“Wow,” I said as we made our way up the drive.
Rocky kept his eyes on the path ahead. “Impressive, isn’t it? Bethany hired a German architecture firm for the remodel.”
I was speechless. So, the farmhouse belonged to Bethany and Rocky. On the whole drive up, he hadn’t even mentioned it.
“She wanted it to blend in with the surroundings,” he continued. “Many of the materials were harvested from other buildings on the property.”
“Other buildings?”
“It’s a farm. The land was slated for development at some point, but it had been sitting there for years when Bethany bought it and restored it to its former glory. The new working farm is on the other side of the hills, over there.” He waved his hand vaguely. “There are horses. It’s all very American.”
I gathered that Rocky didn’t care much for his wife’s project. Looking up at the walls that were all window, I said, “It must be hard to get work done in a place like that. With everyone looking in.”
“There’s plenty of privacy in the loft. I just don’t like working.” He laughed shortly.
“Bethany does?” I stumbled over her first name. It felt normal when discussing her with Gwen but weirdly intimate when talking to her husband.
“I assume that’s what she uses it for.”
Before we reached the door, Gwen emerged from the woods with two other grad students, carrying a basket and laughing. She waved. “Mac! Come join our team.”
“Team?”
“We’re in the middle of a scavenger hunt.” Gwen held the basket aloft. “For dinner.”
“That’s my exit cue,” Rocky said, gesturing toward the door, a splotchy metal slab set in the glass wall. “It was lovely to get to know you, Mac. Best of luck being a good academic.” He leaned in very close, with a wry grin. “I hope your team wins.”
“Thanks.” My face burned, but he was already walking away.
Gwen thrust the basket into my hand. “I think your team was supposed to be dessert, but nobody’ll care if you help us with the sides.” A dozen or so ears of corn rolled and bumped around the bottom of the basket.
“They grow corn here?”
She gave me a look. “I presume it’s from the Food Lion. It was hidden in a well. We have to find butter next. Come look at the clue sheet, I think Connor and Letty have almost got it.”
There was a round of quick introductions. Connor Yu was tall and gangly, wearing a multicolored scarf and just a few too many coordinated layers to be straight; Letty McMillan’s pixie cut made the tiny redhead look even tinier. Letty glanced up from the paper and frowned, pushing her green-rimmed glasses up her nose. “This part is a reference to The Anatomy of Melancholy.”
“Letty’s a medievalist,” Connor said. “She knows her Latin.”
Gwen flashed me a look of pride. “Show it to Mac, she’s really good at spotting patterns.”
As I leaned over the page of clues, a warmth spread through my chest. It was almost four, and the sunlight had the emphatic strength it gets just before the slant becomes noticeable. I was finally in the right place, at the right time, surrounded by the right people, after a lifetime of having always been a little wrong.
By the time we made it back to the glass house on the hill, the spaghetti crew was already chopping garlic while a giant pot of water came to a boil on the big black stove. Team Salad stood rinsing greens over the antique double-basin sink. The only team we had beaten back to the house was dessert, presumably still roving the grounds in search of apples and frozen pie crusts, and I felt slightly guilty for having abandoned them. But nobody seemed to be keeping score. A small group of professors chatted on the white sectional sofa under the floating staircase, their thumbs squeaking across stemless wineglasses like a tiny orchestra of mice. I dumped the basket of corn on the kitchen island, a brick kiln topped with a huge square of teak, and Letty, Connor, Gwen, and I started shucking.
The kitchen seemed to get louder and tinier as the evening wore on, the glass walls going opaque with steam between us and the darkening night. Tiny Letty was shucking corn opposite me, and I found my gaze drifting over her head toward the knot of professors conversing just beyond her. A pair of nearly identical white men in their mid-forties with rectangular glasses and tight-fitting sweaters (specialties: economimesis and future shock) waved their hands at each other in animated discussion. Rocky (virtual museum studies) chatted with Margaret (diasporic feminisms or the feminist diaspora, I’d seen it both ways). Alone in the corner, an ancient, white-haired Shakespearean fidgeted.
“Where do you think she is?” Connor hissed into my ear.
I pulled back, startled. “Who?”
“You know who. Bethany Ladd. Do you think she donated her house just so she wouldn’t have to come? Like a Faustian bargain? After all, she’s the reason most of us are even here.”
I glanced at Gwen, who was the reason I was here. She was tugging husks off corncobs on the opposite corner of the kitchen island. I shrugged. “Maybe she’s busy.”
“Drinking the blood of virgins, you mean?”
“If that’s what she drinks, it’s no wonder she’s not hanging around here.” I was rewarded with a chuckle.
“Who’s going to sleep with whom?” Connor whispered. “Point your corn.”
I let the tip of my corncob drift more or less at random to the right, where it settled on Arjun, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, currently whipping vinegar and oil together with screeching fork tines.
“So far, I approve.” Connor pretended to be absorbed in the strands of silk clinging to his cob. “And . . . ?”
Morgan, a swanlike hipster with a waterfall of blue hair.
Connor squinted. “Darwinian. I like it.”
“Your turn.”
Connor flattened a thin strip of green corn husk on the counter, placing one fingertip right in the center. Then he rotated it like the hand of a clock until the frayed end pointed diagonally across the table at Gwen.
I gasped, giggled nervously. “And . . . ?”
Keeping his pointer finger firmly in place, Connor scooched the compass needle counterclockwise.
“Little Miss Latin?” Anything seemed possible in this world.
“Not Letty, dummy.”
I looked past Letty and flushed so hard it felt like opening an oven door. There was a pause.
“Come on, he’s hot, right? You drove up with him—don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”
I shucked furiously. “I didn’t know professors were in the game.”
“Everyone’s in the game, hon,” he said with a grim laugh. “Even me.”
A few minutes and a lot of kitchen bustle later, we perched on barstools balancing loaded plates on our knees. A knife clinked insistently against a glass, and a flutter of earth tones drifted toward the center of the room. Margaret Moss-Jones, flushed with wine, stood in the center of the white fur rug, backlit by antique lanterns hanging from the high ceiling. The professors fell silent around her.
“As department chair, it is my gracious duty every year to welcome a new group of scholars to the Program. Every year, in every market, graduates from this Program continue to fill tenure-track positions in emerging studies departments at top-tier Research I universities. That is because we do not tolerate anything less than the best from our students. Not all are well-suited for the level of academic rigor they will find here. On average, by the end of the first year, thirty percent—four of you, rounding up—will drop out of the Program. If you wish to avoid this fate, you would do well to find allies among your colleagues.” She waved her glass vaguely. “And that includes faculty. You’re graduate students, not undergrads. We are your colleagues now. And now, without further ado—”