it was Hornberger who recommended these girls as graduate assistants to the Academic Affairs Office, he is only partially guilty of selecting them with his loins. Maybe he makes deals with the AAO: one stunner for one nerd.
“Hello, Dr. Lieberman.” Selena has a soft, strained voice, and I have to read her lips to hear her above the music. “I was sorry to see that your class on Paradise Lost was canceled. I was…I was looking forward to that.”
“Oh, thanks! How nice of you to say that, Selena. Yes, I was sorry, too, but curriculum requirements made the change necessary. Maybe next semester!”
She smiles and bobs her head in a manner reminiscent of the late Princess Diana.
“That would be wonderful, because I’m actually working on—”
“Yeah, leave that for the grad sem, Selena,” her frenemy butts in. “I’m Natalie Greco, Professor Lieberman. I’m in my first year of grad school and it’s my first year as a grad assistant, so you can imagine how excited I am! Welcome to Ardrossan University, again, ma’am, and to The Old Dominion!”
I’m the new girl in class, and the popular girls are noticing me. That is definitely a new experience, only it comes fifteen years too late to be anything but awkward.
“Tessa, Selena and Natalie—thanks for coming to say hello.” I give them my best teacher’s smile. “I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other, if we’re…on the same floor.”
In the same dorm, I almost said. Knee-jerk reflex.
Hornberger hands me my wine, and my eyes focus on the glittering drops of water that are running down the outside of the glass, gather at the bottom, fall onto his wrist and run down the underside of his arm. This is what stimulus overload does to me; I latch on to a tiny detail and close in on it. Then the still life of the drops of water on Nick Hornberger’s hairy footballer’s arm turns dramatic. Natalie Greco reaches out, and with the backs of her four fingers, slightly bent, she brushes the drops away. She is talking to him about something college-related—I catch the words “scanning” and “PDF”—but her eyes find the detail that mine had also found, and she lifts her hand and brushes the water away. Neither of them comments on her action or stops the conversation, and it is this that tells me that they are sleeping together.
I look up and around to see whether anyone else has seen what I just saw, and I catch Yvonne Roberts’s pleading stare, urging me over to join her and Elizabeth Mayfield. It turns out that Elizabeth will not, after her stint as chair, go back to full-time teaching but proceed up the administrative ladder to the position of Dean of Studies. She graciously accepts our congratulations and encourages us to approach her, notwithstanding her principal duties, should we need her help or advice. There is not a single glance over at Hornberger and his circle of giggling admirers to indicate that she does, in fact, doubt the new chair’s ability or willingness to look after us.
I decide to take Elizabeth at her word. She seems genuinely upset when she hears about the mess in my office; apparently it was reported clean and empty months ago. Neither of us mentions Andrew Corvin’s name, and I am as certain as I can be that she appreciates my discretion. Relief at her promise to look into it gives me a second wind of sociability, and when Dancey beckons me over, I bound up to him like a trusting puppy.
Matthew Dancey, I decide after five minutes in which he scolds me with paternal sternness for volunteering to do service that isn’t expected of me and stresses that cooperativeness is of course the first virtue of a valued team member, is a politician. Physically, he is nondescript: below medium height, nearly bald, very thin, a little ill-looking. The only attractive thing about him is his smooth, sonorous voice, but as he speaks I sink into an aural hallucination of this voice as it affably dissects a poor junior professor’s failings and informs her that her three-year tenure review was unsuccessful. This man surely can smile and smile and be a villain. I am too exhausted and too pleased with the prospect of an uncluttered office to worry about the mixed messages that he is sending me. He is very upfront about the awkwardness of Dolph and me working together in the same subfield and suggests we might consider