Connor tentatively picked it up and took a bite.
Bethany sighed as if at a loss for what to do next and took her seat. The room held its collective breath as her eyes traveled around the seminar table, brows invisible behind the red wall of her bangs.
“First, some housekeeping. The course schedule is incorrect. This class meets on Mondays and Fridays, not Wednesdays.”
My face reddened. I worked Friday lunches.
She went on. “If you come here on Wednesday, you will have to teach yourself. Which might be for the best.” Nervous chuckles from around the table. “You, with the pastry.”
Connor, still struggling with the dry cruller, coughed. Pastry flakes flew out of his mouth onto his fist.
“Why don’t you begin. Who are you?”
He swallowed strenuously. “Connor Yu.”
There was a pause. “And?”
“I’m a first-year.”
“And?”
He grinned hugely and spread his hands apologetically. “I’m just happy to be here.”
A few students laughed, but the next student spoke up quickly. “Jordan Ash, ret-con dynamics and the sedentary sublime.”
As students around the table continued to rattle off their increasingly baffling subjects of study (“Tim Barrett, seance theory”; “Evie Haglund, instantiation”), I wrestled internally with my schedule, trying to make it work. Derek had said I needed to hold down at least three shifts a week if I wanted to stay on the schedule. I didn’t have the seniority for dinner shifts, and I had classes the rest of the week. Fridays were nonnegotiable if I wanted to keep my job.
I was sitting nearest the door. While all eyes were on a second-year studying dermatillomania in eighteenth-century Dublin, I quietly picked up my bag and left.
* * *
I didn’t have time to mourn Bethany’s class for long. I didn’t have time for anything.
The readings for my other classes—Diasporic Feminisms (Margaret Moss-Jones), The Futures of Art History (Rocky), and Economimesis (Grady Herschel)—added up to almost a thousand pages a week, and I found them nearly impenetrable. The courses I had taken at Urbana College had prepared me for the idea of reading difficult theory, but not the actuality. I often lost track of who had assigned which article, because typically I had only the vaguest concept of the subject matter. I printed them out at ten cents a page, made notes, underlined important passages with red pen, and left them lying in dog-eared heaps around my bed every night just before falling asleep. Having quickly run out of binder clips, I kept them separate by stacking them at right angles to each other, a complicated game of Jenga that always ended when an accidental kick sent them sliding across the floor.
My weekends went to Nona. Some Fridays, I’d fold up a few pages of an article and shove them into my apron to read in the wait station between slams. But between slams there was always silverware to roll, ice to haul, and side work to finish so I could leave the moment I got cut. After an iced tea spill left several pages of Deleuze sopping wet and unreadable—though, hardly more so than before—I gave up the practice. Anyway, I couldn’t risk getting caught. I had used up my goodwill with Derek when he caught on to my trick of always swapping for first cut so I could go home and study.
“I’m going to be frank with you, Mac,” he said, bushy eyebrows wrinkling his bald head. “This is why we don’t usually hire students. You’ll never make bank here cutting out early. And if you’re not interested in making bank, I’m not interested in you.”
“I’m interested in making bank,” I assured him.
In fact, I was desperate. Fixing the car had dropped my bank account down into the danger zone where a single mistake could set off a cascade of overdraft fees. I turned tables as quickly as I could and upsold furiously, but Derek was right. If I wanted to make real money, I had to start staying out my shifts. I was too tired after work to concentrate, anyway.
To compensate, I began to wake up earlier and earlier during the week, trying to trick a few more minutes out of my brain when it was at its clearest. The gym opened early, so I started my days reading on an elliptical and then headed to the library to reread the bits I hadn’t understood the first time. On a good day, the reading left me buzzing with questions, but I quickly learned not to ask them in class. Classes weren’t for asking questions. They were smartness competitions, chances to attract the attention of the professor and earn a reputation among fellow students. Often, I left more confused than I’d gone in, my notebook full of copied-down phrases to regurgitate next time the subject came up in class. My willpower for the day all used up, I’d start walking toward the library and wind up in a student pub called the Parlor, where Gwen and Connor and I sat at a table pretending to read until we got too tipsy to pretend.
Gwen’s study habits were a mystery to me. Graceful mornings of the kind we had shared during orientation lasted through the first week, and then vanished once classes were fully underway. Except for Rocky’s class, which we shared, we had opposite schedules. I left before she woke up in the mornings, and although we saw each other every day, we were hardly ever alone. When we went out with Connor, we spoke more to him than to each other, performing our friendship as a duet of good-natured needling. Even as we let fly jokes that were occasionally a bit too barbed—as when I informed Connor how recently Gwen had lost her virginity, and he guffawed so loudly she had to let on how irritated she was or risk him blurting it out to the whole bar—I told myself I was enjoying the new lack of exclusivity in our friendship. It felt like a natural maturation, something like the way long-married couples circulate at parties, so connected that they can risk a mild flirtation with someone else. We were having our fun side by side, and with Connor there was no danger of either of us pairing off and leaving the other in the cold.
And it was cold. The oaks had lost all but the most tenacious of their leaves, temporarily painting the quad a darker shade of eggplant than I had anticipated. But it didn’t stay black for long. On Halloween, a freak snowstorm dumped two inches on the oily city streets, heralding a long and bitter winter. Coal dust from the coke ovens, invisible at other times, left odd powdery shadows on the blank sheets of white snow until the parade of boots stirred it into a gray sludge. The red, salted brick of the sidewalks slashed across the gray-scale quads like long, coagulated wounds, giving the campus roughly the same color scheme as my printouts marked in red pen. I had a recurring dream that I was trudging through campus only to find myself wading through some article, the words sticking to me like mud after a thaw. I’d wake up with my heart racing and read for hours in the middle of the night. As the weeks dragged by, the full weight of exhaustion came down on me like a hammer, and even my mornings grew foggy. I found myself lapsing into unintentional naps in the library.
On Friday of the sixth week, I jerked awake from one of my library naps to the sound of someone saying, “What did I do wrong?”
I opened my eyes.
Bethany Ladd sat across the table from me.
* * *
Bethany looked younger up close, her eyes as round and childish as doll eyes, with pupils of startling purple-flecked hazel. She wore no makeup, and next to the fierce auburn of her immaculately straightened bob, her pale skin had a translucent cast. The curtain of bangs, formidably solid from a distance, had caught on her eyebrows and split, revealing a glimpse of worried forehead.