English as a Second Language

by Megan Crane

  I stumbled outside for another cigarette and found Jason still propped up against the wall, napping. Or possibly passed out. Hard to say. I shook him awake.

  “You must be mad,” he said in something like awe, when I’d woken him sufficiently, told him the story of my humiliating Sean interaction, and lit his cigarette. He raked his hair back from his forehead.

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is,” I considered. “He already thinks I’m an idiot, so my confirmation of that can’t actually make anything worse.”

  “True,” Jason said. He exhaled thoughtfully. “But that’s not likely to be much of a comfort.”

  “There is the slight possibility that he was not as sober as he appeared,” I continued. “Slight. He was drinking wine, after all.” I frowned. “Well. He was holding a glass of wine. I was the one drinking.”

  “Did Toby witness this?” Jason grinned. “Maybe he can analyze the extent of the damage.”

  “Toby?” I considered. “Actually, the last time I saw him, he was going on about professional advancement.”

  Jason laughed. “Going on to who?” I clapped a hand across my mouth in sudden horror.

  I stared at him, my eyes wide. “Oh no,” I whispered.

  I collected Toby, who was still going strong when I reached his side. Sean was listening with that same aloof air about him. As if, I thought grimly, he has an idiot checklist in his head and he’s ticking us off one by one.

  “Alex,” Sean said in greeting, his wonderful accent not really concealing the underlying sound of patience sorely tried.

  “I’m just here to get Toby,” I said in a small voice. “Since we’re leaving.”

  Toby turned to look at me, his dark eyes widening. I took that to be the same moment I’d had—when the silence after you stop speaking rings with the horrible sound of what you were actually saying, and to whom.

  “I hope you have a marvelous evening,” Sean said smoothly. One of his brows was arched arrogantly. I felt the urge to curtsey and ruthlessly quelled it.

  “Are you going to crucify me in class on Tuesday?” I dared to ask.

  He considered me for a long moment, and his hazel eyes narrowed. Then he smiled. A full smile, not his usual patronizing smirk. I felt my stomach thud and my heart sink to my knees. Sean raised his plastic glass—still full, I noticed in despair—in a mock toast, and turned back to the crowd.

  “We,” I said dully to Toby, “are dead.”

  Saturday was a really bad day.

  “It’s not actually clear that you were drunk,” Suzanne told me when I accosted her through my window as she walked through our shared courtyard. “You were just really, really intense.” She continued on toward her door.

  “Oh,” I said hysterically, hanging halfway out my bedroom window, “that’s a great comfort. So I’m not a run-of-the-mill drunken idiot, I’m an extraordinarily intense idiot. Fantastic!”

  “Fuck her,” Cristina said mildly, from her usual position in my chair. “She’s jealous of you because you’re friends with those boys and she is not. Ignore her. She wants you to feel bad.”

  “I couldn’t care less about Suzanne and her 90210 issues, Cristina,” I told her, crawling back inside and standing on my bed. “I have to decide whether I should commit suicide or just calmly wait for the English department to kick me out of the university.”

  “So you were drunk, so what?” Cristina shrugged in that supremely unconcerned Spanish way, involving her chin and her mouth. “He is the kind of man who is probably used to people drinking too much to cope with him. If he wasn’t so scary, people wouldn’t need to get so pissed.” I loved that word. Pissed meaning drunk, rather than annoyed.

  “I wasn’t pissed, I was intense,” I reminded her. Acidly. She lit a new cigarette and sipped at her coffee. I flopped down into a sitting position and picked up my own coffee.

  “What are we doing tonight?” she asked.

  “I plan to sit right here and contemplate my sins,” I said piously. Cristina let out a hoot of laughter.

  “That could take weeks.” She made an imperious gesture. “I want to go eat a real meal, in town. I demand that you come.”

  “I couldn’t possibly. First of all, I’m hungover.”

  “Not that hungover, or you wouldn’t be throwing yourself out of windows to speak to Suzanne, of all people,” Cristina replied crisply. I couldn’t really argue. She slid me a sideways look. “We are going to a Mexican place.”

  “Mexican?” I perked right up, intrigued. Then I scowled. “Do you see how easy I am? I have no willpower whatsoever!”

  “Willpower is overrated,” Cristina said, and laughed.

  “My problem is that I have the emotional maturity of a sullen teen,” I told Michael later, when I woke him up in the early Manhattan afternoon and was thus enjoying the image of him cowering from the daylight under his designer sheets. “Emotionally I’m seventeen years old.”

  “Did you assault your high school teachers with your drunken witticisms?” he asked.

  “Ha-ha.” I sighed. “I don’t know that I would use the word ‘assault,’ anyway. And you could argue that this guy had it coming, since he’s kind of a notorious asshole.”

  “Alexandra. Are you planning on teaching Mrs. Tingle, just like a bad teen movie?”

  “Not at all. As you might recall, I have a fatal weakness for assholes.”

  “I sympathize,” Michael said, “although I’m not convinced that shrieking at a man for untold hours, while inebriated, is necessarily the best strategy to win him.” He paused. “Although that was more or less how I started dating Elliot.”

  “Good point.” I stared up at my ceiling. “But we’re not actually teenagers anymore—my behavior to the contrary. We’re twenty-six years old. Aren’t we supposed to evolve?”

  “Please,” Michael sniffed. “The universal shared characteristic of adulthood is a nostalgic yearning for idyllic youth. Having had a shitty youth which gives me daily posttraumatic stress, I can do without the nostalgia. I prefer my emotional adolescence!” He had worked himself up to ringing tones.

  “Listen to you,” I said admiringly. “Little Miss Voice of a Generation.”

  Michael was touched. “I do try,” he said humbly.

  I was pleased to discover I had only the faintest of hangovers the next day. It was so strange not to wake up with a pounding head that it took me several moments to figure out what was different. We had had a dinner that wanted very badly to be Mexican in a restaurant that wanted very badly to be posh. And I had stopped drinking after a couple of pints. Hence the clear head. It was only two in the afternoon—pretty early, considering the hilarity had gone on until after five and Melanie and I had had to drag Cristina up three flights of stairs and put her to bed.

  “You are totally mature and not in any way a sullen teen,” Robin had emailed me late in her Saturday night. “And don’t you dare call me before noon tomorrow.” A glance at the clock indicated that it was still well before noon in New York, so I removed my hand from the telephone and shuffled down the stairs to the cold kitchen and set about making my coffee.

  I didn’t just “drink coffee” in England. Oh no. I brewed myself an entire pot of Lavazza espresso every morning and at several other points during the day. In response to a nation of tea drinkers, I mainlined my caffeine. Other people claimed to have drug-like reactions when confronted with its strength, but I was blissfully unaffected by the pounding pulse and jumpiness. I was comfortable with the knowledge that this was because I was a hard-core coffee junkie.

  I was just settling down with my big cup and a fresh cigarette when the door swung open. I looked up, hoping to see Cristina in all her morning-after agony.

  Sadly, it was George instead.

  “Hello, George,” I said politely. With the advent of classes, I rarely saw him anymore, which suited me fine.

  He rocked to a stop and glared at me. Today, I noticed, he was sporting what could only be called a math-geek
-meets-rapper outfit. Genres collided and performed a drive-by incident on one little redheaded troll of a guy. It was very confusing. I kept my face carefully blank.

  “How dare you,” he said. And actually he was already pretty loud.

  “How dare I?”

  “You woke me up with your party last night,” he accused. I wasn’t a big fan of the belligerent tone, but sucked it up in the greater interests of house peace. There’d been noise, after all.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You should have told us to shut up.” I may have stressed the word “us.”

  “I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed,” he said. Loudly.

  I immediately realized that I couldn’t be bothered, therefore, to care.

  “George,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “It was a Saturday night.”

  “You wouldn’t like it if I had my friends over until six in the morning! How about if we decided to make noise right outside your door? How would you like that?”

  I would probably be astonished, I reflected, that George knew anyone with whom he could throw a revenge party outside my door.

  “Actually,” I said, considering, “I probably wouldn’t care. I would either join you or just deal. Or”— I threw in a meaningful pause—“I’d ask you to keep it down.”

  “My girlfriend and I were trying to sleep!” George roared. His girlfriend?Huh? “We had to get up early this morning! You have no consideration for anyone in this house but yourself! I’m going to party directly outside your door and see how much you don’t care!”

  I didn’t exactly laugh—I may have smirked. I was thrown by the “girlfriend” but I rallied.

  “George,” I said, very calmly. This was a tone Robin had once called my “insulting calm.” “The only thing outside my door is a toilet. Do you think people would enjoy partying in a toilet?”

  Okay, that was snotty.

  George turned purple and pink, not the most flattering colors for a redhead, despite the claims of a certain Molly Ringwald film. As I watched him, wondering idly if he’d really lose it or possibly explode, Cristina hauled herself in through the door.

  George made an inarticulate frustrated noise—at high volume—and thundered out of the kitchen. Seconds later I heard the front door slam shut, and then saw George race past the window at great speed.

  “What was his problem?” Cristina asked without much interest. She was in her pajamas, looking as if she had recently been run over by a fleet of trucks. She slid into a chair and propped her head up with her hands.

  “Why do I get yelled at and you don’t?” I demanded. “And more to the point, the point being totally unfair things—did you know George has a girlfriend?”

  “Impossible.”

  “He said he did. He said he and his girlfriend couldn’t get to sleep last night. Which is by the way my fault because it was apparently my party.”

  “He can’t have a girlfriend,” Cristina said. “It must be forbidden by some law.”

  “That must be the same law that ensures that all I have are horrible flashbacks of Aryan Karl while Horrible George enjoys the horizontal lambada with fetching supermodels.”

  Cristina shuddered and raised a palm. “No more. My stomach is weak.” She glared at me. “I can’t believe you allowed me to drink so much whiskey. You are the elder. You should take better care of me.”

  I snorted and took a soothing hit of my coffee. “You’re a crazy Spaniard,” I said, “not to mention a disaster waiting to happen.”

  Cristina moaned. “I think it already happened. I think I am the disaster.”

  Sundays were just as gloomy in England as they had been at home in New York. All I wanted to do was curl up on my couch, order pizza, and watch bad Lifetime movies for three days. Pizzas in England, sadly, involved bizarre ingredients like sweetcorn and scary ingredients like mad cow. And the only television around was in the central building and generally tuned to what the entire world called football, but I felt compelled to argue was soccer. I tried to do some of my reading but found myself brooding instead.

  My behavior in front of Sean aside—and I couldn’t bear to think about that yet—it wasn’t so clear to me that I belonged in academics. My classmates were constantly worrying about trying to impress the professors with their comments in seminars, which was diametrically opposed to my own view that they ought to be concerned with impressing me. If we were the next generation of scholars, surely the present generation would be advised to pay a bit more attention to cultivating us from our MAs into PhD programs.

  I liked the idea of Doctor Me. I just wasn’t so sure I wanted to chain myself to three years of PhD research into some subject I had yet to imagine. I had no burning desire to write about anything, nothing that jumped to mind, anyway. And three years was a long time, during which you were by all accounts expected, encouraged, and fully destined to go off your rocker.

  That sounded kind of fun for maybe a summer, but as an entire life? I wasn’t even convinced that I loved the whole literature thing. I was afraid I was living my life by default. The thought of the corporate world filled me with horror, so it was best to stay with the academics. Except I couldn’t really say I was approaching academia as a choice. More like the best of uninteresting options.

  Which brought my thoughts back to how much of a fool I’d made of myself in front of a professor. Not just any professor: the most superior professor I’d ever encountered. The professor I most wanted to impress and had had the least chance of ever impressing even before the incident.

  I sighed and reached for my cigarettes. Cristina had retreated back to bed, and I was unable to shut off the instant replay images of me cornering Sean. Reliving my lost youth was one thing; embarrassing myself in what was likely to become my professional sphere was something else entirely. The things I’d left New York for—all those dreams of claiming my life and making sense of it at long last—seemed as out of reach as they’d ever been. The drive that had inspired me to cross the ocean didn’t seem to be around any longer, and Happy Graduate School Girl wasn’t keeping me out of trouble.

  I took a long drag and stared out my window, where the world blurred into reds and greens and was muted by the constant wet. The wind came rushing in from the fields so hard that it raised an eerie howling along the courtyard. Sometimes the windows even rattled. There was no escape from the chill, and the dark came earlier every day. Winter was coming, I’d shamed myself, and I still couldn’t understand the theory assignment.

  It was possible, I thought darkly, that I was losing my sense of humor.

  Five

  Tuesday dawned, despite my and Toby’s best efforts to prevent it, which mostly involved dire mutterings down at the pub. We were trudging up the stairs together as if a firing squad awaited us in the classroom.

  “I’m not sitting near either of you,” Jason had informed us cheerfully over a pre-class cigarette. “I don’t wish to be infected with your shame.”

  Toby and I stopped outside the door and looked at each other. We shuffled back down the hall a few steps.

  “Go on then,” he said.

  “I’m not going in there first. You go.”

  “I insist. It’s actually a courtesy.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  A brief shoving match ensued.

  “Excuse me.”

  That rapier-sharp voice. Toby and I froze like two naughty children. Sean was standing behind us in the hall, eyebrow cocked, hazel eyes alight, but not too actively contemptuous, as there was no sign of the vicious smirk. Which in such circumstances was as close to a good sign as I was going to get.

  Just once, I’d have liked to be able to disappear at will.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. I could feel myself flush several shades of red. Toby tripped over his own feet and thudded into the wall. He was descending into slapstick while I stood frozen in horror, staring at Sean like the proverbial doe in headlights.

  “After you,” Sean commanded, his tone dea
dly.

  We slunk into the seminar room, humiliated, to see Jason laughing so hard he had to wipe his eyes and hide his face in the crook of his arm.

  Sean never changed expression.

  Though I was sure I would bear internal scars for the rest of my days, that was the worst of it. I quickly had other things to worry about. I learned that the reason I had fewer classes than my housemates in economics was because I was expected to read extremely long novels and significant pieces of critical theory. There wasn’t enough time to get to it all, not that this translated well. George, for example, felt that the lack of mathematics and daily classes meant that my work wasn’t really serious.

  “You can’t be stressed,” he scoffed one night in the kitchen. “All you ever do is lie on your bed and read novels.”

  “That’s a really good point, George,” I said. “No wonder I never get my work done.”

  Idiot.

  Cristina and I spent hours in my room next door to George’s, trying to hear through the walls and spy through the little peephole in my door. So far I’d only seen the side of the mystery girlfriend’s head.

  “Her name is Fiona,” George had informed Cristina very severely. “She’s a nice girl.”

  “Meaning we are what?” Cristina demanded later, laughing.

  “Meaning we are bad. Duh,” I said.

  We were fighting for position on the peephole.

  “If this girl is at all attractive . . .”

  “She can’t be.” I was positive. “And if she is, she’s obviously visually impaired.”

  “And deaf.”

  “And they can’t really touch, because then she would realize he was a little troll and run, or, assuming she was bound and gagged, roll away. Screaming.”

  “So we are left with very few options,” Cristina concluded. “She must be a monster.”

  “I can’t stand the fact that George has love and I don’t even have a crush on anyone,” I whined, very late one night. Cristina, Melanie, and I were polishing off a bottle of wine after a night of study. We were clustered in Cristina’s room, listening to music.