Page 5

MARCELLA

TWOLacie

It’s not like Laurel to stand me up, even for a syllabus-prep session, but I’m not going to freak out.

I scratch at the collar of my fisherman sweater, twisting my lips as I stare at my phone, willing it to buzz with a notification. Laurel promised me she would be here, and she’s only twenty-eight minutes late. Maybe she just got caught up with an undergrad after class—she teaches Intro to Latin before this. I know where. I could go check.

But that would be weird, so I won’t.

Not yet.

I take a sip of the latte long gone cold on the table in front of me. Preston’s already starting to empty out ahead of Thanksgiving recess, even though we still have classes for another two weeks. Blame it on those rich parents and entitled undergrads who think that higher education is simply a line item on a checklist: for women, their marriage dowry; for men, their Wall Street pedigree.

My foot’s tapping beneath the table, my brown oxford squeaking against the chair leg. I will it to stop.

I have to get to work, but it’s so much easier and more fun when Laurel is with me. I mean, who wants to write next semester’s syllabus for a bunch of half-asleep twenty-year-olds alone, anyway? Not me.

I swallow the rest of my coffee.

Thirty minutes late.

Dammit.

I pick up my phone and tap out a text.

Hey, still meeting at the Perk?

Then I delete it because that sounds needy, and I’m not, I’m just worried. There have been too many assistant professors quitting lately and I can’t keep track of which classes I have to cover week after week.

Instead, I type:

You ghostin’ me?

I send it because it sounds cute to my ears and a little less direct. It could be a joke, ha-ha-funny, between the two of us. But it’s not, is it? I haven’t heard from her since last Friday, when we made this plan. It’s Tuesday.

My stomach flip-flops.

The Perk is the only place on Preston’s campus that’s still somewhat alive. The air hums softly with conversation, a group of giggling undergrads sitting cross-legged on the corner couches, their binders and notebooks and highlighters all out between them. Finals are around the corner, and I see this group every week. They’re so sweet with one another. Tucking each other’s hair behind their ears and helping one another with note-card memorization and buying red-eye espressos as the hour gets later and later.

I remember being their age: bright, fun, young. Salutatorian at Columbia. I didn’t get to give a speech at graduation—that’s only for valedictorian—but I did get to wear a special sash. It was nice. I had friends, then, or at least study buddies.

I thought I had friends, now. A friend, at least. I like how academia makes it impossible to not have colleagues. One of the built-in perks is how I get to experience what normal social relationships feel like. Some even close enough to call friends.

My phone’s still silent. Where is Laurel? She can’t have quit. Not without telling me, right? Admittedly, being an assistant professor here is challenging. We have hours and hours of coursework divvied up by student ranking. Dean Shea likes to say that his system for assigning work is a meritocracy: that the assistants and adjuncts whose students have the lowest scores on their qualifying exams and orals in grad school get the highest course load to help teach them. More assignments means more opportunities to boost their ranking on the tenure-track list—and bolster their research. But it also means more opportunities to fail, and if the rate of dropouts is any indication, Dean Shea’s little thought experiment is going too far.

And anyone left in the lurch who performs well—that’s fucking me and Laurel—gets buried under a snowdrift of scheduling.

I stare at the work in front of me. My syllabus is only half done, and tomorrow’s the submission deadline. I should be focusing right now, buckling down. But it’s hard to when you’re overwhelmed by work while simultaneously being totally uninspired by the subject matter. Plus, I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong with Laurel.

Once, I was intimidated by her. It’s crazy, with my academic background. But she came as a transplant from Stanford with three fluent living languages, as well as three dead languages under her belt. She was hailed privately as a prodigy by Dean Shea—I heard him talking to Dr. Winthrop in the faculty lounge behind Lowell. She’s going to lift this department higher than it’s ever been before.

I didn’t want to look at her, at first. I was afraid that if she knew me personally, she would see my glaring inadequacies: I only know passable Latin and Old Norse. Icelandic is a natural byproduct, too, but my only other two living languages are English and German.

But then the number of assistant professors in the Classics department dwindled so much that we were forced to work together. I’ll never forget the first time we sat in on an honors thesis presentation for one of the undergrad seniors together. Laurel in her crisp black blazer, ten minutes early to my eight, her horn-rimmed glasses slipping down her nose as she took preemptive notes.

“Hey,” I said to her, putting my bag down. “Just the two of us, then?”

“And Helmsley,” she said, not looking up as she brushed dark hair behind one ear. “Can’t wait to get this over with, because I’m going to miss my grading deadline if I don’t get to the library.”