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“I can do that,” he says. He pushes my messy hair back and kisses my cheek, which stokes a small warmth in my stomach. I lean my head on his shoulder for a moment and breathe in his smell.
“Hey, are you falling asleep?” Rex says.
“Mmhmm.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come home with me? I’ll cook you dinner.”
I groan. That sounds amazing, but all I really want is to go to bed.
“Thanks,” I say, “but it’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow night?” He nods. “Probably around nine? I can text you when we’re done.”
“Oh, I don’t text,” Rex says, straightening his spine and squaring his shoulders.
“Hunh. Okay, then, Mr. Technophobe. Well, we’re just going to the pizza place around the corner from my apartment, so if I’m not at my place at nine, just come there.”
“Okay,” he says. “Can I at least drive you home?”
“Sure.” He goes back to the computer he was using and puts what look like a few CDs and some printouts in his bag.
When Rex stops his truck in front of my apartment, he turns off the engine and turns to me.
“Listen,” he says. “It’s not going to be crap.”
“What?”
“Your paper. You said it’s going to be crap because you’re writing it at the last minute. I know that isn’t true. You’re too hard on yourself. I’m sure it’ll be great.”
“You can’t be sure,” I tell him. I hate it when people say things like this almost as much as I hate it when they assume my writing’s going to be bad. “You’ve never even read anything I’ve written.”
Rex pulls his hand from mine and his jaw clenches. He looks out the window.
“Sorry,” I say. I thought my tone was pretty matter-of-fact, but I’ve clearly hurt his feelings.
Rex shakes his head.
“No, you’re right. I’ve never read anything you’ve written. I’m sure it’s all real over my head.”
He sounds disgusted and I feel like I should apologize, but all I did was state a fact.
“Good night, Daniel,” he says.
He sounds far away. I lean over and give him a kiss and his hand comes up to cradle the back of my neck.
“Night.”
I WASN’T looking forward to dinner with Jay, since I thought I’d need every last second to finish my paper. About an hour before we were set to meet up, though, it all just kind of came together. A rogue example turned out to be the perfect introduction, and it let me pull out a thread that had been lurking but that I hadn’t known what to do with. I finished it in a flurry and I’ll have time to check it over tomorrow night when I get to Detroit.
Dinner turned out to be good, though. Once I wasn’t panicking about my paper anymore, it was nice to just chat with Jay about Sleeping Bear and what a weird place it was. He was in grad school in Phoenix, so the weather hit him even harder than it has me. He gave me the scoop on other folks in the department, affirming that Peggy was kind of the antichrist, and went over how he’d approached the student essays last year. He’s a really nice guy, and very easy to talk to.
“So, I have to admit,” Jay says after we’ve talked about the committee, “I was really excited when you took this job.”
“Oh?” I say.
“Yes. Honestly, I was enthusiastic to get someone who came from a different background. You know, not the typical four-year college to grad school route. I imagine going to community college gave you a different perspective on teaching too.”
He doesn’t sound judgmental about it at all, which is pretty uncommon among professors. Most think going to community college is embarrassing. My advisor told me I shouldn’t list it on my CV.
“It did, yeah,” I say. “At CCP—the community college—people were there because they wanted to be. They were mostly older, or they were going part-time while working to pay for it. And some of the professors were really great. But a lot of the classes were easy. I mean, the English classes were good because the teachers would always talk about other books than were on the syllabus, so I could go find those and read them. But, yeah, they weren’t very challenging.
“I could only afford to take a few classes a semester, but I went during the summers too, so when I transferred to Temple to finish out my degree, I only had a year’s worth of credits left. That was all I could afford there. I mean, honestly, I wouldn’t even have done it except I knew I could never get into grad school straight from a community college, so my degree needed to be from Temple. It’s shitty, but that’s how it is.”
Jay nods, his attention intense.
“Anyway, I was really lucky because one of the professors I had for an English class was an adjunct at Temple. I would go to her office hours and we’d talk about books and stuff. She gave me a lot of good recommendations. She’s the one who told me that if I was thinking of grad school, I’d need to transfer. I really didn’t have a clue about how academia worked back then.”
