“I’m sorry I’m late. The traffic was obnoxious.”
Liz nodded. A stack of research articles lay on the chair next to the one Trina was sitting in, and a small part of her was touched to see that Liz also preferred hard copies.
“A student has complained.” Liz folded her hands and gave Trina a steady look.
Trina knew this was coming.
“I’m sorry that you’re having to deal with these issues, but we all know students complain. It’s part of the work we do.”
Trina immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say.
“I wouldn’t have asked you in here if it was a typical issue,” Liz replied. She leaned forward in her chair. “And you’re right. I shouldn’t have to be dealing with issues like this.”
Trina waited. Her stomach growled audibly. She’d skipped breakfast, and it looked like it was going to be a liquid lunch.
“It seems that you connected with some of your students on social media.” Liz clicked something up on her screen, turning it towards Trina.
There it was. She’d deleted the post, but someone had done a screenshot and now the Department Head of Psychology at Dickinson College had it up on her screen. Last week Trina went home with a guy she met in the smaller banquet hall at the Marriott. She’d passed out across the fluffy white bedspread, her tight dress rucked up around her hips and her period-stained panties on full display. Nothing happened with the guy—she could tell when she woke up, running over her body in her mind like a lover—and nude-colored menstrual panties were a good deterrent to any douchebag. Which is probably why he swiped her phone and posted that picture of her onto her Instagram. Trina should have stayed home that night, but sometimes she felt like she couldn’t breathe and so she went out and shouldered herself into a group of people who were happy. Her first pick, a gorgeous twenty-something with boy-band good looks, had rejected her, pulling her close to him and whispering in her ear that she was a drunken hag. The guy she ended up back at his hotel with was young, too, but a mean kind of desperate.
Trina discovered the post the next morning, scrolling through her phone over a huge coffee and sticky counters at the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street from the Marriott.
“It’s not me,” she told Liz, who immediately gave Trina a disappointed look.
“It’s not just the social media,” Liz went on. “Students are saying that your classes have been canceled repeatedly. That you’ve been ill-prepared for lectures. That exams have not been graded.”
Trina thought about the faces looking back at her from the chairs in her classroom. She was teaching Intro to Adolescent Development this semester. And an abnormal course that had the odd title of Developmental Problems. Who sat in the front row?
She couldn’t recall a single student’s name. One face came to mind, a doe-eyed girl with black hair and eyebrows like apostrophes. Maybe she was the one complaining?
“I’ve been ill,” Trina tried.
“Then perhaps you should take a leave of absence.”
Trina knew what that meant.
“I need this job.” She also needed the paycheck.
Liz’s face softened. “I know you care about your work, and that it’s been a difficult time for you ever since Simon.”
Trina flinched at his name. She hadn’t expected Liz to know about all that, let alone bring it up in this meeting.
“Simon has nothing to do with my work.” Trina cocked her chin up. She was very close to saying “I’m a professional,” but she caught herself.
Liz stood up. “This is a formal warning, Trina. You won’t have another chance to fix things. Get yourself together, do your job, and we won’t have to revisit any of this.”
Trina was still sitting, and self-consciously she followed Liz to the door. She thanked her boss for meeting with her, walked down the corridor and into her office, and pressed her back against the closed door. The lights were still off, and the air smelled of damp. A stack of papers from last semester lay on the side table like a carcass, run through with red ink that Trina vaguely remembered marking after a night of Chinese take-out, best intentions, and eventually several bottles of wine.
Leave of absence. She couldn’t manage that.
Weeks of lazing around her apartment—unpaid—hoping to find something special in the day that brought a glimmer of hope. Not being able to do that and then putting on a too-tight dress and finding somebody getting married and crashing into their happiness until someone agreed to take her home.
Trina clicked on her computer and logged into the college’s teaching portal. Scrolling through, she started to organize materials into folders for her courses. She consulted the syllabus and sent out an email reminding students of an upcoming deadline of an assignment she’d totally forgotten she’d ever assigned. She prepared for her lecture that afternoon, primping her content and including a few fun photographs on the PowerPoint slides.
The class roster showed student ID photos, and she clicked on a few to see if she could learn some names. The doe-eyed girl was called Evelyn.
Her office phone rang next to her keyboard while she worked through her email inbox, and she picked it up absentmindedly.
“Professor Catriona Dell.” God, she still loved the ring of that. In a breath, she resolved to stop drinking, picking up random men and ruining lovely couples’ weddings, and to Start. Taking. Care of herself.
And then the caller spoke.
She’d forgotten he had this number. But—come on, Trina—it was listed on the department’s website, for Christ’s sake. Of course he had it.
“Catriona.” He said her name the way he always had. She was never Trina to him. Always so formal, so proper.
“Simon.”
“I tried calling your cell, but I couldn’t get through.”
Trina pictured the glass of water where she’d doused her phone, now replaced with a bowl of rice to hopefully resuscitate the device.
Sometimes she did things without thinking them through.
“What do you want?”
“It’s coming up on the one-year anniversary, and I wanted to see how you were doing.” He cleared his throat. “You know. Check-in. Make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine. You don’t have to call.”
“I don’t think you’re fine.”
“I’m at work. I really don’t have time to talk.”
She heard a rustling on the other end. A siren blared in the background. It sounded like he was walking along the street. Or perhaps from his office to his car. Trina glanced at the time.
A late lunch with his wife? They liked to meet on Mondays.
“I went to one of your classes,” Simon went on. Something icy ran up Trina’s neck.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
Trina tried to recall if he’d been there. Surely, she would have noticed him, even if he was in the back. Although, lately, she’d been avoiding eye contact with her students. It was easier to get through class without seeing them, seeing her.
She reached down and smoothed the edges of her skirt absently with her hand. Her hair felt tangled, her hands chafed.
“It had been canceled. I ran into a student who was leaving. She thought I was your supervisor, coming to check on you. In fact, she seemed happy to tell me all about the problems you’ve been having in your class.”
Evelyn’s soft, dull face hovered in her thoughts for a moment. Smiling in her school ID picture, baby bangs making her face rounder.
