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“Have you seen him?” I asked now, hoping my voice sounded casual.
“The other day, briefly,” Conner said, then seemed to hesitate. “There was, uh, a girl with him. He introduced her as something like Gem, Gemma, I can’t remember.”
Iknewthat pretty clerk at the music store was into him. “Jewel.”
“That was it!” Conner was quiet for a minute, Shani’s voice coming through in the background. “Shani said I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
Only, holy shit did it matter, because for days afterward it was all I could think about. I’d never been a particularly jealous person, but the idea of Sam with another woman made me literally sick to my stomach. Every night I slept in hisLAUNCH INTO LEARNING!T-shirt and red boxer briefs that I’d purposefully never returned. It was all completely unlike me.
The week of my dissertation defense finally rolled around, and that at least was back in my comfort zone. It was what I’d prepared for the last five and a half years, and I couldn’t allow my focus to wander now.
I had one more meeting scheduled with Dr.Nilsson, although she’d assured me it was just a formality to go through a few last things about the structure of the defense. I’d turned in my conclusion and revised all the previous chapters based on her initial notes, and I knew the dissertation itself was in pretty good shape.
“Who’s going to be there on Thursday?” she said toward the end of the meeting, when I thought we’d wrapped everything up. I wanted to say,Hopefully, you and the rest of my committee?but could tell she wanted more from my answer. I just didn’t know what.
“Family, friends,” she clarified. “You can invite anyone you’d like for the first part. It can be a nice way to show all the people who’ve supported you in this journey what you’ve been working toward. We know that doctorates aren’t earned alone.”
“A lot of people from the department should be there,” I said. Some of them I considered friends, although I realized I’d spent the last few years focused on my work, and not really taking a lot of time for extracurricular friendships. The truth was that Ihadbeen alone, for a while. But it had always been the way I liked it, where I called all the shots and I was responsible only to myself. It had never feltlonely.
Now, suddenly it did.
“Mmm,” Dr.Nilsson said. And I should’ve dropped it, but something about the way she hummed that syllable, a judgment I sensed there, made me bristle.
“You’re the one who said I should keep my options open,” I said. “Right? Not get too tied down in one place or with one person, keep myself flexible so I could be more marketable for academic jobs?”
She blinked at me, as if she were genuinely taken aback by the vehemence of my question. Probably she was. I doubted she even remembered having that conversation, but it had stuck in my head ever since.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “That’s true, to an extent. It can be a nomadic road at first, trying to find a tenure-track position that is the right fit for you. And I won’t sugarcoat it—the market is more competitive than ever. But I apologize if I gave you the impression that you couldn’t have relationships. This can be a hard road, too, and sometimes those connections are what you need to get through it. My parents flew all the way from Sweden to see my defense.”
“Really?”
“Many years ago,” she said wryly. “They didn’t understand any of it. But it meant a lot to me, to look out at the people in that room and see their faces there.”
I had the absurd impulse to make a joke, something about imagining people in their underwear when you get nervous. But I couldn’t workshop it in my head fast enough—for the best, considering that Dr.Nilsson was not generally known for her sense of humor. Instead I just sat there like a potato, still trying to wrap my head around the soft expression on Dr.Nilsson’s face when she thought back to her family’s support decades earlier.
Dr.Nilsson smiled at me. “You’re well prepared, Phoebe,” she said. “Get some rest, and I’ll see you Thursday.”
?UNFORTUNATELY,get some restwas advice I rarely followed. Instead, I paced around my apartment while Lenore watched me from her usual spot on the back of the couch. I scrolled through my streaming options, trying to find something to watch that would let me zone out a little, and instead landed on an episode ofDisappearedthat I’d somehow never seen.
“I know, I know,” I said to Lenore, giving her a few scratches under her chin as it started up. “This is not me making healthy choices.”
The setup was classic—a young husband and wife, both working two jobs in their quest for the American Dream. I almost wished Conner was there, just so he could see how right I was about the narrative choices these shows always made. Because the couple were always working, there was plausible deniability as to why it took the husband three days to even realize hiswife was missing, but still. Clearly this was going to end up another one of thosethe husband did itones.
I leaned my head back against the couch, which caused Lenore to look at me slit-eyed before going back to her breadloaf nap. I felt such a sudden strong desire to have Sam there with me it was almost painful. He’d probably have convinced Lenore to curl right up in his lap by now, would find ways to give thisDisappearedjabroni the benefit of the doubt as he described his frantic search for his missing wife. Hell, Sam wasn’t evenhereand I was already breaking character to root for love in this episode. No way could the husband be involved. Why weren’t the police taking him seriously, filing a missing persons report?
When the wife was found alive, the victim of a horrible car accident that might not have been discovered in time were it not for the husband’s persistence, I was shocked to find myself actually tearing up. It was cathartic, the relief that she was okay after all—something true crime programming rarely gave you. But there was more to it than that.
Somehow, Sam had sanded down my cynical edges. I’d built up this armor for so long, and I’d always worried I wouldn’t recognize myself without it. But it turned out that Ilikedwho I was with Sam. Dr.Nilsson had talked about what a hard road academia could be, and I knew it was true even as I’d discounted her words. I wasn’t afraid of traveling hard roads alone. I’d done it before.
But I didn’twantto do it anymore. And with this dissertation defense, I’d practiced and practiced my presentation, tried to predict questions I might get and prepare brief, articulate answers to them. But I’d never really thought about how it would feel toactually be up there, staring out at a crowd of people there to listen to my research. Hadn’t considered that there might be people I would want there, not because they were colleagues or future graduates, but because they cared about me, and I cared about them, and I wanted to share this part of my life.
I wanted Conner and Shani there, if it was at all possible this late in the game. I wanted Conner to give me a high five afterward and say something ridiculous about the one twisted detail he’d gleaned from my entire presentation. I wanted Shani to be there, radiating positivity and encouragement. I knew it was very unlikely that Alison would be able to come, but I would love for her to.
Most of all, I wanted Sam.
?THE ARRANGEMENTS WEREeasier to make than I’d thought. After I’d sent out a few texts, a poet from my teaching practicum last year said she’d be happy to come by and feed Lenore and clean out the litter box. It almost made me feel bad, how quickly she responded, because I’d considered her an acquaintance but had never thought we had much in common. It just highlighted the ways I’d kept myself in my own little bubble, thinking that there was no point in trying, when there were people out there ready to be friendly at the first opportunity.
