women are sitting and working at their desks, facing each other, framed by the window and the blue sky behind them. An academic idyll.
“Be great if we had weather like this at the weekend, huh?” I’m about to ask whether both girls’ families will come to Ardrossan for Family Weekend when it occurs to me that this would hardly be tactful. Natalie is showing great strength of character (or a great deal of chutzpah, depending on who you listen to) by showing up in college like this, but Family Weekend is a very different ballgame.
“All weather stations say it’ll be sunny,” Natalie informs us archly. “So it’ll probably be pouring with rain!”
“Mmhmm. Selena, I was wondering whether you had a moment?”
Selena jumps up onto her feet. “Of course, ma’am. Dr. Lieberman.”
“Anna.”
She bobs her head and twists her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a cross between Princess Diana and Rapunzel. This will be much harder than I thought.
“I tell you what, if you have half an hour or so, we could get ourselves a coffee and walk a little?”
Natalie’s beautiful face clouds over. I doubt that coffee with Dr. Lieberman counts as a special treat in Natalie’s eyes, but she is peeved that Selena is getting it. Not that Selena is keen. If she could think of an excuse, she would wriggle out. But I smile at her in the manner of a kind but firm professor, and she has no choice. Ten minutes later we are walking between the box hedges, each nursing a paper cup between her hands.
“Selena, I felt bad about—hey, what happened to your hand?” When she took a sip of the coffee, her sleeve, pulled down to her fingers, shifted a little, and I caught a glimpse of raw flesh.
“No, it’s nothing.”
“Yes, it is, let me see that!” Doubly alarmed, I become vehement. “Have you been in a fight, or what?” The knuckles on the backs of both hands are red and glistening with lymphatic fluid; these wounds are fresh. Four round red marks on each hand.
“I…fell,” she improvises. “I was carrying something and scraped against the…wall of the garage, at home. It’s nothing.” She hitches her sleeves over her hands like oven gloves and nurses her coffee.
“Selena, I’m not stupid. How you deal with stress is none of my business, so I won’t probe. But I feel all the more urgently that I ought to say this, about last week’s grad seminar. Things got a little out of hand, and you may have walked away from it feeling that your topic doesn’t make sense or that your approach doesn’t work. But all you need to—”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t bothered by that,” she interrupts me. She may be shuffling alongside me in her sensible skirt and sensible shoes, ducking her head so as not to have to look down at me, but she is perfectly capable of interrupting a professor.
“Weren’t you? Well, that’s good. What’s your…what did you take away from it, upon reflection?”
Not much, it seems. She tries to convince me that like a good little grad student she listens to all criticism and tries to use it constructively, so appreciative of all the help she gets, such an opportunity, graduate study at a place like Ardrossan—
“Yes, but. Selena.” Aha, there it is, the mulish set to her mouth and jaw. I’ve seen it a few times, but I keep forgetting it because the impression of her dowdy diffidence is so overwhelming. “I spoke to Giles Cleveland about your paper, and it seems to me that you and he do not exactly see eye to eye on the question of whether you should go on to do a Ph.D.”
“You fought with him about me. Natalie heard you.”
If I had a wall to bang my head against, I would.
“We didn’t fight, we had a—never mind that! We are discussing your—”
“I was admitted as a graduate student, therefore I must have the academic ability to succeed,” she interrupts me again. “To tell me I shouldn’t be in grad school when I am in grad school is another way of saying that Ardrossan’s admission policies are determined by the financial situation of the university, and not by the academic potential of the students.”
She is right. She has summarized, in a few brutal sentences, the situation in graduate schools all over the country. But if I agree with her and she repeats it, I am toast. On wheels. I’m in enough trouble as it is.