by Elise Juska
Hannah Chaffee: omg I’ve been thinking about that class a lot luke…so disturbing
Kaitlyn Sutton: you’re right about that paper too! it was insane!
Hannah Chaffee, who had written so movingly about her abortion. Katie, who had always taken notes so diligently, calling thank you! to Maggie as she left the room. Maggie remembered Katie as mature, almost peerlike, but maybe she’d misread her; most of her comments felt tossed off and shallow. And then there was this: Don’t feel bad about not talking to him Luke. Everyone was afraid of him. You weren’t the only one.
Maggie stared at that line. Afraid. Had Katie chosen such a strong word unthinkingly, under the influence of the shooting, typing quickly into her phone? Or had Maggie’s students really felt this way? It alarmed her, the possibility that they had been so unnerved by Nathan’s presence, that her efforts to defuse it had failed so completely. Perhaps she just hadn’t been fully present that semester. Too worried about her daughter, too distracted by her own coming-apart life. Perhaps, that difficult spring, her class had served as a reprieve for her, a needed affirmation, making her all the more inclined to pretend Nathan Dugan wasn’t there. Or perhaps she simply hadn’t wanted to deal with him, wanted to be finished with him and to focus on the other students—the more rewarding, more appropriate students. Deliver Nathan his C+ and return him to the world.
Sunday evening, the night before the first day of classes, Maggie received an email called request from student. She expected to find one of the names from her list. But the student was a senior, Juliet Brody. She was an English major, though she’d never taken one of Maggie’s classes. I am writing a story about your former student Nathan Dugan for our first issue of the Sentinel and would like to speak with you about his performance in your class. Please call me at this number. On first read, Maggie found the email jarring—not the fact of the article, which wasn’t so surprising, but the tone of it, which was inappropriate, presumptuous. Sent from my iPhone. Maggie thought it best to ignore. She knew this student, Juliet Brody, would ask what she remembered about Nathan, and she didn’t want to lie again.
Part Two
Nine
Anna’s first essay assignment was to choose a twentieth-century poet and closely analyze the way(s) a recurrent theme or symbol manifests in his/her work. It was for her first-year seminar, The Preoccupations of Poets. First-year seminars were small, cleverly titled, and taught mostly by grad students; hers, Siena, was working on her PhD in Comp Lit. Siena was kind of heavy, but pretty—Anna was impressed by the way she seemed to own her size, wearing fitted dresses with tall boots and bright tights and scarves. In class, she’d shared a few of her own poems, which she’d had published in online journals. In high school, Anna had hated speaking in class, but Siena’s seminar felt different, less like a class than a conversation. She could imagine Siena becoming a kind of mentor figure for her as time went on.
For her essay, Anna decided to write about the preoccupation with solitude and otherness in Elizabeth Bishop. She devoted way too many hours to it, but it was her first college paper—and an English paper, for Siena—so she was determined to do well. When, at the end of the next class, Siena slid their essays facedown across the table, Anna flipped to the last page and was stunned: B-. The margins were filled with blue-penned notes, underlines and arrows that quickly swam off into the margins. “Until next time, guys,” Siena was saying as Anna stuffed the paper in her backpack. To her horror, she felt tears gathering behind her face. She bit the inside of her cheek and hurried outside and onto the quad, where she found an empty bench and bent over her knees, opening the paper again and madly skimming, twisting her bottom lip. Lovely writing but I wish the feeling came through more. Push this idea further? Potentially interesting, but not clear.
When some guy sat down beside her, she swiped at her eyes, startled—couldn’t this person see she was in the middle of a meltdown? In her peripheral vision, she saw a blue-jeaned leg, scuffed black boot, paperback book splayed upside-down on his knee. “What’d you get?”
Later that day, recounting this meeting for Alexis, the arc of the story would take on a high gloss—how, before Anna realized she liked James, she thought James was the most arrogant person she’d ever met. In reality, Anna’s first impression of James was how skinny he was (sadly, even with guys, it was the first thing she saw). “Excuse me?” she said.
“On the paper.” His face was hidden behind his sunglasses, which were mirrored and disconcerting.
“What paper?”
He pointed his chin toward her lap. “That one right there.”
She pinched her nails into her palms. “Are you asking me what I got on my paper?”
“So you didn’t get an A.”
He was a collection of affectations, Anna told herself: the wrinkled short-sleeved button-down, the glasses, the phone weighing down his shirt pocket, even the book, which was the sort of paperback you might find in a used bookstore, swollen, pages yellowing.
“How do you know?”
“Because if you got an A, you’d just say you got an A,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting I think grades have any real significance. But you obviously do, so you must have done badly—or, not actually badly, but badly for you, because you probably got straight A’s in high school.” He pushed his sunglasses on top of his head. His eyes were sort of smiling, but she couldn’t tell if he was kidding. They were light brown, the color of balsa wood. “B minus, right?”
Anna didn’t reply right away—I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, she would report later to Alexis, but in fact she was too caught off-guard to speak. When she did, she tried her best to sound airy and unfazed. “You guessed it. Congratulations.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And who gives a shit about a B minus?”
“I do.”
“How come?”
“Oh, I don’t know, because I want to do well? Because I care about this class? Because I worked hard on the paper and have never gotten less than an A in English in my entire life?”
“Ah.” He nodded. “I knew it. You’re an overachiever.”
“What’s wrong with being an overachiever?”
“Nothing,” he said. “If that’s what you’re into.”
“Why wouldn’t overachieving be what I’m into?”
“Apparently, it would.”
“Great. Thanks for clearing that up.” She spoke briskly, but there was a new feeling, a low thrumming, in her gut.
“What’s the class?” he asked.
Her eyes dropped to her lap—phrasing is awkward. “Poetry. My first-year seminar.”
“If it makes you feel better, nobody gets an A on their first paper for first-year seminar. To motivate you to do better and all that bullshit.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged. “Perfectionism is kind of your thing, right?”
“I don’t have a thing. What’s your thing? Quick, unfounded generalizations?”
“Truth-telling. Challenging the status quo. Exposing the hypocrisy that plagues modern society.” He smiled. “Although according to the official rhetoric of this institution, I’m majoring in Film and Poli Sci.” He pulled the phone from his pocket, holding it level with his chin. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What’s your major?”
She paused. “What are you doing? Are you filming me?”
“For posterity,” he said. “An archive of our first meeting.”
“Well, that’s normal,” she quipped, but felt suddenly self-conscious, aware of her face. “To answer your question, I don’t have a major. I’m a first-year. Like I said when you apparently weren’t paying attention.” The camera was making her anxious. She looked at it directly and stuck her tongue out, and he laughed, which pleased her. Talking to him felt something like a competition, like she was skating on the surface of herself and tryin
g to keep up. “But eventually, English and Psychology.”
“Why English and Psychology?”
“Well, my mother’s an English professor, so that’s probably some sort of Pavlovian thing—”
“And Psychology because you have a fucked-up family?”
“Potentially,” she said, a ripple of adrenaline in her veins.
“So,” he said. “Let me guess. You want to be a shrink.”
She laughed. “Um, wrong.”
“You have something against shrinks? I’ve been shrinked.”
“Sure. Me too.” It wasn’t something she wanted him—or anyone—to know about her, but it felt like they were locked in a game of one-upmanship, playing honesty with a stranger and seeing how far they’d go. “That doesn’t mean I want to be one.”
“So an academic,” he said. “A prof. Like Mom.”
“No,” Anna said. “God, no.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Why’s that?”
Anna rifled through the reasons—the fact that she’d watched her mother’s teaching gradually consume her, that her mother had always been halfheartedly “working on a book” but as far as Anna knew had never written a word—but said only “I have a complicated relationship to higher education.” And: “Actually, I want to be a writer.” Then held her breath. This wasn’t something she’d admitted to many people either, but he nodded seriously.
“I can see that,” he said. “And in case you were worried, grades on papers in bullshit first-year seminars are not a predictor of future writing success. You can fail all your English classes and still go on to have an outstanding career. In fact, some failure might be healthy for a perfectionist like yourself.”
“Noted,” she breezed. “Thanks for the tip.”
He slipped his phone back in his shirt pocket. Then he looked at her closely, kind of wonderingly, and later, Anna would think that what first attracted him to her was her seeming bite and boldness, the willingness to go toe-to-toe with him, though in reality, this crisp, cavalier exterior was just the flip side of her nerves.
He stuck out a hand. “James. Intrusive asshole who interrogates women who clearly want to be left alone.”
“Anna,” she replied. “Perfectionist who has a breakdown if she gets less than a B plus.”
He let go of her hand but still sat there, studying her, as if deciding something, while Anna struggled to maintain a look of cool indifference, hoping he’d walk away before she cracked and her true self spilled out. Finally he fished the phone back out of his pocket and said: “May I have your number, Anna, please?”
James Baird-English, Alexis reported. Junior, Film/Poli Sci double major, freakishly smart, kind of political, no known addictions and/or baggage, went out with a grad student.
“Wait,” Anna said. “Grad student?”
“So?” Alexis shrugged. “That’s a plus.” They were splitting a pizza and sitting on the floor of their dorm room in Hightower, on the shaggy multicolored rug Alexis had ordered online. It was just how Anna had imagined college would be: the rug, the pizza, even the way they were sitting, cross-legged, bare knees touching. Except that, on the inside, the pizza was making Anna’s heart race. She was distracted by Alexis’s knee, which was half the size of hers. It turned out Alexis was actually one of those people that celebrities claimed to be, the kind who was naturally tiny, could eat anything she wanted and not gain weight. Anna tried to accept Alexis’s carelessly shared snacks and not let on if they were making her feel panicked. For as much as she’d already confided in her new roommate, Anna had told her nothing about her struggles in high school and had no plans to. Her intermittent inner freak-outs about all the junk food she was consuming, the high-calorie beer she was drinking, the occasional bursts of lingering online activity about the shooting—these were all part of the life she’d left so deliberately behind.
“That means he’s experienced,” Alexis was saying, reaching for another slice. “That’s a good thing. Plus, smart. And smart people are better at sex.”
“Oh?” Anna laughed, forcing a bite. “Is that scientifically proven or something?”
“Haven’t you ever heard that? It’s a definite thing.” Alexis often offered up lines like this, pronouncements on the way life was, but she had the goods to back it up: eight years of camp, five sexual partners (her term), various international travels (she’d spent half the summer with a single aunt in Italy), and casual encounters with drugs at her elite private school, which she referred to with eye rolls, as if they were childish fads she’d outgrown. Alexis herself was off the market (which of course only made guys more interested) and had a boyfriend named Willem (Willem!) who went to Vanderbilt; they sexted regularly, something Anna hadn’t known people actually did.
“Anyway,” she continued. “The girlfriend was unstable. The grad student. That’s what Breck said.” Between Alexis’s school and camp, she was well connected on campus; after hearing about Anna’s conversation with James that afternoon, she’d tapped her upper-class sources like a private eye. “She transferred after the breakup, apparently.”
“Really?” Anna said. This information was weirdly exciting. “Unstable how?”
“Breck didn’t say.”
“Didn’t or wouldn’t?”
“Both,” Alexis said. “But never fear, roomie. We have our ways.” She dropped her half-eaten slice back in the box and blotted her fingers on the rug (Anna had been appalled at first by Alexis’s personal habits but had since chalked them up to her growing up with maids) and grabbed her laptop. “Let’s look him up.”
This was one of Alexis’s strengths: She always had an answer, always had a plan. She never seemed less than confident about anything. At parties, she steered Anna around warm sticky basements, homing in on guys to introduce her to. Alexis herself didn’t do anything too recap-worthy, and any minor exploits she owned so thoroughly that they never felt juicy. But she was a reliable source of gossip about the other girls in their hall: like Violet Sharma, who had had sex with both Mike Hack and his roommate at the same party. Hilary Macintosh, whose nose had started bleeding (study drugs, Alexis surmised) in the middle of Introduction to Eastern Thought. Violet’s roommate, Carly Smith, was so unsocial as to be fascinating in her own right: She went to bed at nine thirty, Violet reported, even on the weekends (a supposed inner-ear problem), had never had sex, never drank.
“Bueno,” Alexis announced. “It’s public.”
Anna edged closer. Alexis was scrolling down James’s Facebook page. His profile picture looked like some kind of psychedelic solar system. Under Lives In, he’d written: State of Perpetual Disillusionment. Under Studied: Whenever the Eff I Felt Like It at Collwood HS. Anna found this clever, but Alexis zipped by it in search of more pertinent information. There wasn’t much to be had. Links to articles and petitions, mostly. Unmasking the Media and Stop Corporate Greed NOW. Alexis flipped through James’s photo albums, most of them pictures he’d been tagged in by other people, and Anna watched years of his life go whipping by: James at graduation, arms looped over two girls’ shoulders; James leaning out a car window pointing to a sign that said ENDLESS MTNS NEXT 6 EXITS; James sitting by a campfire, giving a blurred finger to the camera; James, looking younger, raising an OCCUPY sign in a crowd in New York City; James taking a picture of the person taking the picture.
“He doesn’t post much about himself,” Alexis summarized. “But there are no lingering pictures of him and the girlfriend. So that’s good.”
She flicked through his mobile uploads: a ticket stub for a film festival, a bumper sticker that said DON’T JUST SIT THERE MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN, a pair of mud-crusted boots sitting in a field. And there was his profile picture again—not a planet, Anna realized, but an eyeball. His eyeball. The nice brown color that had been fixed on her earlier was threaded with thin red and blue veins that made the eye look vaguely electrocuted, like a fortune-teller’s ball.
“He’s definitely eccentric,” Alexis pronounced, then retur
ned to her slice. “But no serious red flags, roomie. And Breck said he was cool.”
Anna was left staring at the photo of James caught on the screen, one that had probably been taken in middle school: acne-ridden, glasses-wearing, sitting on a bald brown couch with two other acne-ridden glasses-wearing teenage boys. Subtract the glasses, cut the hair, and erase the acne, and there was James: another, perhaps truer version of James. On his face was a twist of a smile, a trace of insecurity. Looking at it, Anna felt guilty, as if she were peeking at a painful past James would surely not want seen. Her mother was always denouncing technology, and Anna was always defending it, but then there was this: The most awkward phase of your life still available, visible, with a few clicks.
“Don’t worry,” Alexis said without missing a beat. “That was taken a long time ago.”
Since arriving at college, Anna had had little contact with her mother. With her father, even Felicia, she texted now and then. But Maggie had an ancient flip phone on which texting was basically impossible, and didn’t like email, so their only real option was talking on the phone. The times her mother called, Anna had been studying, or hungover. After three messages, she’d stopped leaving them, the red missed calls piling up in a silent reprimand. Anna had listened only to the first one. Anna, how are you doing? An ordinary question, but coming from her mother, it was soaked in concern. It was enough to make Anna feel defensive and put off calling. That Tuesday, though, the day after she met James, her happiness was making her feel magnanimous. Her mother answered on the second ring: “You’re alive.”