AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The straights could never,” he says and this time I laugh.
“Yeah. I’ll go,” I say, even though it makes my chest feel tight, a date that might end like the last one. Or a person who might expect me to fit within their life when I can barely fit into my own. “On one condition,” I say.
“Anything.”
I can tell he means it.
“You stop meddling.”
George is quiet, staring blankly at the TV screen. Like he has to think about it and he’s weighing his options, as if it might be worth canceling on this “Lulu” for the right to keep sticking his nose in my business.
“George.”
He sighs. “Fine.”
I sit back against the couch and focus on the match. This feels like a win, even if it isn’t really.
Chapter Two
Lulu
Wilvale University boasts fewer than ten thousand students on one hundred and fifty acres of land and yet I always seem to run into the same people. I expected the history department to be quiet today since the Phillies have a better chance of winning the World Series than an academic has of dragging themselves to campus on a Saturday, but the bathroom door swings open just as I’m ready to flush and I freeze in my stall.
I try to catch a glimpse of the shoes that enter the stall next to mine but they’re not the heels that Miranda wears or the orthopedic sneakers that the semiretired Dr. Hoff wears. They’re flats, but fancy, the kind with a pointed toe. They tell me all I need to know about who this is. My bathroom companion finishes their business as I stand stock-still and it doesn’t occur to me that they a) probably know I’m in here, too and b) think it’s weird that I’m just standing here listening to them pee?
Get it together, Lu.
And yet. I wait until the door opens and closes on their retreating footsteps before I unlock the door. I lean against the sink after I wash my hands. The summer semester started last week and I find myself teaching the same first-level course that I’ve taught since I started here in the fall: Introduction to Western History, which is really just a sterile way of saying, we’re going to teach you about a bunch of old dead, white guys from the fall of Rome until the First World War. And let’s face it, that’s already a pretty sterile topic.
“Imagine,” I say to my reflection. “The horrific finality of being remembered only for the worst thing you’ve never done.”
I make a face likeblech. It’s a bit dramatic and over the top, but it’s gripping. It’s exactly the way I’d want to start my gender and witchcraft course, if I could ever get out from underneath this first-year survey course the department has saddled me with.
As I finish washing my hands, I recite more of the lecture that I’ve lain in bed crafting, that I’ve spent hours working on when I should have been reading a new article about gender theory or grading exams or working on a proposal for a book.
“Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of people—mostly women—were murdered because they were believed to be witches...” I swing the door open with too much force, the handle hitting the wall with a loud bang. I cringe and poke my head out into the history department hallway but whoever was in the bathroom with me doesn’t seem to be around now.
A lot of academics see teaching as a speed bump, something that gets in the way of research and writing, but I grew up watching my dad take hours to prepare his lectures. He’d practice in the mirror and rehearse for mom at the dinner table. He cares so much about his students, about giving them the chance to love history as much as he does. I didn’t have any other choice but to feel the same way.
“Other than their alleged crimes, historians don’t know much about them. Sometimes names were recorded, sometimes ages. But their lives before they were ‘witches’ are lost.” I pause, patting my pockets down for my phone. I open the notes app, ignoring the red notification from my lunch buddy, George, and type: “Anonymous. Erased. Their history was burned up along with them, on flaming pyres.”
Damn. I’m good. That’s good, right?
Behind me, someone giggles, sharp and high. In this hallway, with the tiled floor and cement brick walls painted white, the sound echoes, matching the stark and impersonal feeling of the history department. I hunch my shoulders up to my ears, a defensive position before I’ve even turned around. Dr. Audrey Robbs and Dr. Frank Hill peer out from the now open doorway of Dr. Miranda Jackson’s office.
“Who are you talking to?” Audrey asks. Her tone makes it clear she knows I was talking to myself and she thinks that’s a little bit weird.
“No one,” I say quickly. “I was...” I clear my throat, trying to buy myself time to come up with an excuse, but I’ve always been a terrible liar. “Practicing.”
“Practicing for what, Dr. Banks?” Miranda smiles, welcoming and warm where Audrey and Frank are skeptical, sharing a look.
“Um.” I clear my throat again. They’re going to think I’m getting sick if I keep this up. “A lecture.”
“For Intro to Western History?” Audrey asks. Audrey’s style resembles Miranda’s more than the grad student chic that I still sport, despite receiving my doctorate two years ago, which consists of any available clean clothes that match my Keds. Which means really any type of clothing at all. Everything matches Keds.
Audrey wears a pair of pointy-toed flats, made to resemble animal hide, a skirt in the graphite-est of grays, and a blouse that buttons to the collar. She’d never be caught dead in sneakers, or talking to herself. Frank already looks bored and disdainful, offended by my presence, though he doesn’t reserve that for just me. He thinks he’s God’s gift to the study of eleventh-to-thirteenth-century monastic orders and manuscript illumination.
“For a...” I wasn’t planning to pitch this idea until the planning meeting later this summer, but Miranda’s here now, I guess. It would be good to get her input. I look from Audrey to Frank, gauging the level of judgment on their faces.
