Chapter One
OfficialEndeavourHigh: The missing traffic cones have been recovered. Should the perpetrators try to steal them again, please know they are now equipped with tracking software.
I don’t want to be anyone’s hero. People should be able to casually tap their heroes on the shoulder without them having an emotional breakdown. I’m not hero material.
But, despite that, that sentence becomes another one I unnecessarily obsess over. Play over and over again in my mind. I can’t figure out what he meant, even as hard as I try. In the end, it bothers me enough to actually ask him.
“What do you mean, I’m their hero?” I ask on the next class day, instead of any kind of greeting.
Good morning might have been nice. Hi would’ve worked.
I didn’t see him in the parking lot this morning.
He must’ve gotten here super early, because I’m really early.
(Definitely not because I wanted to catch him in the parking lot, though. That’s a ludicrous idea.)
“Morning, Novella.” He doesn’t smile. His eyes are downcast and kind of sad, and I don’t know why that makes my chest hurt.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, throwing my stuff down and sitting in my seat. At first, I sit like a normal person. Then, some part of me kind of wants to drift closer to him, so I turn, sitting sideways and letting my legs slide underneath his chair.
He twiddles a fraying thread from the rip in the knee of my jeans in between his forefinger and thumb. I pretend this is completely normal and not at all overfamiliar. I’m scared that if I say anything, he’ll stop.
Why don’t I want him to stop?
“Sorry,” he mumbles, his hand falling away. “I know you don’t like people touching you. I didn’t mean to—”
“No,” I protest, because he did indeed stop.
My hand reaches out for his, my fingers wrapping around his wrist. Now, I don’t know what I’m doing.
It’s possible I’ve never known what I’m doing.
“I mean, I don’t like strangers touching me.
You …” I try to make some sense of this, of why it doesn’t bother me that he’s so close. That he could be closer. “You … can.”
“Okay.” And finally, he smiles. He turns his left hand over, shifting my fingers from around his wrist to settle against his palm.
“So, what’s wrong?” People are starting to filter in, paying us no attention. Even if we are sitting arguably closer than is appropriate for classmates and project partners.
“It’s nothing,” he mumbles, looking up at people walking past us with that almost fake grin while he tickles the inside of my wrist under the table.
These are the kinds of conversations I don’t like. He says one thing, but he means something else. I don’t know which meaning to respond to. My instinct is always to take everything at face value, but that makes me gullible.
“But you’d tell me if something was really wrong, right?” I ask, squeezing his hand, even as Dr. Lowry ambles into the room.
“Yeah.” He winks again. I’m so unprepared for that. “I would.”
Lowry reminds us that midterm papers are due soon. That’s the only announcement. She sits down in her chair, pulls out her beloved iPad, and leaves us to our own devices.
“So.” Hayes turns his body toward mine, so he mirrors my position. My legs under his chair, his legs under mine. He opens a notebook that looks like it’s seen better days. “How’d you come up with this, anyway?” He picks up the printed midterm outline I gave him a week or so ago.
“Her, if you can believe it.” I point my pencil to where Lowry sits in front of us. I would hope that was discrete enough, but she hasn’t looked up in, like, ten minutes. She must get lost in time and space too. I wonder what she’s working on.
“What?” Hayes leans in, his brow crunched up in confusion. “How?”
I knew I’d have to explain this. To someone, eventually. It just makes me feel foolish. Like I allowed myself to be deceived. Like I let her pull the wool over my eyes and convince me she was actually a competent professor.
“Did you look at the citations?” I ask him. I flip over to the last page of my probably too-exhaustive outline, where my alphabetized MLA-format citations are.
“I didn’t pay any attention, why?” He looks at them now, skimming through each one. He’s not an MLA kind of guy, so I can almost see him rearranging the information so it fits into his preferred APA format.
“No way,” he almost whispers. “We’re really gonna cite her research?”
I nod.
“So this is why you liked her so much?” The use of the past tense isn’t lost on me. He picks the stapled pages up to read more closely. Probably too closely. Maybe he needs glasses.
“I know it’s hard to believe.” I look at her while I say this, because she’s only here in the physical sense.
“But she’s a hell of an academic. All of her articles are either on the deep darkness of early American lit, like the way Poe writes about madness and death.
Or they’re on British Romanticism, like the way Austen crafts imperfect men and women who save them. It’s weird.”
“Weird, how?” Hayes’s voice interrupts my monologue. I did it again, forgetting time and space. Usually when this happens, whoever’s around just kind of moves on with their life as if I’m not word vomiting.
“Well.” I take a deep breath, trying to explain this.
“Typically everyone has a specialty. I mean, she’s teaching American Lit because her graduate work was in American Lit.
Academics usually have one research focus, starting with their dissertation.
It has to be on a specific topic that you spend years researching.
Then if you end up teaching, that’s basically what your specialty is. ”
“So my parents would’ve done their dissertations in neurosurgery and high-risk obstetrics?”
“They probably could’ve. Aren’t there MD/PhD programs where you do both at the same time?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “And that sounds horrible. Why can’t you just get a PhD like a normal person?”
We’ve never really talked about this. His parents and the medical-dynasty family he doesn’t seem to want to be a part of. How he thinks normal people have PhDs.
“It makes sense, though. If you’re a department head, and you have two professors with literature PhDs, one focused on American lit and one on British lit, you know who’s gonna teach which class.”
“Because you don’t want a neurosurgeon doing an emergency C-section.” He nods again. I don’t know why we’re speaking in two different metaphors, but it’s actually nice. To have someone to engage in these ramblings with.
“Your dad doesn’t actually think he can do your mom’s surgeries, does he?” I’ve never met him, but from what I know about Hayes’s dad, that tracks.
“Yeah.” He rolls his eyes. “He does.”
Hayes flips through the pages again, reading article titles and looking at the dates each one was published.
“So, what, you think she’s out of her depth or something?” he asks. “Like she’s operating on the wrong part of the body?”
“No.” I sigh, looking at her again. “I think she just lost herself somewhere along the way. Her early work is so strong, and I read her dissertation—”
“Are you serious? Her entire dissertation?” His eyes widen almost comically.
“Yeah.” I shrug, like it was no big deal.
It was kind of a big deal. “I think at some point, she shifted from her original focus. Maybe she got bored or burned out. I don’t know.
But she started publishing kind of random stuff, and lately, she hasn’t published anything.
Originally, I wanted to use her as a source because I thought she was the best. Now … ”
I sigh again, my voice trailing off when I realize how hopelessly pathetic I sound right now.
“Now … maybe I’m hoping seeing her work through our eyes will remind her she’s the best.”
Hayes hums, either in agreement or just to get me to shut up. I look over at him, trying to figure out which one. He taps his pencil against the desk a couple of times.
“That’s why I said you’re everyone’s hero, Novella.” He smiles that whole-face smile. I forgot I even asked about that. “We all just need someone who cares as much as you do.”