Chapter Fourteen Bram
Chapter Fourteen
Bram
And that’s all until the guests get here,” Ali finishes.
We’re in Nagel Auditoria, a Gothic building in the heart of Astra’s campus, as we prepare for the upcoming seminar on pollinators.
We’re welcoming lepidopterists—or butterfly perverts, as Ali keeps forgetting not to call them—along with ornithologists,* chiropterologists,* melittologists,* and other entomologists.
* It’s me and two assistant professors on the tenure grind who’ve been trying to keep up with Ali’s tossed-out ideas all afternoon.
“And we’re committed to online-only resources, Dr. Darwish?” one of the assistant professors asks. Dr. Diana Mensah, a Brit who came over as a grad student, and whom I adopted immediately as she was the only one in her cohort even remotely interested in a future as a bryologist.*
Her compatriot in suffering, a lanky man upsettingly named Maverick McGee, clears his throat. “I’m just thinking we might need more organization beyond throwing everyone’s slides and handouts onto the cloud.”
Ali pauses, then makes finger guns. “Let’s do a seminar website, then. Thanks, guys!”
Diana and Maverick exchange a dead inside glance, which Ali misses as he’s already striding up to the door, waving for me to follow him.
“You know, we’ll probably have to build the website ourselves,” I remark as we leave one of the lecture halls and emerge into the soaring stone lobby. “The web department won’t turn it around in time.”
Outside, the sun is fondly golden and the air is pleasant, despite the ever-present wind here on the hill Astra University is perched upon. The trees are waving and sighing, their full green leaves just starting to hint at the red and orange and yellow tumult to come.
“It’ll keep the APs busy,” says Ali. “Wouldn’t want them to get bored this early in the year!”
I give him a wry look as we start toward Gerhart Hall.
“Bram, I promise I won’t break the baby professors. I didn’t break you, did I?”
“Isn’t that how organizational abuse perpetuates itself, sir?”
“We should ask someone in Psych. But your concern about the website is duly noted,” he adds, too quickly to take him at his word.
“I’m happy to help with—”
He’s already shaking his head. “Bram, stop. Stop. You have your hands full—great work on that proposal, by the way, you know how to titillate those National Science Foundation program officers—but you don’t need to take on everything at Astra University that needs doing.
Either the APs will get the website done, or we’ll throw everything onto”—a heavy sigh, like it pains him to say—“Microsoft OneDrive. But you have got to get better about giving yourself away, because a university isn’t like your greenhouse.
You’re never going to get back what you put into it.
Maybe you’ll get back what you put into teaching and mentoring, to a point, but never into the institution itself.
A university will eat your health, your ideas, and your spare time, and it’ll keep only half paying the bill until you’re retired or you’re dead. ”
“I’m . . . not sure what lesson I’m supposed to take away from that.”
Ali stops in front of our building to squat down and extend his hand. Dr. Monty, who was lazing on his side on the grass near the entrance, gets up and starts rubbing his fluffy head against Ali’s fingers.
“There’s not a lesson,” says my department chair. “I’m just telling you to do some shit for yourself for once. What does Bram Loe want when he’s not being a professor or a dad? What do you do for yourself to unwind?”
I’m assailed by the memory of Maddie standing in front of me in a classroom yesterday. Sweater up, tits covered in lace. Heavily lidded green eyes and a bratty smile.
I push it away.
“Being a dad and teaching are the things I do for myself.”
Ali gives Dr. Monty a final pat and then stands with the posture of someone about to casually throw down a decent hand of cards. “You know . . . Sara’s worried.”
I groan and start walking to the doors, away from this nonsense. The thing about bonding with the same professor as your spouse while you’re both in undergrad is that time marches on for all of you and yet you still have this eternal, shared pseudo-parent in tweed.
“I’m serious,” Ali continues, half jogging until he catches up.
“She feels like she has Asher, and—well, glaciers, I guess—but you chose to teach science instead of doing science, and you’re still alone after five years, and she’s worried, is all.
I’m worried. I’m not saying you have to download a dating app or take up ballroom dancing, but give yourself something, man.
It doesn’t have to accomplish anything other than bringing a smile to your face.
It doesn’t even have to make sense. In fact, it’s even better if it doesn’t make sense!
Because then I’ll know you’re not being a scientist about it. Or worse, a dad.”
He claps my shoulder and then pulls open the door to the building, entering as Dr. Monty headbutts my ankles and then darts inside to find a grad student’s laptop to lie on.
I BEHAVE FOR a week. Seven days. Seven days of giving Maddie rueful smiles as I make sure not to touch her in the hallway as we pass, as I make sure I don’t graze her in the kitchen as we clean up after dinner.
Seven days of quietly pulling on my cock in the shower, trying not to think about what Ali said after the seminar meeting, trying not to justify and justify and justify what I want.
Give yourself something, man.
But I can’t, I can’t do it. It’s not right.
That afternoon, I come home to three banged-up cars in my driveway and muffled yelling from Fern’s room.
I set down my satchel on the sofa and peer up the stairs as Maddie emerges from the kitchen holding a bowl of denuded grape stems.
“So, there was a tie in the election,” Maddie says without preamble. “And rather than doing a recount, the principal has asked Fern and Simon to co-govern as student body presidents.”
Shit.
I can’t imagine what Fern is feeling right now. It’s hard enough to hammer things out with Sara sometimes and we’re repeatedly told that we have the healthiest ex-relationship ever to have existed.
But Simon is a brain-rotted, cowardly piece of shit who deserves nothing but unskippable ads and diarrhea for the rest of his life for what he did to my daughter—and I can’t do anything about the ads, but maybe I can work on the diarrhea if I use up a favor or two from Zoology—
Maddie catches my arm, and I realize that I’ve already started going up the stairs.
“I need to talk to Fern,” I explain patiently. “Make sure she’s okay. Let her know that I’m happy to go have a talk with Simon and give him a chance to do the right thing before I fill his car with potting soil. Or kill him.”
Maddie isn’t letting go. In fact, she’s leading me to a kitchen chair and sitting me down, like I’m one of the stubborn students we practiced managing.
“Bram,” she says. Resolutely but with a sort of kindness too, like she understands the next part is going to be hard for me to hear but she doesn’t have the patience to argue with me about it.
“Fern is with her friends right now. They are making sure she’s okay.
They are hatching all sorts of plans that may or may not include ruining Simon’s life.
You can check in with her later, but right now, she’s with exactly who she needs to be with. ”
A chorus of groans and shrieks comes from upstairs. It sounds . . . well, maybe not all the way happy, but energized. Comradely.
Maddie pats my cheek. Even with my sitting down, she’s barely taller than me.
“Fern needs to do this—at least partly—on her own. With her peers. She needs to figure it out without Dad rushing in to save the day. She needs to try to get through this, and maybe even to fail at getting through it, because otherwise she’ll never learn how to pick herself back up again.
It doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to talk to her tonight or give her lots of love in the coming weeks.
It just means that Dad isn’t the first person she needs to talk to, or even Mom. Not anymore.”
I look down at my lap. At the hands that held a baby Fern, that held on to the handlebars of her bike while she learned to pedal fast enough to keep herself upright. “I hate that.”
“She’s seventeen. This is what seventeen is for. Learning how to get through hard stuff while the safety net is still underneath her. Practicing leaving the nest so that she can make her own one day.”
“That’s very wise,” I admit. Grudgingly.
“Well, I remember being seventeen very well,” Maddie says with a laugh. “It’s a traumatizing age.”
A knotty sort of guilt snags in my chest and throat as I think Of course you remember it well . . . because it was only nine years ago. Because the difference in age between us is the same difference in age between you and my daughter.
I make myself stand up. “I should get some grading done before dinner,” I say. “Thank you for this.”
She steps back, her expression turning briefly uncertain and then resigned. “I’m a good advice machine. That one was on the house.”