Ava felt her cheeks warm and glanced down at her plain fingernails. “One of my professors suggested I submit something…”
“I especially like the way you were able to revive the Byronic hero and make him totally modern, without letting on that’s what you were doing. It was subtle.” Mrs. Waltham beamed. “Clearly, I’m a fan of a well-turned misdirect.” She gestured to the Shakespeare playbills.
Ava twitched a smile. “No one does it like the Bard.”
“No,” Mrs. Waltham agreed. “But” – she leaned forward and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper – “if I have to read one more entrance paper about someone’s existential social crisis, I’ll throw the thing out the window.”
Ava’s brows jumped.
“Here’s what I like about you,” Mrs. Waltham continued. “Everyone’s spent so long trying to write ‘outside the box,’ that the box has shifted, and what was radical is now boring. It’s classic,” she aimed the end of a ballpoint pen, “that will endure. That’s what people will still be reading twenty years from now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ava said carefully. “That’s what I think, too.”
“Good.” The advisor shut Ava’s folder and slid it back across the desk. “You’ll do wonderful here. Just watch out for Pitts,” she warned with a wink. “He likes his existential.”
Ava nodded. “Right. Yes, ma’am.”
She left the office buoyed by optimism. She’d worried about the way she’d fit into grad school, concerned she didn’t possess the proper mindset, the right kind of personal philosophy. She looked at writing as an individual art, as a true expression of her heart. But she’d encountered profs who thought differently; there was a proper kind of rebellion, and an improper kind. She wasn’t political enough, or angry enough in her writing for the tastes of some. She loved the Brontë sisters too much; she worshipped at the Church of the Romantics.
But with Mrs. Waltham in her corner, the future at UT seemed full of possibility. Maybe even happiness.
And then she stepped out onto the sidewalk and saw Littlejohn waiting for her.
Like he’d done back at the house, he jerked to attention, coming to her side.
“You make out alright?” she asked him, sliding her sunglasses into place.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Littlejohn, I thought we talked about the ‘ma’am’ thing.”
“Oh, we did.” A little life crept into his voice, a little flavor of humor. “But there’s a problem with that. Your old man is my president. Your brother’s going to be my brother. And some real scary motherfucker told me nobody was to ‘touch a hair on your head,’ so I’m real sorry, ma’am, but I’ve got to call you ma’am. That’s just how I was raised.”
Everything about the statement struck her at once. She halted and glanced up at him through her dark lenses. Students parted in waves around them and kept moving. “My brother’s going to be your brother? You’re pretty optimistic about getting patched in, aren’t you?”
“Well, I work hard and I ain’t no rat. So I figure, yeah, I will.”
The next question hurt, the words sparking pain in her throat. “Which scary motherfucker?”
“That’d be Mercy, ma’am.” A touch of color graced his cheekbones, signaling he knew there was history there. He’d heard the gossip.
“And you’re aware, right, that back-talking to me like this is so not on the getting-patched-in checklist?”
“Oh!” His blue eyes bugged. “No, ma’am…I mean, I didn’t think I was…I mean, I didn’tmeanto…”
Ava laughed, letting the sound carry the internal pain away. “You’re fine, prospect. Just don’t ever let my dad hear you say anything like that.”
“No, ma’am.” He ducked his head. Shuffled his feet. Gathered a breath. “There’s just one more thing, though.”
“Yeah?” He was cute, and she felt like humoring him, even if the students around them were starting to give dirty looks.
“Your dad wants you to go by the clubhouse on your way home.”
“Of course he does.” She sighed. “Alright, let’s go.”
Dartmoor bustled with its typical Saturday traffic. If the citizens renting trucks, buying mulch, having their oil changed were concerned about the murder that had hit the papers that morning, they didn’t show it.
The clubhouse was flanked by a handful of bikes, but had that sleepy, empty look about it; the boys were working or hunting up intel. The hangarounds and prospects had cleaned up the carnage from the party; the place looked as tidy as it ever did.
