Baggy on Ice.

The lecture hall becomes quiet the moment I stand up. I let it stay quiet for three whole seconds before I speak. That's the trick nobody teaches you in a communications class. Silence itself is a spotlight; you just have to be brave enough to use it to your benefit. "Crisis communication isn't just about controlling the narrative,"I say, walking the aisle confidently like it's a runway and not a two-hundred-seat auditorium in the Gatsby Hall. "It's about slowly controlling the chaos before launching the needed narrative. When everyone starts talking, the person who waits and chooses their words in the midst of it all. That's the person people trust." Dr. Fiona isn’t one to smile easily. But she’s smiling now with her arms crossed, leaning beside the white screen before the class, like she’s watching a show. I feel it in my chest: that little pride of realizing I did that. And I say this with zero apology, but I just maybe the best communications major OakCity has produced in a decade. Ask anyone. That was some months ago though. Now I'm sitting in the auditorium, except it's empty and just me; it's ten at night, my pad screen is the only light in the hall, and I've written the same sentence six times and deleted it six times because none of the words are landing like they could when I write. My phone rings. I don't look at it. I already know whose name isn't on it, which is somehow worse than if it were that name. I don't want to talk about the encounter at Malibu this past summer. Not yet. There are things you say out loud and things you carry inwardly around with you, and this one I'm still carrying tightly under my ribs like a twisted rib bone that won't unclench itself. All I'll say is this: I thought I had finally resolved the parts of me I wouldn't show anyone, not even Yuri and Aiko. Sadly, I was wrong to think it could all be resolved. Malibu opened my eyes to the reality of my life, and somehow i am meant to walk around campus every day like it hadn't happened. So I stopped writing, stopped communicating my takes in class. And stopped being the A- student who commands the admiration of her lecturers and course mates, and started being the girl who stares at waiting cursors on the screen of her iPad, until the cleaner kicks her out of buildings. My grades dropped before I noticed. I used to be able to write four thousand words of research papers and assignments in an afternoon, and half of them would be as good as Shakespeare’s. Now I stare at a document for an hour and produce a single sentence I hate. It's not writer's block. Writer's block implies the words are still there somewhere, just stuck on how to come together. This feels like my creative well ran dry. Like whatever used to fill me up and pour out onto the page as words and ideas just isn't there anymore, and I have no single idea how to get it back, or whether it's ever coming back. --- Dr. Fiona’s office smells like her usual oud perfume scent, and she doesn't invite me to sit with a smile in her usual way before she starts talking, which tells me everything about how this conversation would go. "Rei." She folds her hands on the desk. "I've read your transcript from this semester twice because I couldn't bring myself to believe it." "I know." I keep my eyes on everywhere but her disappointed face. "Do you?" She slides a paper across the desk. My GPA, placed out like evidence before a judge. "This isn't the girl who wrote the piece on the Students’ Perception of College Administrations. This isn't the girl who blew my glasses away when three different publications tried to recruit her before she'd even decided on her major." I stare at the disgraceful numbers until they are laughing back at my face. "I know, Dr. Fiona." I pause, trying to utter the next words. “I think I can explain.” "I'm not asking you to explain yourself, Rei." Her voice softens like a mom, just enough that I almost lose it right there, in the washed-out brown chair. "I'm asking you to fix it. You have one shot left before the scholarship committee pulls away your funding at the end of the semester. One, Rei." "Okay." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "What do I have to do?" She tells me the department has considered my records so far and decided to give me a PR project to execute. I get to choose a campus client who has quite a buzz online and on campus but is struggling. I’ll have to fix their media reputation and be responsible for their online presence. This was not like the mock practice campaign we carried out from time to time with a non-existent brand in classes; this was something that could render actual people socially helpless if I failed. "You have two weeks to secure a client," she says. "After that, it's out of my hands. I put in some good words; don’t disappoint me, Carter." I nod like this is nothing. Like I'm not doing the math in my head of every possible person or group I could approach; of everyone who might say yes to me, and how short that list is actually. How did I get myself here in the first place? I decided to let myself be vulnerable in Malibu for the thousandth time. Look where being a pu**y got me! I walk out of Dr. Fiona’s office. I don't cry, because I don't do that anymore since that night when it last happened. My hands are shaking by the time I get to the campus mini park, and inside of me, my ribs seem to squeeze tighter.