by Shelia Grace
Suddenly a shiver ran through me. If that guy from the library showed up in class next week, I was screwed. But even worse than that, I realized that I was going to have to show up in Professor Robertson’s Calculus class and see Ryan Bennett again. On the other hand, there was no way I was going to sit in the front row, and with more than five hundred students in that lecture hall, I could find a way to avoid him for the rest of the quarter.
When I finished up most of my reading for Monday’s classes, I went down the hall to see if Julie was in her room. Julie had the same problem as I did. She and her roommate did not get along. And coincidentally both our roommates happened to be rushing the same sorority. Birds of a feather, I guess. I poked my head in her room, and Julie looked up from her record collection.
“Where the fuck were you last night?” she laughed. “I went by the room and your roomie had the infamous sock on the door again. I figured fuck it. I knocked really loud and rattled the door handle.”
I gasped and started laughing.
“Oh shit. You did not.”
“Totally did. Then I went down to the lounge and waited for her to open up, which she totally did. She was drunk as shit and half naked, and she had one of those animals from downstairs in there with her.”
I frowned.
“Yeah? Well, one of those animals just wandered into my room and started reading my Creative Writing assignment over my shoulder.”
Julie snorted in disgust.
“Dicks. All of them.”
Julie hated the guys from the second floor. She had a loud mouth, a nose piercing, and she didn’t put up with their shit—so they were constantly barking and screwing with her every time she walked by. Unlike her, I just tried to stay off their radar.
“So? Where were you last night?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Now you have to tell me.”
I sat down on the floor and told her about Brit salivating over our new TA. By the time I got to the part about the stalker in the library, Julie was silent, which was rare for her. When I told her a highly sanitized version of my night with Ryan Matthews, aka Ryan Bennett, she erupted.
“What the fucking shit! You spent the night at this guy’s place?”
“Julie, shut up! Are you trying to broadcast my night to the entire dorm?”
“Sorry! But Jesus. That is insane.”
Julie and I also shared the ignominy of having very little experience in the guy department.
“You have no idea, Jules. I almost dropped dead of a heart attack when he walked up and kissed me.”
“Wait. What happened to the psycho?”
“No idea. We spent half the night filing a report with the campus cops—”
“And the other half of the night making out! Fuck, Alex. That is unreal.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I was thinking the entire time.”
“So, when are you going to see him again?”
I looked down.
“I’m not.”
“Whaaa? Why the hell not? Super hot guy saves you from a psycho, you make out with him all night … and then nothing?”
“Yeah, nothing. He gave me this whole speech about how young I was … blah, blah, blah.”
I laughed to hide the fact that my eyes were burning.
“Young? How old is this guy?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Oh shit. That is old.”
“Thanks, Julie.”
“Well, he is kind of a cradle robber.”
I smiled crookedly.
“A hot cradle robber.”
“Damn, I want to see this guy.”
“Well, then come to Calculus with me Tuesday night.”
Julie made a face, and I stood up.
“You want to grab something from the DC? I haven’t had breakfast.”
“Sure, let’s go. Maybe I’ll find a hot TA down there.”
I smiled at her, but deep down I was afraid that I was never going to find anyone who could make me feel anywhere close to the way Ryan Bennett had last night.
Chapter 6
Ryan
After taking Alex Reed back to her dorm, I spent way too long in the Rec Center mangling the punching bag. Then, on Saturday, I put in another ten hours straight trying to ingratiate myself with Robertson by developing another impossible homework assignment. I hadn’t told Alex, but I knew why she was failing his class. The old fucker was teaching to the top half percent of these freshman courses. He wanted to fail these kids.
The study of mathematics, to him, was the be all and end all of existence. Divorced four times, he was apparently impossible to live with. He was also impossible to TA for. I knew if I tried to develop a homework assignment that fifty or sixty percent of the class could finish, Robertson would throw it out. In lecture he seemed like an easygoing guy, but in reality, he was a fucking fascist.
If Alex had gotten any of the other professors in the math department, she might have passed her second term of Calculus. But after what she had told me, I started thinking it might be better if she flunked now. It might shake her up a bit, fuck with her GPA—but in the long run it was probably better for her if she took her life back from her mother and everyone else who had told her what they thought she should do.
On Sunday, I spent the entire morning on the computer, but my mind was elsewhere. I picked up the tennis ball I had been throwing to Finn earlier and bounced it savagely off the wall.
“Fuck.”
Why the fuck couldn’t I get this girl out of my head? I wasn’t her freshman advisor. I was her fucking Calculus TA—who had very nearly violated her. My throat tightened. The sick part was that she was goddamned lucky it had been me. Because I had stopped. The stalker from the library? Just thinking about what might have happened if I hadn’t caught up with him when I had made my jaw clench. I had lost him on the second floor, and by the time I had made it to the third floor and seen him with his hands on her … My knuckles cracked.
Reaching for my phone, I hit the number for a girl I knew in the bursar’s office. She happened to be getting married to Jess, a guy a year behind me in the program. Poor girl had no idea what she was getting into by marrying a mathematics doctoral candidate.
“Brenda? Yeah, hey. How’s it going?”
I listened for five minutes as she related the latest in their nuptial planning.
“Is Jess around?” I asked during a pause.
“Already on campus … on a Sunday.”
I laughed, secretly relieved.
“Can I ask a favor?”
“Sure. Name it.”
I gritted my teeth.
“Do you have remote access to the undergrad database?”
I could hear Brenda breathing.
“This isn’t something that’s going to get me fired, is it?”
“I just need a guy’s school address, not his social.”
I could hear her typing.
“All right. But if anyone ever asks me, you’re a hacker and I don’t know you.”
“I’ll owe you,” I smile.
“Yeah you will.”
I gave her as many details as I could. Monday undergrad Creative Writing workshop. Professor Salinas. Justin … no last name. Then I tapped out a rhythm on the table, hoping there wasn’t more than one Justin in that class. But usually the workshops in the School of Letters & Science, or LNS as people call it, were small.
“Here it is. Justin Garibaldi. Local address is 312 Park Place, Apartment 4-D.”
“That’s all I need. And if you want me to, I’ll stage an intervention if Jess talks theorems past seven o’clock.”
She laughed, and I hung up. Then I stared down at the name and number and tried to talk some sense into myself. No luck. Justin Garibaldi was about to get bitch-slapped. I got up and opened the backdoor for Finn before grabbing my jacket, backpack, and the aluminum bat before walking out to the bike. The
dickhead’s apartment was on Undergrad Lane, which was just a row of shoddy buildings that hadn’t been updated in two decades.
I passed by Alex Reed’s dorm building on the way over there. In the back of my mind, I realized that I was being a complete psychopath, but I couldn’t fucking help myself. The thought of this jackass fucking with her again was more than I could stand. Parking the bike at the back of the complex, I walked around until I found 4-D.
The door was cracked open, but there were no lights on inside. I toed open the door and listened to the steady thump of a bass. The smell in the apartment was a combination of cat piss, vomit, stale beer, and weed. Flicking on the light switch, I started moving toward the back of the apartment. Tacked on the walls were countless pictures of girls on the university’s quad. I studied them until I saw one of Alex coming out of her dorm. Pulling the picture from the wall, I pushed open the bedroom door with the bat and walked in, turning on the overhead light and shutting off the music.
“Wake-y, wake-y, shit head,” I said to the pile of blankets.
“What the fuck, man?” mumbled a groggy voice.
The shapeless mass shot up in bed, staring blearily at me.
“How does it feel?” I asked.
“How the fuck does what feel?”
“To be stalked?”
“Who the fuck are you?” he growled, jumping out of bed.
I held out the bat at arm’s length until he backed up against the wall. His watery, blood-shot brown eyes narrowed with recognition.
“I fucken know you. You were with that little freshman from Salinas’s workshop. Look, man. I didn’t know you got there first. I just thought she was fresh meat.”
I stepped forward and let my arm bend until the bat was pressed up against his throat. He flinched when I leaned toward him.
“Listen very carefully, you fucking sadist. If I see you anywhere near her … if you so much as look at her—or any other girl on this campus—you’re going to find yourself fifty miles from here buried up to your neck in pig shit. If you doubt me …” I laughed humorlessly. “Well, go ahead. See what happens. People disappear everyday.”
I eased up with the bat, and he coughed. I had just started walking toward the front of the apartment—and fresh air—when I heard the heavy steps of someone very hung over thudding toward me. Turning in the narrow hallway, I figured why not? I pulled back and cold-cocked the guy.
By the time I got back to the house, I felt better. Opening the front door, I looked down at my knuckles. It had felt good to smash that guy’s face. I smiled. Let him go to the cops to report me and then explain his night job as the campus rapist. I looked down at the picture of Alex Reed, her expression serious as she left Mercer.
I worked until sometime past two in the morning before passing out. Monday I went into the department. When I ran into Jess, I asked if he wanted to go over to the courts. A hair shy of turning into Robertson with his math obsession, Jess talked about his thesis the entire walk over to the Rec Center. I shot him the ball, and he grinned at me.
“Brenda says your stalking some undergrad.”
“Stalking? Brenda’s got a vivid imagination—and a big mouth. But, hey. At least she got you to concentrate on something other than your thesis for once.”
“What I’m working on right now is going to blow everything else out of the water,” Jess said.
“Good to know you’re staying humble.”
“So? Stalking? Seems beneath you, Matthews.”
I blocked his shot, which was easy to do with half a foot on him.
“Your fiancée’s got it turned around. I wasn’t stalking anyone. I caught some douchebag following a little freshman from Robertson’s intro class. I just took a little trip over to his apartment and scared the shit out of him.”
Jess threw me the ball.
“Yeah? Why didn’t you just let the campus cops handle it?”
“And let the guy grab her the next time she walked to the library? What if it had been Brenda?”
Jess nodded, and I took the shot.
“Was she hot? The freshman?”
“She was eighteen.”
“That’s legal.”
“Legal, not ethical,” I corrected him.
Which reminded me: how the fuck far had I been from ethical last Thursday?
“But was she into you? I mean, you should get something for having Robertson as an advisor,” Jess laughed.
We played two more games before I reminded him that Brenda would be getting off work. I headed back to the house, and by the time I got out of the shower I had two voicemails. One from my mother. And the other from Gretchen.
That was the problem. They both thought that I was going to come to my senses. My mother liked Gretchen. Of course, I hadn’t told her about Gretchen’s penchant for pill popping. I didn’t need to instigate more fucking drama in my life.
“Hello, dear. I wanted to remind you about your father’s event. Please wear a tie … and I’d really love it if you would call Gretchen to work things out.”
As soon as I erased her message, Gretchen’s started playing.
“Ryan, we need to talk …”
Deleting the message, I threw the phone on the bed. The last thing I needed was to talk to Gretchen. The two of us had been a mistake. On paper she looked good to my parents, but at some point I had woken up and realized that their approval didn’t matter as much as the potential for a fucked up marriage that would have ended in a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. She had wanted me to be someone else. Someone who didn’t exist. She had thought our life was going to be a fairy tale, and it had been easy to tell when she had started planning the wedding that she would have ended up disappointed in reality.
The last thing I needed was another person to be disappointed in me. During high school I had insisted on going to public school, something my mother had found inappropriate. She would have preferred all-boys, Catholic, private. It had been my first act of rebellion, not the last. The day I had arrived home in the back of a squad car for fighting, she had called it a disgrace.
It hadn’t made any difference that I hadn’t started the fight. My crime had been that I won. The dick from the football team who had started it ended up with a busted nose and his arm in a cast. To this day, I’d like to think he regretted calling me a rich faggot and then charging headlong into me after I had calmly pointed out that he was the one who enjoyed tackling other guys. Not that I would have had a problem if he had been into guys. My problem had been—and always would be—shitheads who thought they could terrorize everyone around them. Still, in my mother’s eyes, I had been the fuck-up.
When I had announced that I was going back for my doctorate, it had just pissed everyone off. Of course, no university had wanted to take me by the time I finally applied. Too old. It didn’t matter what my GPA had been in undergrad. The study of mathematics was a young man’s pursuit. Or at least everyone in the field thought it was. Ironically, Professor Robertson had a quote from G. H. Hardy’s memoir tacked to his corkboard: “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game.”
But I hadn’t gone back to school for glory. I just wanted to study something I found interesting before inevitably returning to the family trade. The important part had been doing something for myself before it was too late. Maybe that was why Alex Reed’s story had struck me. Only eighteen and she was deciding her fate based on an overbearing mother and a TV show. And then there was me, her Calculus TA, who had nearly deflowered her. That should turn her off to math forever.
Still, I couldn’t deny it. I was looking forward to Tuesday night’s lecture. If I had really wanted, I could have gone over to Mercer and stood at the door, waiting for her to come out. But then I would have deserved—even more than her stalker did—to be in a jail cell.
I ignored Gretchen’s message and sent a text to my mother, smiling as I sent it. She hated texting. T
hen I went to the kitchen and got some milk and cold cereal. No point to putting on a show without anyone to impress. The thought made me curse. Was that what I had been trying to do? Impress the pretty little freshman? You’re one sick fuck, Bennett, I thought miserably. Before it got completely dark out, I took Finn out to the park. After that, the rest of the night and most of Tuesday dragged. This feeling wasn’t going away—the near desperation to see Alex Reed again. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this fucked up over a girl.
When I headed over to my infinitesimal office about twenty minutes before lecture, Robertson stopped by, which meant I couldn’t escape. I ended up listening to him pontificate for the entire walk over to the 1500 building. The undergrads called 1500 the prison. And it looked like one. All concrete. Few windows. It was depressing as fuck. And I couldn’t wait to get there.
For being a genius, Robertson didn’t know dick about computers apart from the modeling software specifically designed for math geniuses. But in the real world, he needed someone to set up his PowerPoint presentation. I watched as he got swarmed by students—most of them already failing. Alex wasn’t among them. Finishing up with the laptop, I took out the graded assignments from last week’s lecture. All of them except Alex’s. I kept hers with me, which turned out to be a good move. The lecture hall had already filled up, and her roommate was in the front row—war paint applied. But Alex wasn’t there. When Robertson started, I stayed at the front of the room, scanning each row.
It took me damn near half the class time to find her at the very top of the lecture hall by the exit. Fuck. She’d be out and gone before I got anywhere near her. I looked down at my phone. Jess had just gotten out of Kwan’s Advanced Analysis. If I caught him before he went back to the department, I could get him to collect this week’s assignments and hand back last week’s. I texted him and told him I would owe him another reserve case of wine if he’d swing by and cover for me. Then I waited, tapping out a rhythm on the wall behind me until Robertson turned and gave me a quizzical look. With five minutes left before lecture ended, Jess showed up at the door and took the stack of papers from me. I could still see Alex in the top row.
