to her next time.” His eyes darted to The Professor’s table where he noticed with some relief that the angry sapphire eyes were now fixated on Christa, who was bowing her head and close to tears.
Julia shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“I care. I saw how she was looking at you. And I felt your reaction: you cringed. You fucking cringed, Julia. Why didn’t you tell her to go to hell?”
“I don’t do things like that if I can help it. I try not to lower myself to her level. Sometimes, I just feel so…so surprised that someone is being nasty to me, I can’t think. I’m speechless.”
“People are…nasty to you?” Paul began to get angry.
“Sometimes.”
“Emerson?” he whispered.
“He’s coming around. You saw him just then—he was nice.”
Paul nodded reluctantly. Professor Dick-erson.
Julia fidgeted with her hands. “I don’t mean to be all…St. Francis of Assisi or something, but anyone can shout obscenities. Why should I become like her? Why not think that sometimes—just sometimes—you can overcome evil with silence? And let people hear their hatefulness in their own ears, without distraction. Maybe goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is, sometimes. Rather than trying to stop evil with more evil. Not that I’m good. I don’t think that I’m good.” She paused and looked over at Paul. “I’m not making any sense.”
He simply smiled. “Of course you’re making sense. We talked about this in my Aquinas seminar—evil is its own punishment. Look at Christa. Do you think she’s happy? How could she be, behaving like that? Some people are so self-absorbed and deluded that all the shouting in the world wouldn’t be enough to convince them of their own shortcomings.”
“Or jog their memory,” Julia mumbled, gazing over at the other table and shaking her head.
The next day, she found herself in the Department of Italian Studies checking her mailbox before the Dante seminar. She was listening to the CD that Paul had given to her, which she’d finally agreed to accept and upload to her iPod. He was right; she’d fallen in love with the album immediately. And she found that she could write her thesis proposal while listening to his music much better than while listening to Mozart. Lacrimosa was far too depressing.
After days of finding nothing in her pigeonhole, she finally received some mail. Three pieces of mail, actually.
The first was an announcement of the rescheduling of Professor Emerson’s lecture, Lust in Dante’s Inferno: The Deadly Sin against the Self. Julia made note of the new date and planned on asking Paul if he would accompany her to the lecture.
The second piece of mail was a small cream-colored envelope. Julia opened it and was surprised to find that it contained a Starbucks gift card. It had been personalized, she saw, and the image on the card was a large light bulb. The text emblazoned across it read: You are very bright, Julianne.
Julia looked at the back of the card and saw that the value was one hundred dollars. Holy shit, she thought. That’s a lot of coffee. It was obvious who had sent it to her and why. Nevertheless, she was very, very surprised. Until she withdrew the third piece of mail.
The third piece was a long, sleek envelope, which she quickly opened. It was from the chair of the Department of Italian Studies congratulating her on winning a bursary. She read no further than the amount, which was five thousand dollars per semester, payable on top of her regular graduate student stipend.
O gods of all really poor graduate students with very small hobbit-hole-not-fit-for-a-dog apartments, thank you, thank you, thank you!
“Julianne, are you all right?” The voice of Mrs. Jenkins, comforting and gentle, wafted over her shocked body.
She stumbled uncertainly to Mrs. Jenkins’ desk and wordlessly handed her the award letter.
“Oh yes, I heard about this.” She grinned amiably. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? These bursaries are few and far between, and suddenly on Monday morning we received a call saying that some foundation had donated thousands of dollars for this award.”
Julia nodded, still in shock.
Mrs. Jenkins glanced down at the letter. “I wonder who he is.”
“Who he is?”
“The person the bursary is named after.”
“I didn’t read that far.”
Mrs. Jenkins held the letter up and pointed to a block of bold print. “It says that you are the recipient of the M. P. Emerson Bursary. I was just wondering who M. P. Emerson is. I wonder if he’s a relative of Professor Emerson. Although Emerson is a common enough