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A chatty woman had sat herself beside me, hellbent on telling me her whole life story. She talked for three hours straight without ever asking me a single question. Not that I minded, I didn’t plan on answering any questions. Not honestly, anyway, but still. And her perfume was overly strong.
Thankfully, she’d gotten off in St. Louis but I hadn’t been able to fall asleep since.
I found a spot by a plug and plugged in my burner phone that doubled as an mp3 player and FM radio, and settled in.
It charged fairly quickly while I people watched, and then I put my earbuds back in and listened to a couple of podcasts, settling my backpack in my lap and tucking my arms through the straps in case anyone tried to mess with it if I fell asleep.
Then I let my eyes finally settle shut.
The podcaster’s voice droned soothingly and I drifted, and drifted, and drifted…
“Penelope, can you stay after class?”
I blinked and looked up from my paper. There was a bright C- scribbled on the top of it. My nose stung, which was stupid. It was stupid to feel so wounded over a grade. So what if I’d always gotten all A’s in high school.
This was college, and of course I wouldn’t ace every paper. It was just… I’d worked really hard on this one and thought I had done a good job.
The C- glaring at me said otherwise. C- was almost a D.
I nodded at the TA, Jeff Chambers, and my heartbeat started racing for entirely different reasons. He was beloved in the English department, and there’d been much ado about how this was the last class he’d be TA’ing for before switching to his law degree full time. He was already taking classes for it and there was hubbub about how everyone in that department expected great things from him too.
This was the person who’d graded my paper. And now he wanted to see me after class. It couldn’t be for anything good, and yet being singled out by him still made me feel special and brought a flush to my cheeks. Which was even more ridiculous. He was going to chew me out for how bad my paper was and here I was blushing because he was so handsome and all the freshman girls had a crush on him, a graduate student.
I hurried down the row of desks to where he sat typing away on his laptop by the lectern.
“Just a moment,” he said, not looking up from his task as everyone else filed out of the room. I was the only one he’d asked to stay behind. I stood, nervous, trying not to shuffle back and forth from one foot to the other.
Five minutes of waiting, after everyone else was gone, he finally closed the lid of his laptop and looked up at me.
“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the front row of chairs.
I did. “What’s this about?” I asked.
He frowned and brought his hands together, one rubbing the fist of the other. “I’m not sure how to put this delicately,” he said slowly. “Your paper was…”
I found myself leaning forward on the edge of my seat waiting for what he was going to say.
“It was not well-argued. And frankly, doing a feminist reading of Hemingway is far from original.”
His words felt like a blow. I thought I’d put forth a considered and well-supported case for a feminist reading of Hemingway’s short stories. But I didn’t know how to articulate that without sounding stupid in front of this intellectual giant. “So… I take it that it isn’t?”
He smiled at me like I was especially amusing. “No.” He reached forward and took the paper I was still so sweatily grasping and flipped several pages. “While I appreciate your empathy for the girl in Hills Like White Elephants, it’s not grounded in textual evidence.”
“Oh.” I sat there wanting the ground to swallow me up. I’d worked hard on the paper, and it was true, I had felt empathy for the girl in that story, faced with the callous American demanding she get an abortion.
“Hey,” said Jeff, reaching out and putting a hand on my knee, just the quickest touch before removing it. It was just friendly, nothing more, I told myself. “But if you want, I am offering tutoring sessions. There’s a group that meets at my house on Tuesdays. You’re welcome to come.”
I smiled, feeling lit up from his attention. “Really? That’d be great. I want to get my Master’s in Literature so it means so much to me to do well in this class.”
He smiled back at me, a really warm smile that made him look even more handsome. “Here, I’ll write down the address for you, then.” He took my paper from me, flipped it over, and scribbled his address on the back. “Tuesday at seven. Don’t be late.”
“I won’t be,” I gushed. “Promise.”
“Good girl.”
I woke with a start, Jeff’s, “Good girl” still ringing in my ears, and waves of revulsion shuddering through my body.
Only to sit up with a start because oh shit.
