Chapter 2 #2
Still, as the mid-September sun sets and blackberry ice cream melts on his tongue, he wonders if all he’s doing is delaying the inevitable: falling asleep in a strange new room that doesn’t hold any of the memories of nearly half his life.
—
The dean of the life sciences department calls a meeting a couple days before the start of the quarter.
Nick is one of those saps who gets emotional about the beginning of the school year—he always has, ever since he was a kid.
He’s already tidied his office, updated his exams and assignments, edited his PowerPoint presentations.
He even hung a banner that says Get Psyched on his office door, because as a psychology professor, he feels humor is a vital part of his job.
He takes every opportunity to show his students that the subject can be both complicated and bizarre, its history full of colorful personalities.
Freud is really only the tip of the iceberg.
Is the banner a little dorky? Sure, but this is academia—dorks proudly welcomed.
He doesn’t even dislike these meetings or any of the university red tape.
Structure is exactly what he needs to move forward, and the optimism comes easy as he nods his hellos to the other two professors in the dean’s office, Fumiko Hayashi, who teaches marine biology, and Marshall Klein, who he’s never met but teaches philosophy in the humanities department.
They all take seats in front of Dean Traci Eckhart’s desk as she waits for the printer to spit out some documents.
Nick crosses one leg over the other. He’s in chinos and a collared shirt, his thermos of coffee an extension of his right arm.
At least he’s no longer living out of boxes, aside from the handful he’s not going to touch until he has his own place, and he’s been able to pick Audrey up from school every day so his sister can work a bit later.
They’ll grab a bite to eat or grocery shop for Audrey’s next masterpiece or park themselves at the kitchen table while she does homework and he preps for class, struggling to remember the quadratic formula when she asks him about math.
It’s the closest thing to a routine he’s had in months, and as eager as he is to meet his students, he’ll miss it.
“Welcome, welcome,” says Dean Eckhart, a petite middle-aged woman with a background in molecular genetics and a slight mistrust of technology.
Case in point: she asks everyone to turn off their phones during the meeting so none of them can listen in.
After they exchange pleasantries, she gets down to business.
“I wanted to speak with you before you receive your most up-to-date class lists. We have a celebrity enrollment this quarter, and she’s in all three of your classes. Ramona Wilder.”
The name is so unexpected, it takes a moment to register.
They have celebrity students not infrequently—some under the radar, some not—and Nick’s had a couple in class before.
Most of them keep to themselves, as though worried about drawing even more attention, though toward the beginning of his career, he taught one young actor who asked such insightful questions and performed so well on his exams, Nick recommended him for one of his high-level psych seminars the next quarter.
Instead, the guy left for Atlanta to shoot a Marvel movie.
Despite having lived in LA since college, Nick’s never been very interested in the industry. It’s always seemed like this strange, hyper-glossy behemoth that exists entirely outside his own life.
Marshall, the oldest of the three, with shoulder-length shaggy gray hair and a beard to match, leans forward in his chair. “Sorry, who?”
“She’s a singer,” Nick says. One of Audrey’s favorites, in fact.
He took her to a concert a few years ago when Lexi came down with the flu.
He remembers the throngs of screaming girls, how he regretted not wearing earplugs when he could barely hear the next day and decided this must mean he was getting old.
And now she’s apparently a UCLA freshman.
If he doesn’t have to sign an NDA, this is going to earn him some serious cool uncle points.
“Former child actress, too,” Dean Eckhart says, passing around her printouts. “She was on a kids’ show called”—a squint down at the paper—“Greta Life!? Ah, I get it. Clever.”
Nick has to muffle a laugh. For as much as they tout the importance of proper research and vetting sources, the dean really just went and printed Ramona’s bio off Wikipedia.
“Very accomplished,” Fumiko muses, lowering chic reading glasses from the top of her head as she scans the printout. “I think my daughters listened to her when they were younger. Didn’t she announce she was retiring?”
“Could be a publicity stunt,” Nick says. That was his first thought when the news broke, and Audrey spent half the day in her room sobbing into a pillow. Didn’t celebrities do that kind of thing all the time, declare they were retreating from the spotlight only to create buzz for a comeback?
Dean Eckhart lifts her eyebrows at him. “It’s not our job to pass judgment. This is a delicate situation, and we want to give it the gravity it deserves.”
“With all due respect,” Nick says, as though he himself is holding on to some of Audrey’s anguish, “what makes her so special?”
As he says it, he thinks back to that concert.
Ramona Wilder strutting around the stage in combat boots and ripped tights, everyone in the arena half in love with her.
He didn’t really care for the music, though some of the songs were catchy, but she had such a confident command of her voice—he remembers that, how she knew exactly when to hold back and when to belt.
How she flirted with the audience. A well-timed smirk. A jut of her hip.
Even in this grainy Wikipedia photo, she’s objectively beautiful. Long hair hitting mid-back as she leans over the stage, microphone an inch from deep red lips. He supposes being pretty is simply part of her job—surely it must cost a lot of money to maintain it.
That’s what celebrity means to him: a wholly manufactured sense of superiority.
“There’s a good chance a lot of your students will have grown up with her,” Dean Eckhart says. “We just want to make sure to foster a learning environment where all our students feel safe and comfortable.”
“I consider it a privilege,” Marshall says, and then, with zero cynicism: “I’m sure she’ll have some fascinating insights on free will and determination. I look forward to hearing them.”
It doesn’t matter, Nick decides after the meeting, that Ramona Wilder’s net worth is $28 million—he googled it—or that she has three Grammys. Some of his colleagues might fawn over a pop star, but in his classroom, everyone is equal.
Once the quarter starts, she’ll be just another student.
And he fully intends to treat her that way.