But sometimes when I was lying in bed at night, I thought about him dancing. His face, flushed from the heat and exercise and joy. Then I thought about his face after I’d told him I couldn’t love him. He’d looked crushed, andI’ddone that.
I wasn’t sleeping much.
One night, while I was still lying there, tossing and turning, Lenore jumped up on my stomach. Her eyes glittered at me in the darkness, as if she were assessing just how low I’d gotten. Finally, she kneaded my shirt for a few minutes, turning in a circle and then plopping down to stay there. She didn’t want to be petted—if I even tried she’d jump right back down. Instead, she was almost like a paperweight, holding me in place. It was incredibly annoying. It was also oddly soothing, and became one of the only ways to stop my masochistic inner loop.
The last thing I wanted to do in this state—the absolutelastthing—was meet with Dr.Blake about my future career inacademia. But it was all set up and I had the stupid blazer, and I didn’t want to let Dr.Nilsson down again in yet another way. So I dressed up in a black dress with a cute 1950s silhouette and topped it with the charcoal blazer and some red lipstick, hoping I looked better than the warmed-over death I felt like.
I closed the front door carefully behind me, making sure that Lenore hadn’t gotten out, and was in the process of locking up when I heard Sam’s truck pull into the driveway next door. I felt stuck on what to do—if I ran to my Camry and got in real fast, I wouldlooklike I was avoiding him. But maybe that was the respectful thing to do, since he appeared to be avoiding me.
I ended up standing stupidly next to my front door, my keys still in my hand, as he climbed out of his truck.
He’d gotten a haircut, so that now it was still long but not quite as shaggy as it had been. He was holding a bag of some takeout food, and he glanced over at me, giving me a tense smile. That seemed to be all he was going to do, which maybe was for the best, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
That monosyllabic intro out of the way, we both just stood on our respective driveways. The problem was, I couldn’t think of what to say after that. My instinct was to start apologizing all over again, but clearly that wouldn’t do any good. And even if I wanted to make small talk, I couldn’t think of a single goddamn thing—not an observation about the weather, not a piece of true crime trivia, nothing.
I miss you. That was what I wanted to say most of all, but of course I had no right.
He reached up to scratch his eyebrow, his body language saying he couldn’t decide if he was coming or going, until eventually he dropped his arm back to his side in resignation. “You look nice,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. There was a small, perverse part of me that was glad he had the chance to see me this way, after a summer of me wearing my most casual, worn-out clothes. “I have that interview thing.”
“I remember,” he said.
“And what about you, still teaching lessons at Jocelyn’s?” My insides were one giant Michael Scottyikesface gif repeating over and over. What a ridiculous question. He’d already told me he was, right up until school started back up again, and even then he said he might still do a few on the weekends for extra money.
Now, he held up the bag of takeout. “My food’s getting cold,” he said. “Good luck with your interview.”
“You, too,” I said, and luckily he’d already disappeared inside his house before he could see the cringe face I made at my own self. Our first interaction since that horrible day after Conner’s proposal. It could’ve gone worse.
It definitely could’ve gone better, too.
I tried to put it out of my head as I drove to Stiles College and parked in a visitor’s spot. Dr.Blake had said they’d meet me at a student-run café on campus, although they apologized that it would be closed for the summer still.But we can walk around the campus, and I’ll show you around,their email had said, which made me wonder again exactly what the point of this interview was. Dr.Nilsson had been very clear that it was not a job interview, and I’d double-checked Stiles’ website. There were no joblistings, at least not for a professor in the English Department. If I could teach statistics it looked like I might’ve had a chance.
Dr.Blake gave off seriousif you haven’t done the reading, I will call on you in classvibes, but as soon as we started talking about some professors in my program I relaxed a little. They were treating me more like a colleague than a student, and even referenced a paper I’d written, complimenting me on the way I’d tied two seemingly disparate pieces of media together by looking at them through a feminist lens. It reminded me of Sam, and the fact that he’d actually taken the time to search for my work on the internet, but that line of thinking was dangerous. I forced my mind to focus back on Dr.Blake.
“Ultimately, being in academia is service work,” Dr.Blake was saying now. “Our research, our teaching, ourmentoringis all to serve future generations of thinkers. How do you intend to do that with your degree?”
Maybe it wasn’t fair to hear the echoes ofstudying true crime is not real scholarshipin their question, but that was my natural defensive reaction. I spoke slowly, wanting to really think about my answer as I gave it.
“I know studying literature or rhetoric in general can get a bad rap,” I said. “There are a lot of people who ask what’s the point, poring over words that were written twenty, fifty, two hundred years ago. And doing it again and again, after there’s already been so much written on the subject. But ultimately I think it’s about learning to pay attention. Learning to examine something closely, and ask questions, and place it in different frameworks to see how it might change. As a culture, we are what we write about, andexamining those texts can teach us a lot about how we see the world.”
I glanced at Dr.Blake beside me, but they were simply staring straight ahead, their hands clasped behind their back, as they listened to my answer. “True crime is a perfect example of that,” I said. “At its heart, it’s aboutwhat do we know about humanity’s capacity for evilandwhat should we be afraid of. The answers to those questions can tell us a lot, especially when you look at the intersections of privilege and power, who are telling the stories, who are the subjects of them. I know a lot of people think true crime is a pulp genre, and not worthy of analysis, but the fact that it’s so closely tied to mainstream fixations makes itmoreworthy. If I can help students to pay attention to those stories and the way they’re presented or received, I’d feel like I’d done my job.”
I had never articulated all of that before. It was shameful to admit, even to myself, but I hadn’t given myservicemuch thought. I enjoyed teaching, the energy of being in front of a classroom, the chemistry that could happen when you were firing on all cylinders and your jokes were landing and the students’ faces were lighting up with recognition. But it could also be stressful and exhausting, and had to take a back seat to my own studies and research while I focused on getting my degree.
It had been seeing Sam, and the way he was about his own students, that had really made me consider my own teaching more. He exemplified more of what Dr.Blake was talking about—the idea that everything he experienced or learned could be funneled down to spark excitement for music in a kid, or teach them a concept about tempo or pitch.
He’d asked me, all those weeks ago, about why I was drawn to true crime. I had no idea what answer I would’ve given then, but I had more clarity now.
“I feel like I grew up afraid of so many things,” I said. “There’s just so much uncertainty in life, especially when you’re a kid... you don’t know why your dad is upset, or why your mom puts up with it, or whether you’ll ever have a true friend you could talk to. It sounds twisted, but by the time I was a teenager, there was something almost comforting about reading about serial killers. It was like, here, be afraid ofthis. Focus onthis. There’s uncertainty, and open questions, but it’ll all get wrapped up at the end. Justice will be served, the victims will be remembered, whatever. It was only when I started reading and rereading some of those books more closely that I started questioning whatjusticemeant, ortruth, or evenfear.”
“It’s an interesting focus,” Dr.Blake said, and it didn’t sound patronizing at all, the way it sometimes did when people used the wordinterestingto describe my work. “Do you think you’d want to teach the rhetoric of true crime specifically, if you had the opportunity?”
“I’d love to,” I said. “But I know it’s kind of a reach. I’m definitely ready to do my time teaching composition, professional writing, whatever pays the bills. And then maybe someday I’ll find somewhere that would let me propose my own class, where I could focus more on American true crime from the 1960s to present.”