues praise the new hire’s “precise and incisive” thirty-page administrative document for the umpteenth time, even though I was the one who wrote it, only no one read it until he added his name along with three lines specific to his field and then recirculated it, and it has been known ever since as “Peter’s document.” Academic culture is also changing. So many students want to be fed information they can spit out verbatim on a test rather than learning to think critically and independently. If they don’t get what they want, they file complaints, exploiting a system that was set up to protect them, not to do more harm.

I’ve poured myself into this career. Being a history professor is the only job I’ve ever wanted. But lately, I’ve lost the passion, and the disappointment I’ve felt in a career I once revered has bled into my social life, my love life, and even how I eat or exercise. It crept up on me slowly, initially dismissed as temporary and circumstantial, but for years now, I’ve been telling myself to “just get through the day,” only to wake up and pep-talk myself into getting through another day, wondering when I’ll reach a point where I’m not waiting for something to change, something that makes me enjoy the moment I’m in, instead of gritting my teeth and watching the days, weeks, and years slip away. Something that makes me feel like I’m alive.

If only I knew what that something was.

All of this brings me to now, two hours later, after I filed a thirty-day lease termination on my apartment and sent a polite but definitive I don’t think we should see each other anymore text to Noah, which he replied to with a simple OK, telling me everything I need to know about our relationship and leaving me with a gulf of loneliness as big as the sinkhole I almost fell into this morning. I’m also wrestling with the growing awareness that I’ve panicked my way out of my job, my home, and the closest thing I’ve known to a romantic relationship in a decade, not that it was romantic in the conventional sense, but the sex was good, and I really liked Noah’s dog.