Chapter Fourteen

All in one place

And then it was Monday. The day of my interview. There was, in the end, no delay.

I was scheduled in perhaps the second worst slot of the morning, the final one before the break for lunch, just when the committee’s ability to focus would effectively nill. If I hadn’t known from previous rounds that the placement was mostly random, or based on distance to travel to campus, I would have thought that they were sending me a message. By that time of day, the cafeteria coffee has worn off, the pastries are starting to take on a dull sheen, and everyone has been paying close attention far longer than humans were designed to pay attention.

This can make it really, really hard to stand out, and really, really easy for committee members to file you as adequate, no further comments, let’s get to that break. Still, it’s better than being the very first, where you’re setting the baseline, and no matter how good you may be, no one is ready to note you as amazing. So I took it as a challenge—if I could keep them engaged, there were decent odds that that fact itself would stand out.

I dealt with my morning class, ate a snack, slammed back a cup of coffee, checked my teeth in the mirror, received one text from Jess, telling me to kick ass, and then, it was time to go.

When I first walked into the departmental office, suited up, hair and makeup done, nylons fresh from the drugstore pinching at my waist but making my calves impeccably shiny and guaranteed to please anyone old fashioned enough to think to notice, Cynthia smiled at me and pointed at the lone chair by the door.

“They’ll be done in about ten minutes,” she told me. “You’re a little early, and I can’t let you prep before it’s time. You know the drill. Fifteen minutes, and not a second more.”

“No problem,” I told her, and carefully, casually, crossed my legs and took a slow sip from my extra hot latte. I’d put that on my credit card. I still wasn’t actually looking at my credit card statement, but it hadn’t been declined, at least not yet.

The conference room door opened, there was a soft murmur of voices, and a middle-aged Indian woman I’d never seen before stepped into the hallway. “Thank you so much,” she said, giving a half wave into the room before walking back out to Cynthia’s desk.

“Thanks dear,” Cynthia said. “There’s nothing more we need from you today. We’ll be in touch with you soon.”

The candidate’s perfume followed her out. For half a second, I gloated that I hadn’t been the one who made the mistake of wearing perfume, the way all the articles on interviews warned you not to. It was unprofessional, because you never knew who was going to be in the small room with you and what they wouldn’t like, or even what allergies they might have. But the scent that lingered was, now that I thought about it, actually lovely. It wasn’t harsh or artificial; it was floral and pleasant. A sharp bite of anxiety caught me for a moment. Should I have worn perfume?

“Katie, hi,” Harvey said, suddenly in front of me. “Go ahead and start your prep. We’ll call you in fifteen.”

In the prep room was a laminated list of questions, taped down to the tabletop. I scanned it quickly; they were all remarkably similar to the last time I’d been interviewed. But my stomach knotted anyway. This was it, really it. Either I nailed this and moved on to the next round, or things stayed how they were. And they couldn’t stay how they were. I’d have to come up with another solution.

And if I couldn’t? Was there any option left after that beyond living in my car? In that moment, it was a very real, if cold, possibility.

I gazed out the window at the students walking by. They all looked like they had places to go. None of them glanced towards me. Even if they had, what would they have seen?

A professor, I reminded myself.

I sat up a little straighter. They’d see a professor, one clutching her coffee with the grip of the seriously distressed, but a professor nonetheless. A professor getting down to work. Just the way they saw me, day in and day out, in the classroom. They didn’t know, most of them, about how the system functioned. They didn’t realize that so many of us taught for what amounted to below-poverty wages. Normally, I resented this a little. It made me upset that the powers that be, the ones with the ability to change this situation, were happy to keep the students—or, more accurately, the consumers—in the dark. That morning, however, I found it comforting. I may not be compensated for the job I was doing, but it was still my job. I was still doing it.

And then one of the students saw me. I couldn’t remember which class I’d had her in, but I knew she’d been a student of mine before. She was a tall, black woman—her parents were Somali, if I remembered correctly. She wore jeans, a gray sweater, and pristine white low top Chuck Taylors. She was walking with two friends, and they were laughing in that semi-performative way college students do, but she saw me through the window. And she paused to give me a little finger-wave and a smile. Me, a teacher who didn’t have to matter in her life anymore.

That was all I needed. I waved back, holding my hand up for a beat longer than necessary.

And then I began furiously taking notes on the prepared material. When Harvey came to get me, I gave him a broad smile.

“Ready, Katie?”

“Born ready,” I said.

He chuckled. And then he led me into the conference room, where I proceeded to give the performance of my life.

*

I won’t recap the details. It’d be tedious if you aren’t a teacher, and possibly even if you are. Teaching is such an in-the-moment activity, dependent on energy passing from the instructor to the students and back again, the truest definition of the concept of gestalt that I’ve ever found. Words don’t quite suffice, not alone. There’s a reason that the best depictions of classroom dynamics are done on film. It’s one of the few weaknesses you’ll ever catch me admitting to when it comes to the capacities of literary expression.

Suffice to say, I nailed it. And I walked out of there so high over it all that I must have been two feet off the ground and glowing.

As cheesy as it sounds, I did it for Maggie. I did it as a fuck-you to Sam. I did it so that whatever came next, I would know that it wasn’t because I’d choked. I also did it so that if I ever did run into Colin again, I could tell him that I had, in fact, kicked some major ass.

I must have walked around campus, flowing with the crush of the lunch hour, just a part of the crowds, for only ten minutes after I’d left the department office, but it felt like it had been hours by the time I paused next to the building that housed the writing lab and pulled out my phone to find a single text.

It was from Colin. And he’d sent a link from the Mercury News to a story about Sasha. Granted, it didn’t say it was about Sasha; it said it was about a faculty member at our college who had been missing and then found dead, and that was all I could see, since that was all the information in the headline and I couldn’t click through. But it was enough. I was suddenly very aware of the concrete beneath my feet, of my own weight pulling me down, down, down.

Holy shit! I just saw your professor written up.

The first thing I thumbed out was “I told you so,” and then I deleted it.

The second thing, which took a lot of concentration, was “Do you think I was making the story up just to fuck you over and get a free meal?”

I deleted that one, too.

By then, however, my thumbs were beginning to get a little sore, so in the end, I settled for keeping it simple:

People are talking here too.

As I waited for him to respond, a sinking feeling began to form in my stomach. I ducked into the building, took my seat at the lab’s instructor table, and pulled up the local news page on my laptop. The lab was empty, save one student in the back corner, doubled over onto the desk, head almost completely buried within a thick, faux-fur lined hood. I’d have thought I’d have found my second body if the figured hadn’t twitched when the door clicked shut.

The police wouldn’t have reported who reported the death, would they? They wouldn’t have listed my name in connection with incident? But the page wasn’t loading, and I fumbled for my phone again.

They don’t mention me in the article, do they? Can’t pull it up right now.

No. No mention of anyone but your friend. Know I said it the other night, but I’m really sorry again. That’s awful.

Relief, fortunately, was almost strong enough to crowd out the other feelings—slight annoyance that he had to read it for himself in the paper, strong reluctance to think about Sasha any longer than I had to.

Thanks. Really don’t need my name attached to this kind of thing during a hiring process.

How did it go?? Did you kick ass?

I smiled at that, just a little.

Think so.

And then, just as I hit send, the door to the lab opened. I sat up a bit straighter and slid my phone back into my bag, expecting a mildly-confused student who would need to be redirected to a classroom down the hall. (It was still, in week two, far too early for students who actually realized that they needed help to be making their way to the lab.)

Instead, looking even more out of place and rumpled in his button-down shirt and khakis, it was Harvey, still holding the same thick pseudo-leather document folder that he’d had on the table during the interview.