12. Lydia
Lydia
I hated studying at home—especially when someone else was there. It reminded me too much of struggling to complete my schoolwork in my bedroom while my effortlessly smart older brother watched noisy hockey games in his. But I gave it my best shot, spending the next few days tending to Trish and trying to read Dawn with headphones on while “Smoke and Ashes” by Tracy Chapman played on an endless loop in the background.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask Trish to turn it off—or even down. I mean, it was all my fault that the girlfriend she’d been planning to follow to New York after graduation had dumped her.
But if I heard Tracy keen one more time about how her blind devotion had only led to heartbreak, the house would be smoke and ashes when I burned it down just to get out of hearing that song again.
By the time Saturday night rolled around, I was more than happy to fulfill Trish’s grief meal request of pretzel bites, a turtle custard mix-in, and a double order of fried cheese curds from the campus rec center’s Culvers—even if it meant having to stand in line for nearly an hour due to the pre-game rush and then having to wait an additional twenty minutes to retrieve Trish’s order from the pick-up counter.
However, I did have to wave the counter attendant down after she pushed a tray full of food toward me instead of a to-go bag.
“Hi, sorry!” I said before she could walk away to retrieve the next order. “I asked for this as a carryout.”
The attendant glared at me before snatching up the receipt, which clearly had the word CARRYOUT written across it in block letters.
Her expression didn’t change, though. “Guess that’s what you get for being a crazy-ass stalker,” she muttered.
“Excuse me?” I jerked my head back. “What did you just say to me?”
“Here you go, Restraining Order ,’” she answered with a fake smile before carelessly tossing a plastic blue-and-white bag on top of my food.
By the time I recovered from my shock, she’d walked away, and another attendant was asking me to move so he could place the next order on the pick-up counter. I’m pretty sure I heard him call me Restraining Order under his breath, too.
That was how I found out that the Black Bunny nickname Artyom had suggested to his teammates hadn’t stuck. But Restraining Order? Apparently, that one had gone viral.
You’re a Carrington. You’re a Carrington. You’re a Carrington , I chanted to myself when my long-dormant temper threatened to give rise.
As my mother had reminded me throughout the years, I represented the Carrington name wherever I went. Completely losing my shit like I used to when I got frustrated wouldn’t do.
Tamping down my anger, I gathered up my tray and turned to find another clear surface to pack up Trish’s order?—
“You got no business being here, Restraining Order! Rule’s two hundred feet!”
That was all the warning I got before a guy wearing the official Yolk’s game day jersey slapped the open tray of food out of my hands.
I nearly wailed like Trish when the pretzel bites and cheese curds I’d ordered for my grieving best friend scattered across the floor, right before the turtle mix-in custard splatted down in the middle of it, like a totally ruined cherry on top.
“It’s one hundred feet!” I called after the asshole—no “am I?” about it—on social work major principle.
But I was a Carrington. And I could already see a few students with their phones held up—eager to see me go off.
Not today, Satan —as Trish still said, even though she started listing her religion as Yoruba after taking a West African Studies class her sophomore year.
With a sigh, I grabbed a wad of napkins to try to clean up the mess as best I could.
Then I felt his eyes on me.
I looked up to find the reason my attacker claimed I was violating a restraining order. Artyom Rustanov. Sitting at one of the campus rec center’s long tables surrounded by his hockey player friends.
Way less than 100 feet away and close enough that I could hear his teammates snickering as the guy who’d ruined my food took a seat at the other end of the table and began high-fiving the other dudes like he’d just scored the winning goal. Just in case there was any doubt about why they were congratulating him, they helpfully pointed at me so anyone within hearing distance could also laugh as I cleaned up the mess their teammate had made me make.
At least Tommy wasn’t among the players at the table.
I guess I had that one microscopically tiny thing going for me.
But I didn’t feel anything remotely close to lucky as Artyom watched me clean up Trish’s ruined comfort food with that cold sneer I was beginning to know all too well. Had I only imagined him smiling down at me softly in that Berlin hotel room? At this point, it felt like a hallucination.
Anyway, that night, I went through Culver’s drive-thru and brought back cold cheese curds and a half-melted mix-in custard for my grieving roommate.
After a disastrous attempt to study at the off-campus Caribou Coffee on Sunday—the barista was a huge Yolks fan—I did my best to study at home. Because, apparently, nowhere was safe from Artyom Rustanov’s wrath.
“Maybe Claudia was right….” I said to Trish on Monday night when she emerged from her grief cave to find me struggling through chapter three of Dawn . “There’s no way I’m going to be able to finish this book before tomorrow’s class. I should probably just drop it.”
“No! You can’t let the terrorists win!” Trish insisted.
“But…”
“No buts. Only cans!” Trish grabbed my laptop off the coffee table. “Here, I know, like, all the illegal sites for cliffsnotes. That’s all you need to bullshit your way through one class. Then you’ll be set because the rest of the books are on audio.”
“Yeah, but Artyom?—”
Trish stopped me right there with a noisy huff. “Okay, Claudia ain’t shit. Fine. I can live with that—after lots and lots of crying, Tracy Chapman, and Culver’s cheese curds. But we are not going to let Ick Rustanov have the library with your last name on it, the campus rec center, and the freaking Clara Quinn class. Girl, you are going to have to fight for your right to take an esoteric class about Black women sci-fi writers. Do it for the culture!”
Her words made me rally a bit, and her offer to read the illegal cliffsnotes to me felt like a great idea...
...until I woke up the next morning underneath the blanket Trish must have laid on top of me after I fell asleep—promptly, apparently. I had not one memory of anything she read. And it was only fifteen minutes before the start of class. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
After throwing on a bright pink Gemidgee Animal Shelter hoodie, the only top I could find in the bedroom floor pile I’d mentally labeled “Sort of Clean,” I dashed through the bitterly cold morning to the other side of campus and barely made it there… over three minutes after the start of class.
Clara Quinn, who was lecturing in front of a slide with a vintage cover of Dawn, featuring two White women on it, paused to say, “Speaking of disrespectful… You may show up to the class on time in the future, or you may not bother showing up at all. I do not allow students to walk in late to my seminars.”
“Sorry, Ms. Quinn,” I mumbled as I rushed to take the only empty seat left at the table.
Unfortunately, it was located right next to Artyom Rustanov.
After shadowing social workers in Minnesota’s rural county system for only a week, I was deeply aware of what a privileged existence I enjoyed as the able-bodied adopted daughter of a multi-millionaire. But seriously, fuck my life. Fuck it so, so hard.
“Is she even allowed to sit next to him?” I heard someone whisper as I sat down. “I thought he took out a restraining…”
Luckily, before they could finish, Clara Quinn began lecturing about how the first cover of Dawn was whitewashed because the idea of Black women in the sci-fi space was so relatively new back then that the book’s original publisher didn’t believe it could sell with the book’s Black protagonist on the cover….
It was a worthy lecture that deserved our full attention. But I could barely concentrate because instead of listening to Clara Quinn speak on the injustices of late 20th-century publishing, most of my classmates were openly glancing between Artyom and me, sitting side by side. I could almost hear their minds wondering if the stalking rumors were true.
“I’ll give that honor to you, Ms. Carrington.”
The sound of the last name I was still trying to live up to jerked my attention back to Ms. Quinn, who was looking at me expectantly.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
She pinned me with a disbelieving squint. “You didn’t hear me ask you to stand up and read the passage I’ve been talking about for the last five minutes?”
Read?
My stomach dropped like the iron anchor on my father’s lake boat.
Clara Quinn wanted me to read aloud. To the entire class.
This was the stuff of nightmares.
Literally, I’d had nightmares about getting asked to read in front of the entire class—until a helpful administrator at the private school my adoptive parents tried to transfer me to when I was thirteen asked for them to get me formally assessed for what she’d called “certain academic handicaps.” After that, I’d been exempted from the common practice.
But something told me Ms. Quinn wasn’t the type of guest professor who went through the accommodations list for her class roster.
I swallowed but couldn’t make myself form the words to answer her. I could only sit there, rooted with embarrassment to my seat. My eyes pooled with tears. I’d be turning twenty-two in March, but I felt thirteen all over again, getting called out by teachers who assumed I was too lazy to do the work.
“Did you not read the book?” my hero, Clara Quinn, asked me, her voice becoming testy with irritation. And suspicion. “If that’s the case, you’ll have to leave. There is no place in my class for students who not only come in late but also fail to?—”
The scrape of a chair pushing back cut her off.
“I will read this passage you wish to hear out loud now,” Artyom announced.
Mouths dropped open all around the table, including mine. What is he doing?
“I did not ask you to read the passage, young man,” Clara Quinn said, squinting at him.
“I know you did not. This is why I am volunteering,” Artyom answered in a tone that somehow managed to be affable and cold at the same time.
Either way, it brooked no argument.
And even if it did, it didn’t matter in the end. Artyom began reading the passage in heavily accented, monotone English without waiting for Clara Quinn’s permission.
He was back. The considerate guy from Berlin had come to my rescue.
Drowning in a well of shame and confusion, I couldn’t help but wonder which version of Artyom Rustanov was real.
The savior reading the passage so that I wouldn’t have to explain to Clara Quinn why I couldn’t in front of the entire class?
Or the monster who’d launched my campus-wide torment with one cold sneer?