My professor is in love with me

Chapter One Mary’s POV The kitchen light was always the last to go off in the Collins house. Mary had learned this the way she had learned most things about her family by watching from a distance, by cataloguing details that nobody thought to hide from her because nobody thought about her at all. From the driveway, through the thin gap in the curtains her mother had never gotten around to replacing, she could see the warm yellow spill of it across the linoleum floor. It meant they were still awake. It meant she would have to be quiet going in through the side door, up the stairs, past Lucy’s room with its faint smell of the expensive perfume their father had bought her for her birthday last spring. Mary’s birthday had come and gone in March with a card her grandmother had mailed from across town , To our Mary, our bright, bright girl and a ten-dollar bill tucked inside that she had spent on thread and a new seam ripper. She still had the card. She kept it in the front pocket of her tote bag where she could feel the edge of the envelope against her fingers when she reached in for her transit card. She sat in the driveway on her motorcycle and did not go inside. The August air was thick and warm and smelled like the neighbours’ magnolia tree and car exhaust and the faint, specific smell of New York in summer that she had known her whole life and could not name. She pulled off her helmet and held it in her lap and looked up at the kitchen window and thought about how tired she was. Not the tired that came from a long day though she was that too, deeply, in her bones , but the other kind. The kind that lived behind her eyes and had been living there so long she couldn’t remember what it felt like before. She had been on her feet since four-thirty that morning. Four-thirty, because the alarm on her phone, the old one, the cracked-screen one, the one Lucy had called embarrassing at the family dinner in June went off at four-thirty every weekday morning without exception. Four-thirty, because the bus that would get her to St. George Street by six-fifty ran at five-fifteen, it took her twenty minutes to walk to the stop, and she needed ten minutes to eat whatever she had packed the night before, and she did not have the luxury of being late. Ms. Dora at the fashion house did not say much when her apprentices were late. She simply made note of it, the way a ledger makes note of a deficit, and Mary had been in enough deficit in her life without adding to it at work. She was good at the work. That was the thing she held onto, on mornings like this one, on all the mornings, really she was genuinely, measurably, undeniably good at it. She could look at a piece of fabric and understand it the way some people understood language, the way it wanted to move and where it would resist and how much you could ask of it before it gave way at the seam. Ms. Dora had told her once, in the particular way she had of complimenting people as though she were simply reporting facts: “You have good hands, Mary. Don’t waste them.” Mary had carried that sentence for four years like a stone in a pocket, small, heavy, always there. The kitchen light stayed on. She should go in. She had to be up again in seven hours. Her body was a quiet catalogue of the day: the specific ache in her lower back from bending over the cutting table, the tight pull across her right shoulder from the hand-stitching on the afternoon commission, the dull sting in the pads of three fingers on her left hand where she’d caught the needle without thinking. She had wrapped them in the supply room before leaving small loops of bandaging tape, neat, efficient, practiced. She had not told anyone. She never told anyone. Go inside, Mary. She pressed the heel of her palm against her eye and pushed. Go inside, eat something, sleep. Tomorrow is tomorrow. That was when she heard her mother’s voice. She wasn’t trying to listen. She needed to understand that about herself, later she was not crouched at the window like some character in a story who went looking for the thing that would break her. She was just sitting in the driveway. The window was open because the kitchen got hot in summer and her parents were too stubborn to run the air conditioning before September. And her mother’s voice was not a quiet voice. It had never been. ”can’t keep going like this, Robert. She is twenty-one years old.” Mary went very still. “I know how old she is.” Her father said. Lower, more careful, the voice he used when he was trying to sound reasonable while agreeing with something he knew was unreasonable. “Do you? Because sometimes I think we forget we even have a middle daughter.” A pause. The sound of a chair scraping. “Which might be the whole problem.” Mary’s fingers tightened around the helmet in her lap. “She was never” her mother began, then seemed to reconsider, and then continued anyway, because her mother always continued. “She was never easy, Robert. You know that. Even before she came, that year was” “Angela.” “I’m just saying what’s true.” “Then say it quietly.” Another pause. The refrigerator hummed. The magnolia tree shifted in some small breath of wind and Mary watched a petal come loose and drift across the driveway and land near her front tire and thought, with a clarity that surprised her: I am not going to cry. Not because the feeling wasn’t there. It was enormous and it was right behind her sternum and it had been there her whole life in one form or another, the specific grief of being the child in the middle of the photograph who everyone’s eyes slid past on their way to the daughters on either side. It was there. But she would not give it to them, even accidentally, even without them knowing. Her tears were hers. They always had been. “The Hendersons would take her.” Her mother again, quieter now, clearly under some impression that quieter made it better. “Vivian said so. They have the room since Daniel went to college, and they’ve always” “We’re not sending our daughter to live with the Hendersons, Angela.” “She’s barely here as it is. She’s barely” “I said no.” Silence. Then Lucy’s voice, from somewhere further in the kitchen , the table, probably, where she would be sitting with her legs folded under her, picking at something, existing in the centre of every room she entered the way plants turned toward light: “She’d probably be happier, honestly. She always liked Aunt Vivian.” Mary closed her eyes. She’s bad luck, someone had said to her once. A relative, at a family gathering, years ago, said with the easy cruelty of adults who assume children don’t understand what they’re hearing. Born in a bad year for this family. She had been seven. She had understood perfectly. She had gone home and asked her grandmother about it, sitting at the kitchen table on Fernwood Avenue with a glass of cold lemonade and her grandmother’s warm hands on either side of her face, and her grandmother had said: “Mary Adele Collins, you listen to me. You came into this world in November, when all the trees were bare and the ground was hard, and the very next spring everything bloomed. That is what you are. Don’t let anyone tell you different.” Her grandmother. Across town now, which was as good as across the country when you didn’t have a car and the buses ran poorly after eight. Her grandparents had moved the year Mary was fifteen and something had quietly, permanently shifted in her when the door of that house on Fernwood Avenue closed for the last time. She had not said so to anyone. There was no one to say it to. She opened her eyes. The kitchen light was still on. She could hear them moving around in there, the ordinary domestic sounds of people at home in their own lives. Lucy said something and her father laughed, the easy, open laugh he kept for the daughters on either side. Was this all my life was worth? The thought arrived without drama, which was somehow worse. Not accusatory. Not theatrical. Just a quiet question, sitting there in the driveway beside her, patient as anything: is this it? Is this the full sum of it ? the four-thirty mornings and the bleeding fingers and the years of making yourself small enough to fit in the space they left you, and at the end of it, the kitchen light on for everyone but you? She sat with it. Then she put her helmet back on, even though she wasn’t going anywhere, and pressed the visor down, and breathed in the smell of the plastic interior that always reminded her, slightly, of the supply room at the fashion house. Her phone screen lit up through her pocket. She didn’t look. She was thinking about Ohio. It had come in the mail three weeks ago a letter, which was already unusual, since most things came by email these days. Blueland University, Columbus, Ohio. Office of Admissions. She had stood in the hallway and stared at it for a full minute before opening it, certain it was a mistake. When she had spoken to her school counsellor, Ms. Park, in the spring, they had discussed it only briefly a good programme, strong design track, financial aid available and Mary had said she would think about it, and then not thought about it, because thinking about things that might not happen was a luxury she had learned not to afford herself. But Ms. Park had gone ahead and submitted the application on her behalf. Mary had discovered this only when the acceptance arrived. “You’re too talented to disappear, Mary,” Ms. Park had said, when Mary had gone to her office to ask, bewildered, what had happened. “And sometimes people who are too talented to disappear need someone to push them out the door.” She had read the letter four times that night. She had done the math. She had $400 saved in an account her family didn’t know about she’d been careful about that, about having a thing that was only hers. The bus to Columbus was $87. She would need first month’s rent for the student housing. Financial aid would cover tuition. She would need work immediately. It was a very long list of things she would need to manage alone. She was very practiced at managing things alone. In the kitchen, someone turned the tap on and off. The light stayed on. Mary lifted her visor, looked up at the window one more time, and made a decision that felt less like a choice than like something that had already happened and was simply waiting for her to catch up to it. She reached into the front pocket of her tote bag and found the envelope the edge of it, the paper slightly soft now from weeks of being touched. Her grandmother’s handwriting on the front. To our Mary, our bright, bright girl. She had never written back to tell her grandmother about Ohio. She had not let herself believe in it enough to say it out loud. She believed in it now. I’m going, she thought. Not to her family, who would not notice she had decided, or perhaps not notice she had gone. To her grandmother, who was across town in the direction of the magnolia-smell wind. To the letter in her admission folder upstairs. To herself, mostly, who had been waiting for a very long time for the version of her own life that was simply hers. I’m going. The kitchen light, at last, went off. She sat in the dark driveway alone for another few minutes, and if she cried a little then, with the visor down where no one could see, she did not consider it a defeat. She considered it a deposit , grief paid forward for the cost of leaving, so that when she actually went, she could go clean. She went inside quietly. Up the stairs, past Lucy’s door and its expensive-perfume smell and the faint sound of Lucy’s television, past Anne’s door with the light still on underneath it, past her parents’ room where the silence was the particular silence of people who had gone to sleep easily. She went to her own room, which had a window that looked at the neighbor’s wall and a secondhand desk and a shelf where she kept her thread organized by color the way some people kept books by feeling, by how she was likely to need them. She sat at the desk and opened her laptop. She began drafting an email to the Blueland University housing office. And in the very corner of her window, barely visible behind the neighbor’s wall, she could see a slip of night sky , dark blue, the particular blue of late August and it occurred to her that Ohio had the same sky. The same moon. That she would be under it, starting over, and it would not know the difference. She thought that was probably the most hopeful thing she had ever noticed. She found her grandfather’s photograph at the bottom of her desk drawer, tucked inside a book she’d read four times. He was smiling directly at the camera not at whoever was taking the picture, but at the camera itself, as though he had understood something about the future and wanted whoever was looking to know it. She set it on the desk beside her laptop. “You were the only one who ever looked for me,” she said, to the photograph, to the late-August dark, to no one and everyone. Who will look for me in Ohio? She closed her laptop. She went to bed. She set her alarm for four-thirty. She did not know, yet, that the answer was already on a faculty roster in Columbus, circling her name out of habit, for reasons he had not yet thought to examine.