are very general statements. I would like to hear what you feel about your personal situation. Are you enjoying grad school?”
“I couldn’t imagine doing anything else in the world!” she states in a hollow voice, and her cheeks flame.
Oh, of course. The young man in the observatory. Perhaps I should cast a beady eye or two over the male grad students. I briefly consider asking her what her parents would say if they knew that they are coughing up thirty thousand bucks a year so that their daughter, a girl chastely reared in the fear of God, can have it off with some guy in the attic of her department. She would presumably tell me, and rightly, to mind my own freaking business, and anyway, she is paying for her own tuition, isn’t she?
“That is not really an answer to my question.”
“I’m fine!”
“No, Selena, you’re not fine! But it’s your life, and you have—”
“That’s right, it is!”
“—and you have been brought up with a strong sense of right and wrong. All I can encourage you to do is to trust your own judgment and to be honest with yourself about what you truly feel about something. Or someone.”
Good speech. I should memorize it and tell it to the mirror tonight.
“I am! That’s exactly what I am doing!” She seems almost pleased with me for putting it so well. Her face, bare of make-up and exposed by that demure blue headband, beams with relief, and up close I see how white and soft and smooth her skin is, and how her lips are trembling a little.
Well, all right. So this vulnerable, headstrong young woman has fallen into the hands of a scoundrel. But the sex has intoxicated her, and people as inconsequential as a new assistant professor or her study advisor have no chance of getting through to her. Hey, grad school’s a bitch and then you get fucked by a bastard. Been there, done that. Wait till you are on tenure track. Tenure track is an uber-bitch, and you fall for a lovely man who doesn’t even tell you he is dating another woman before you fall in love with him.
Contrary to Natalie’s cattish prediction, the weather on Family Weekend is dry and sunny. The campus appears in its full glory of undulating shrubbery, surging, orange-yellow-brown masses of leaves, and green lawns already dotted with orange and white shirts, banners, and hats. “Pipe, Plover!” is Ardrossan’s war cry, and apparently the Plovers are expected to trounce their traditional rivals, the Lynxes, who are traveling over from the other research university on the other side of Shaftsboro for tomorrow night’s football game. I’m proud to belong to the Ardrossan Family, despite all the squabbles we recently had, and I bought a long-sleeved Ardrossan U t-shirt especially to go with the dress pants I dug out for this day.
When the door of the elevator opens onto the fourth floor, I almost push my bike into Tessa, who comes running around the corner from the hallway.
“You must come,” she says, heaving, pale as a sheet. She grabs the handlebar, pulls my bike out of the cab, and lets it slide against the wall. “Come, quickly.”
“Tessa, what—” Another smashed window? What?
Oh. My. God.
Now it is graffiti. Across Natalie’s and Selena’s office door, in red capitals about two feet high:
WHORE!
And on the opposite wall:
IF A PRIEST’S DAUGHTER DEFILES HERSELF BY BECOMING A PROSTITUTE, SHE MUST BE BUR
“Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker…”
“I don’t think more cursing is going to help!” Tessa flings at me, then bites her lip. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry, Tessa. When did you see this?”
“Thirty seconds before you did? People will be up here with their parents today, and—oh, dear!” She is fighting down tears, and I can understand why. We are standing in the middle of the empty hallway, red hatred screaming at us from the walls.
“And what’s that stench?” I walk further along the corridor, where a foul, pungent smell—
“Fish,” Tessa says, sniffing like a pointer. “Rotten fish. Gross.”
“Well, I guess that sort of fits the general idea. If you’re into vulgarities of that sort.”
“Yes,” she says, “but it comes from your office.”
It does. A biting smell emanates from my office door, which has been liberally sprinkled with some sort of fluid. I peek into the plastic box that is screwed against the door to hold essays and notes, and in it are nestling some stinking chunks of pickled herring.
“Here,” Tessa says and holds up a glass jar, using a Xeroxed