Gwen was still following him with her eyes. “Oh my god.”
“He doesn’t seem like a first-year. What do you think—third? Fourth?”
“He wasn’t on the email list because he’s not a student.” Gwen grabbed my jacket sleeve and turned me toward the open double doors, where a woman in her fifties with a dark red bob and blunt-cut bangs was shrugging off a stiff woolen cape. In her knee-high boots with dramatic spike heels, she only came up to Rocky’s shoulder, but she had the air of a much taller woman. Expertly balancing his already half-drained refill in one hand while receiving her cape with the other, he seemed to shrink into the background.
“That’s Professor Pyotr Semyonovich,” Gwen said in awe. “Mr. Bethany Ladd.”
* * *
Six o’clock came early the next morning. Sheepish about my mistake and nervous about my first shift at Nona, I had left the reception early and walked home alone. Before I went to bed, I’d pulled Gwen’s copy of Ethical Negation off the shelf and flipped through it idly. This morning I cracked it open again, determined to get through the introduction over breakfast. But I must have been groggier than usual, because after only a couple of pages, I found myself completely lost and had to start over. By the time I left for my training shift at Nona, I had managed half a chapter but had to admit to myself that I’d need to read it again. I didn’t really understand it.
My trainer at Nona looked me up and down with a bored smile and showed me around the kitchen until the Saturday slam hit. Within minutes, our section filled up with boozy brunch-goers, and I forgot about everything but carting French toast out of the kitchen, refilling coffees, and tipping the contents of mimosa pitchers into champagne flutes.
When it was all over, and my trainer had thrown a couple twenties my way and left, the time was 1:30. I was supposed to be meeting Rocky in half an hour.
“Shit.” I yanked at my apron strings. “I have to get out of here. Am I cut?”
Derek flashed me a sadistic smile. “Trainees do the side work. Guessing you haven’t started yet?” He gestured toward the laminated sheets dangling on strings near the walk-in. “I’ll need to check it before you leave. Sometimes we get a second slam. You wouldn’t want to leave your coworkers hanging, would you?”
“Right.” I thought of my actual cohort, the pack of grad students enjoying lunch on the farm, perhaps doing trust falls into bales of hay. I took a deep breath, checked out the laminated sheet, and started hauling racks of glasses and coffee mugs to the wait stations. I sprigged parsley and wedged lemons as sloppily as I dared, arranging the prettiest ones on top. I did the same trick with my tub of silverware, rolling the top row as tightly as cigarettes and stacking them neatly over the disastrous rolls below.
Still, it was 2:04 by the time Derek okayed me to go. I was officially late. I ran to the library, bag bouncing on my back all the way.
I slowed down when I turned the corner and spotted Rocky standing in front of the library smoking, but I was still sweating and panting when I got there.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“I’ve only just arrived,” Rocky said with a mysterious smile that made me wonder if he was lying. His cigarette wasn’t even half-smoked, but who knew how many he’d already gone through?
“Well, thanks for waiting. I mean, thanks for giving me a ride.” Everything was coming out breathless, but, then, I had a feeling any conversation with Rocky was destined to leave me a little out of breath. Despite his hints last night about a hangover, he looked bright-eyed and freshly shaven, and his dark jeans and strategically rumpled sweater made my work uniform of black pants and a white button-down seem somehow both fussy and sad.
“How was the root canal?”
I followed his glance down to an errant smear of whipped cream on my pants leg and laughed sheepishly. “I made forty bucks.”
“Not bad for one tooth. I’ll have to try it.” Rocky grinned. “Come on, I’m parked close by. You look ready to drop.”
In the car, we stayed silent for a while. I listened to Rocky’s retro-punk playlist and spot-cleaned my pants with a bottle of fizzy water. But as we drove farther away from campus and out toward the suburban and exurban sprawl, he turned the music down.
“So where are you from, Mackenzie?”
“The Chicago area. People call me Mac.”
“Like the computer.” He twisted his mouth ruefully. “I know, I’m one to talk.”
“Where’d you get your nickname?” I already felt so comfortable with him. At Urbana College, I was never the kind of student who fraternized with professors or friended them on social media, but Rocky was different. He seemed more like one of us than a professor.
“In America, nobody really likes saying foreign names.” He scratched his nose. “I was born in Ukraine and came to the States for college. Everybody expected me to be really good at fútbol because I was an international student, but I was terrible.”
“So . . . Rocky?”
“Pyotr means ‘rock,’ more or less. Someone thought they were very clever.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “Maybe it was a comment on my passes, as well. I never asked.”
“I didn’t pick mine either.”
“I was just happy to have an English-sounding name. When you’re shy like me, every little bit helps. Besides . . .” He flashed a grin. “I look like a Rocky, don’t I?”
“What you don’t look is shy.” I immediately regretted it. Too flirty.
But he smiled. “I hide it well with charm,” he said gracefully. I noticed he played up his accent for jokes. “So, what about you? What are you interested in?”
“I’m studying—”
“I know what you’re studying. I was on the admissions committee. I meant outside the Program.”
I blinked. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would want to know. “Film.”
“So why study them? Why not make them?” He sounded more eastern European with every word. “The world needs good movies more than it needs academics.”
“And what if the academics are good?”
“Good, bad. Doesn’t make a difference,” he said offhandedly. “It’s all garbage.”
The wind rushed out of my lungs as if I’d been punched in the stomach. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all.”
Rocky looked sideways at me, hands tightening momentarily on the wheel. His eyebrows furrowed for a moment, and I could have sworn I saw a flicker of pity in his black eyes. Then he looked at the road again. “That’s good. You’ll do well here.”
He turned the music back up.
* * *
The “farmhouse” was a two-story glass box set high up on a hillside surrounded by trees. From the gravel drive where Rocky parked the car behind a trail of hatchbacks and sedans, I could see straight into the large front room, an atrium with walls of glass and a dizzyingly high ceiling. The back wall, in contrast with the modernist furniture and glass walls, was weathered gray shiplap hung with giant sculptural farm machinery parts, three stories high, like the side of a barn sliced off and displayed in a museum showcase. In the open-plan kitchen, tin and cast-iron appliances were set in austere concrete blocks that seemed to rise from the concrete floor on their own. A floating staircase led up past the barn wall to a balcony perched high over the main room.