Chapter One
All of Chapter One, in one place
On a cold and rainy January morning in 2015, a week behind on rent, I wrote a bad check.
At least it didn’t have far to go; my crappy apartment was in Sunnyvale, California, which if not located in the heart of Silicon Valley, was at least in the somewhat-functional left artery. The leasing office was in Mountain View, just one town north, with free public WIFI and a way better library. (But nobody, as far as I knew, had founded a Google or an Apple in a Sunnyvale garage or shed or wherever. I’m sure it wasn’t for lack of trying.)
I could have just been delinquent, but sending a check that bounced might buy me time in the back and forth about whether I could make it good. The Bay Area was notoriously expensive, and community college English instructors just as notoriously underpaid. Until very recently, I had lived in San Francisco, where I hadn’t paid rent at all. Sam had covered it, first as a loan, and then as a loan that slipped further and further into the distance with each passing month, a signpost on a lonely road barely visible in the rearview mirror.
(The loan part was really just to make me feel better. He never thought of it that way himself. I don't think he would have known what to do had I ever written him a check, much less a good one.)
The whole reason, however, that I was about to jilt the one place where I could kind of afford to live of their legal due, the whole reason I was writing this check on a tiny stained kitchen counter (a step above the only other flat surface in the place—a wobbly card table I’d hauled in from the thrift store a mile down the road) was because I’d left Sam. And I wasn’t—not even for all the money in the world, a good chunk of which was kept safe for VCs and start ups just miles from my janky front door—going back.
It might make the best-ever response to the worn-out “What I Did Over Winter Break” essay ever, were I the type of teacher to assign it.
What I Did, In No Particular Order:
On the last day before Sam’s holiday time off began, just after I’d turned in my grades, I submitted my extremely complicated and tediously bureaucratic application for the full time, tenure-track position that was opening on campus in the English Department in January.
I borrowed Sam’s personal laptop, connected conveniently to his delivery account, to order myself a celebratory lunch. (I didn’t do this often; I didn’t, god forbid, live completely off of my tech marketing boyfriend, but it had been such a long week, such a uniquely challenging application given that the college was mired in a months-long transition from analog to digital paperwork and so everything was some incalculable combination of them both, and I was hungry. There it was, my sin: I was really, really hungry.)
Only instead of the browser window open onto Reddit or Twitter or Gizmodo, it was open to Tinder, and there were messages, there were responses. There was no plausible deniability.
So I decided to forgo the usual breakup conversation in favor of helping Sam procure Girlfriend 2.0 more efficiently, packed my car to the gills with my clothes in garbage bags, my papers and books in our enormous collection of reusable Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s shopping bags, and, for good measure, the cat, crammed into his box.
Somewhere along 280 I pulled off the freeway at a scenic overlook, the usual variety of scenic overlooks that line that stretch of road (there are many; it’s stunning), complete with a canyon, coastal hills, and forests mostly obscured by the thick fog that clung to my hair and glasses as soon as I stepped out from the car.
I slammed my iPhone, with its connection to our family account that would render me trackable, against the side of a rock until the screen shattered and the button stopped working. And then I hurled the entire thing over the edge of the cliff into the craggy embrace of the San Andreas Fault.
I kept driving until I found a cheap motel on the edge of Mountain View that didn’t ask questions about the box that yowled. Slept there for nearly twenty four hours straight, then used the room phone to lock down the apartment.
Went to Goodwill and bought a few things; went to Fry’s and bought a pre-paid candy bar phone; moved my worldly belongings to the new place; slept through most of Christmas. (The only other real option, paying for a ticket at the Cineplex and then sneaking into one movie after another, like some overgrown adolescent, depressed me so much I only woke up on the 25th at all in the afternoon because Kierkegaard started clawing my scalp around two, looking for kibble. He must have known it was a holiday, or was showing a rare moment of pity, to have left me alone for so long.)
And finally, when we’d staggered into the new year and there was just enough time to get my shit together before the semester started, I bought a cheap iron and nylons at Walgreens and dug through my garbage bags to see how much of my professional wardrobe had made it to the South Bay. Fortunately, enough of it had. What didn’t, I was sure Sam could give to the next girl, or even leave it on the corner in a box marked FREE. It’d be gone before he made it back upstairs.
*
So. It was first day of spring semester, which was always kind of a joke, early-January being winter even in the Bay Area, and it was pouring, off and on, cold, raw rain. And I pulled over by the mailbox two blocks from my apartment, holding an old, crumbling campus newspaper over my head in what was really nothing more than a gesture of protection, lowered the cold blue handle of the mailbox, and slipped the envelope protecting the bad rent check inside. The flap snapped back shut with a metallic clang. It was shielded from the elements now, safe and dry, and on its way.
And so was I, if damp and exposed. I cranked up the heat as high as it would go and when I arrived on campus found I was early enough to grab a parking spot in the back of the campus’s sole covered garage. It would be a longer walk over to the department office than if I’d chosen the outdoor faculty lot, but I wouldn’t go from damp to drenched.
There are those transplants who love to complain about how California doesn’t have any real weather. Maybe this is true in times of drought, but in my experience, the weather exists for several solid months of downpours for which no facet of the environment is in any way prepared. I did not need to walk onto campus, on the first day of the semester, looking like a drowned rat. I was already at least a full day of prep work behind, thanks to my unorthodox break. But I was good enough that, if I didn’t slip up, no one would know.
The thing is, the first day of the semester on a community college campus matters. Everyone’s in a half-fog coming off of break, especially after the holidays, trying to remember whether they’ve posted their syllabi in all of the required places, registered for office hours (and then posted that information in all of the required places), completed the required start-of-semester paperwork according to a procedure that changes every half second, on a good day, packed the right lunch, etc. But gradually, as the day wears on, they begin to notice what they’re seeing, and whom. Like that adjunct, in the right place, at the right time, sharp, relatively chipper, and ready to go. Putting them all to shame, but without looking as though she’s trying too hard, as though she’s too desperate.
You don’t want to be so good that you’re untouchable. Or worse, background, and then they can take you for granted, and they will. They’ll assume that you’re so good you must have it made somewhere else in the world—you come from money, or you married rich, and this is just a part-time diversion to allow you to feel useful. No, you want to aim for that critical half-step above ordinary. Just enough that they really pause and take notice and think, hmmm, maybe she’ll be applying for that full time position. I could get behind her. There are levels upon levels of politics here, you see. I suppose that’s true in most every workplace—Sam always used to tell me so, every single time I tried to explain how crucial every move I made was. I also suppose that, at least in fields like business and tech, failure doesn’t mean you might not be able to eat.
But adjuncts can’t look that hungry, not on the first day of a new semester. And so I didn’t. I walked onto campus in my best pencil skirt, wearing those new drugstore tights, low heels, a deep purple cashmere sweater that gave my winter pallor as much color as possible (it had just one, well hidden, hole at the armpit), and a long, belted black raincoat, pulling my wheeled bag, huddling underneath my umbrella, dodging the rainwater that pooled in the sidewalk dips, looking, as much as I ever did, like a reasonable approximation of a professor. My heels clicked, my bag wheels rattled, no one could see the remaining strands of orange cat hair on my clothes that I could never complete eradicate, and the students who passed in their hoodies and sneakers and knock off Uggs, bless their hearts, didn’t know the difference between me and the tenured ones.
At least, they never had in the past, unless I told them. I usually didn’t; I am not an inherently political person, but a pragmatic one. And the last thing I needed was some kid talking to the wrong person about how I’d radicalized them on academic labor issues the week before I appeared in front of a hiring committee. (I respected the adjuncts who did the labor organizing and union work; I was too inclined to hedge my bets to join them. I did enough unpaid work as it was.)
My first class of the day was a transfer-level composition class, the backbone of a transcript for anyone who wanted to either graduate with an Associate’s Degree or transfer out to a four-year institution. Most of my students were new-ish, probably only in their second semester of higher education, and even if they weren’t English majors—and most of them weren’t English majors—they were already taking things fairly seriously.
This group was a typical mix of students for the campus—close to fifty-fifty male/female, maybe a third of the students Latina/o, a third East Asian. Of that latter group, about half looked American, of all backgrounds, half international, something that was usually fairly easy to tell. Most of them were traditional college age, as per usual for a morning class, though a couple women looked as though they could be older, here while their own kids were in school.
(The best part about teaching composition: everyone comes through that door. Everyone has to come through that door, unless they’re on campus to scratch a random intellectual itch with a one-off course. The depth and breadth of life experience in any of my comp classrooms never failed to floor me. It was a sharp contrast to how I’ve always felt in Actual Silicon Valley environments, where diversity beyond surface level tends to only really apply to how many unique conference t-shirts are present in the room.)
They came in quietly, took their seats quietly, only a handful here and there half-whispering across the aisle to a friend from a class before, the sound of a metal desk-chair leg scraping across the floor occasionally breaking the near-silence. Most of them stayed focused on their phones, glancing up at me every once in a while, when they thought I wasn’t looking. I knew from experience that this was the quietest it would ever be; give a roomful of college students a couple of hours and alliances would form, annoyances would emerge, friendships would gel, and flirtations would develop.
There are always some professors who try to stall that process, keep total control of the dynamics in the room as long as humanely possible, but as for myself, I’d always found that students with relationships were much more likely to come to class, and far more likely to turn in their work, or at least to talk to me about it when they didn’t. Anyone who thinks teaching is about maintaining complete control is a drill sergeant, in addition to being horribly ineffective in a classroom. No, it’s far more like surfing, that stereotypically-Californian activity of choice that I still have yet to try—a mix of balance, poise, and a willingness to dive head-first into an oncoming wave at a moment’s notice.
But that would come later. The first day of class was mostly paperwork—a student survey, a quick writing sample, and plenty of roll call. This time around, I’d even decided to hold off on the icebreakers I’d usually do until the next meeting and just let them leave when they were done; I knew that I could use the extra twenty minutes to catch up on my start-of-semester paperwork, catch up on my email that I’d completely ignored over break, double-check that my job application had been accepted. And they almost certainly had their own registration work, bills to pay, books to borrow or buy, and lines to wait in for half the morning.
After the stragglers had all wandered in, the final one of which was a lanky kid in a campus police polo who looked at the clock, looked at me, and looked mortified, when I had them all settled in with their survey and prompt, a sea of heads bopping softly with the almost-unfamiliar rhythm of longhand, I pulled my laptop out and tried to log in to the college network to submit my online class census. But the login wouldn’t take. My email wouldn’t open. The WIFI itself wouldn’t connect. “Shit,” I muttered.
This was par for the course. Despite being maybe three feet, maybe a mile (depending on who you asked and what operating system they used), from the epicenter of Silicon Valley, the college was known to have really patchy WIFI. I was going to have to fire up the campus desktop, then, a hunk of highly-refined metals and plastic that I preferred to think of as an impromptu shield, should anyone ever show up shooting. But they usually worked, once you got them turned on. It was just going to take at least half an hour, from start up to login to input to success, and that was if I got lucky. Sometimes, if you weren’t teaching the first class of the day, they were already up and running. This was, however, the first class of the day. I reached around for the power button, and held it until the computer gave its familiar, slightly ominous, off-key chime.
*
Forty-five minutes later, nearly all of my students had placed their surveys and writing samples in piles in front of me before slipping back out onto campus to face the rest of their first day. I’d passed out five add codes, straightened the piles at least six times, answered something like eleven questions about the department and registration, and still—still!—hadn’t managed to make the census report site load. I finally just quit the browser. There were only a few students still writing; I could run over to the department office and use one of the computers that was connected to ethernet via the thick blue cord that was quickly becoming old-school. It would work, however, unless the entire site was down. I began to gather my things.
And then, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
The lanky kid in the police polo, the one who had come in ten minutes late and taken the seat in the front right corner, was next to my desk. “Ma’am, I’m really really sorry I was late,” he began, in a low voice, “but I have a question. And I’m Andy, by the way. Andy Nguyen.”
“Hi Andy,” I said. “Ask away. But don’t worry about calling me ‘ma’am.’ Ms. Thompson’s just fine.”
“Oh, sure, sorry professor. I mean, sorry Ms. Thompson. I just came from my ROTC course, so you know, I’m in the habit. Anyways, that’s what I wanted to say. I might be a little late because of that on some Mondays. ROTC morning requirements, I mean. And then I have to change so that I can do my shift after this class. I intern with the campus police, and it’s the only time I can get my hours in with classes and ROTC, and I’m really sorry to disrespect your class like this, it’s just that especially after The Incident at the end of last semester—” and I could hear the capital letters loud and clear “—it’s really important to have people walking their patrols when they’re assigned so things don’t slip through the cracks—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I broke in, when he paused for a breath. “I understand that sometimes things like this come up.”
“Really?”
“Really. The important thing is that you’re telling me about it ahead of time. Just be sure to be as close to on time as you can be, and when you come in, don’t cause a distraction. If you have questions, wait for a quiet moment.”
“Like right now.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Do you have your survey filled out?”
He looked down at his empty hands. “Oh, right, right! Yeah, sorry—I’m almost done. I’ll get back to work.”
He made his way back to his desk, crouched his frame back into the chair, and picked up his pen once more.
*
Finally, everyone was finished with the assignment, if only leaving me with an extra ten minutes before the end of class instead of the twenty I’d coveted. As I made my way over to the department office, grateful that the rain had paused, I wondered idly what Andy had meant by last semester’s “incident.”
He was just fifteen feet ahead of me on the path, but I didn’t call him back to ask; too much familiarity, too soon. A shyer student, one who wasn’t already feeling his way into a position of minor institutional authority, I’d probably make a point of catching. Some students do need to be draw out; others need cheerful, consistent boundaries. Makes the entire semester go far more smoothly for everyone if I can figure out who is who at the very start; I’m usually quite good at it. As curious as I was, it wasn’t my job to ask them for what I wanted, but to figure out what they needed.
So I didn’t call him back, and I had nearly managed to shelve my curiosity by the time I’d reached the department office door. If it really was as much of a thing as he’d thought—and that was far from guaranteed—there’d probably be an email about it waiting in my inbox.
Inside, it smelled faintly of toner, stale coffee, and mildew. There was the usual first-day chaos, even in the relatively small space, people crowded around the copy machine, hitting buttons and swearing, full time faculty trying to reach their mailboxes, adjuncts camped out semi-permanently on the three computers hooked up to the ethernet and printers, their paper coffee cups lined up between them like road delineators. It had been too much to hope for that I was the only one having technological issues; at least there was no one else in line. I sighed and leaned up against a counter while I waited, wondering when I’d run into Maggie, wondering if I had already slipped onto her bad side for going so thoroughly off the grid over the break. I hadn’t even sent her my new number.
But no—she was probably worried about me, given that I wasn’t one to disappear, and if that worry came out as anger, I could handle it. I knew her too well. She was Magdalena to most people in the department—had been to me for the first two years I’d known her, too, before I managed to snag her as my mentor. How I did that still baffles me; most likely, it wasn’t I who did it at all. Maggie always made her own choices, and we lucky few would benefit.
She was easily in her seventies when I met her, but she showed no signs of even considering retirement. She was a departmental institution, brusque and efficient, no-nonsense with her colleagues and tough on her students. The colleagues often found her immensely frustrating, as she refused to play politics for something she didn’t believe in (and her beliefs were an odd mixture of radical and dated). But she was a master of trading favors for a good cause and could cut through bureaucracy to get things done better than anyone I’ve ever known, before or since.
Her students, almost invariably, loved her. Her online ratings are paragraph after paragraph of students writing things like “I hated her for the first week, and then I loved her” or “Hardest grader I’ve ever met, but I learned more in this class than any other.” (And they were usually written in complete sentences, too, which is perhaps the best compliment ever paid to any professor in this new millennium.)
She didn’t team up with just anyone. From what I’d heard, she took on one or two adjuncts at any given time, and no more. If they didn’t perform, if they stalled out after the first interview more than once, or worse, didn’t even get called in, she was gracious, but she moved on. Ours was a friendly relationship, but she was always quite clear about her motivations: “When it’s all said and done, it’s a horse race for the future of the department. And if you’ll excuse my mixing metaphors, close doesn’t count. I have my ideas about how I’d like things to go in the future, and you’ll be a step in that direction.”
The first time I applied for a full time position, which was incidentally the first time one had been open in nearly five years, she’d been kind, if a little aloof. I’d been cut after the first round of interviews. Once I’d gotten over the gut-punch, I’d gathered up my application materials, written down the questions that the committee had asked, and my responses as close to word-for-word as memory allowed, bought three of the best raspberry jam muffins from the overpriced bakery just off campus, and crashed her office hours. Whether it was the jam, my brazenness, or just her own boredom in that particularly dead hour that got her over her initial annoyance that I hadn’t bothered to make an appointment with her remained unclear. What mattered was that she was intrigued in spite of herself, then engaged, and then, finally, invested.
She gave me a breakdown, blow by blow, of what I’d done well and what I’d completely fucked up. Those two things, naturally, weren’t nearly as obvious as you might think. And over time, we became close. It was mostly a professional closeness—she didn’t say all that much about her life beyond campus, and I didn’t say much about mine. Granted, it wasn’t entirely clear that she did have a life beyond campus.
As for me, our relationship was developing just as my mother’s mental state really began to devolve back in a Medicare-funded nursing home on the East Coast, and though I would never have gone so far to call Maggie a mother figure, largely because I was fairly certain she’d drop me like a hot potato were I to do so, there were nights when I got off a half-hour call with my mother, a call comprised completely of the same five minute conversational unit repeated six times over, and it was Maggie’s emails, as business-like as they could be, that helped bring me around to stable ground again. Sam certainly never figured out that particular trick. His go-to method was to try to get me to watch a new show, almost always something gritty and dramatic, and when it didn’t work, he’d go sulk by jumping on his stationary bike and pretending that he wasn’t sulking, while I buried myself in work, letting Maggie’s words rest along my spine like a weighted blanket.
The second time I’d applied for a tenure-track position, she’d coached me through the entire hiring process aggressively, from rumored announcement to hiring committee research to application to interviews, and when I barely lost out in the final round, she was still optimistic. She was also very straightforward about the new hire: “He’s incredibly talented, and so are you. He’s also mixed-race, he’s a man, and he’s young, but not too young. You have one of those three things. You’re both qualified candidates—and they made a decent choice. We’ll see how he pans out.”
I paused for a moment at that, because to engage Maggie on hiring demographics always had me worried about who might be listening around the corner, and, if I am to be completely honest, how her own opinions and ways of putting things might reflect on me. “Is there anything I can do to pull it my way next time?”
She shrugged at that. “Pray? If you’re the praying type. But I wouldn’t worry too much. Certain people within this institution focus more on quotas and checkboxes than anything else. They checked a whole hell of a lot this time. Gives them a little more freedom to skip one or two boxes the next time around. Next time, if I have anything to do with it, it’s yours.” And she’d smiled at me, a fleck of raspberry jam—I still tried not to come empty handed—on the edge of one pointed tooth.
I hadn’t seen her since the fall semester ended, but that wasn’t special; I hadn’t seen anyone. Still, we usually exchanged holiday emails, and I hadn’t done that, nor checked my personal account for one from her. I hadn’t even checked my department email for the start-of-semester forms and contracts yet, which I knew would be a black mark if anyone in charge ever found out. There was a lot I hadn’t done. But I’d take care of things before anyone noticed, starting with my census forms, which really should have been the easiest part of the whole thing—mark who was there, mark who didn’t show, submit the whole shebang for an Official Count.
The thing was, I still needed access to the website to make that happen, and none of my peers currently squatting at the computers showed any sign of leaving. Nor did they seem to know how to use a keyboard, much less a mouse. Usually I’d pull out my phone while I was waiting and check my email, maybe the news. But my candy-bar burner didn’t do things like that. I sighed, idly picking up a flier from the table next to me and flicking one orange corner of it back and forth with my thumb.
And then I took a closer look. There was a black-and-white picture of Maggie on it, one that had to be at least ten years old. “Magdalena Gerson Memorial Scholarship,” it read, in tall, bold type against the washed out orange paper. There was a paragraph of smaller text below that, but my vision had suddenly blurred.
“Cynthia?” I called, turning my head in the general direction of the receptionist’s cubicle wall. I tried to keep my voice steady, though the flier shook. “Cynthia, you there?”
“Sure thing!” she called back, and I took the three steps around the corner to the entrance. She smiled as I came into view. “What’s up? Please don’t me you can’t find your add codes, because if I have to tell one more person how to access them now that they’re digital…” She broke off and throttled an invisible neck, her bangles jangling against her pink-banded watch.
“No, no,” I said, holding up the flier. “This. I want to know about this. What’s this? Are we naming scholarships after living people now?”
Her expression shifted immediately into cautious pity, and my stomach began to roil. I clutched the edge of the cubicle wall and willed her to stay silent.
“Katie,” she said gently. “Haven’t you been checking your email? Magdalena passed away at the beginning of winter break.”