“But she can’t, you can’t join, Ji Sun, right, because he didn’t . . . take advantage of you. Did he?” Margaret’s voice was pitched like a child asking if her parents were getting divorced. Beneath her puffer vest, she wore the pale angora sweater that Alice had given her, and she looked as skittish as the bunny the sweater had once been, nose twitching, cheeks pink.
“No.” Ji Sun was clear on this. “He never did anything like that to me. I never even really felt uncomfortable around him. Did any of you?”
They all shook their heads.
“I get that he’s this dreamboat,” Alice said. “And this big-deal professor. But to me he honestly felt more like, I don’t know, a camp counselor or something. I . . . trusted him. Which I guess is weird in its own way, right? Like, I don’t really think about whether I trust teachers or not. I usually just take their word.”
They shared who and how he’d been to each of them: a crush, a prophet, a counselor, a king. They went inside and thought of who and how he’d been to the girls who were accusing him: a creep, a lech, a pervert, a dick. None of these words were quite right, but the ones that might’ve been, they were not yet ready to say.
Chapter 18
Lainey had sworn off men in the wake of learning the truth about Walker. But she found herself falling into something unexpectedly serious with Adam, whom she knew from the articles he wrote about the antiwar protests, and whom she’d previously deemed a bit of a dullard. Now he was the only person, other than her roommates, with whom she wanted to spend time.
People always talked about being dizzy in love, but it wasn’t like that for Lainey; it was the only time she could see clearly. Adam, ordinary Adam—apple pie no à la mode Adam!—was the only person with whom this clarity felt sustainable, less like the first hit of some new drug, its effect weakened with each use, and more like some kind of health food she didn’t know she’d been needing all her life: nutrient deficiency, vitamin Adam. She felt a freedom to not adopt his habits or uniform (oatmeal for breakfast every day, the same boring clothes as his roommates and half the other boys on campus) and to instead relax into herself, freeing up space to read and write and consider questions about who she was, the answers to which seemed fascinating in their complexity rather than punishing. She studied better and slept better. She’d stopped taking Adderall from the cache Margaret had given her, but she felt energized with the edges worn off, rooted but not stuck. The skin on her face felt new: cheeks softer but tight, too, from laughing so much. Was she stupid now? She walked around grinning like a loon. For as long as she could remember, she’d had a voice that rang in her head like a bell some days: I’m sad. I’m sad. I’m sad. After a month with Adam, she realized it hadn’t played in days. She’d kissed him when this occurred to her, a kiss so forceful she nearly knocked him over.
“Wow,” he said, taking his hands from the pockets of his puffer vest. “What did I do to deserve that?”
The way he said it, like the kiss was both reward and punishment, made Lainey feel weak in the knees. “You make me weak in the knees,” she told him.
“I don’t know,” he said, still a slight wobble in his own long legs. “You seem to be standing pretty steady to me.”
She wanted to leap up into his arms, have him carry her not over a threshold, but onto the shores of his planet, a place where it was possible to cultivate a patient, steady appraisal of the world around him, to be truly curious about things without giving over to obsession, to listen to other people without thinking of what you would say next. What place made this person? Could it possibly be the same one that had trained her to believe that the most interesting people were the loudest ones, the shape-shifters, the lecherous lecturers like Walker, all flash and dazzle, rotten at their core? What a relief it was to be around Adam, steady and decent and true.
Margaret had also started dating someone. Mac was a second-year law student and in nearly every way an enhanced, or at least enlarged, version of Conner: richer, beefier, louder, a bit more boorish. He had a face that looked like it had been perfectly sculpted at one point, but then the artist couldn’t resist going back in there, and had overworked it so that now his eyes were squinty and stretched a little too far apart, and there appeared to be a bit too much material at his temples and on his cheeks. He’d sent flowers to their room every Friday since Margaret’s birthday, but Margaret hadn’t been ready to date anyone until Lainey took up with Adam. Margaret’s roommates felt about Mac the same way they had about Conner: suspicious, begrudging, wearily tolerant. “Asshole upgrade,” they’d called him privately until Margaret announced he was her boyfriend, and they vowed to give him a chance.
Now they were all together in the girls’ common room: Mac and Margaret snuggled on the futon, his meaty hand on her jeans; Adam and Lainey and Ji Sun on the window seat, books in laps; and Alice at the desk, peeling methodically through a bag of oranges she’d ferreted away from the dining hall. She’d previously hoarded bananas to practice her sutures, and was now focused on removing each orange peel in one piece.
“Is that like a surgical thing, too?” Margaret asked.
“No,” Alice said, without looking up. “This is not for anything particularly premed other than stress relief.”
The smell of orange oil crowded out the faint smoke from a spent beeswax candle and the vegetal, decaying smell of the dying lilies, Mac’s latest offering, that sat atop the mini fridge. Lainey thought she could smell everyone in the room, too, the best smells beside her: Ji Sun of resin and suede, and Adam of sun-warmed sweater and a whiff of boyish funk muddled up with his piney deodorant. She rested her head on his shoulder.
“What do y’all think is going to happen with that?” Mac picked up a copy of the student newspaper, pointed at a headline about the allegations against Walker, below the fold on the front page.
Neither boy knew that Ji Sun was planning to be at the hearing, though Adam had interviewed Ruby—anonymously—about the complaint.
“Probably nothing,” Adam answered, though the question was not for him.
“He’s got quite a lot of admirers,” Mac said, squinting at the newspaper.
“They’re not his admirers.” Lainey felt her shoulders tense, sat up straight. “They’re his accusers.” The pitch of the room had changed, and she felt trapped now instead of cozy. She could hear Alice’s humidifier, which ran on high all winter, whir and burble, and she became aware of the condensation on the fogged windows, cold and wet on her back.
“Right, right,” Mac said. “Lemme see here.” He began to read: “Maximilian Walker—oof, Maximilian? Is this guy for real?” He snorted. “Pretty fucking handsome, though, am I right?”
No one answered.
“Alice, you get the appeal of this guy?” Mac asked.
After Margaret, Mac was most comfortable with Alice. Lainey tried to hope this was because they were both athletes, but she was starting to feel it was more likely for reasons of racism.
“Eh, not my type.” Alice scrunched her nose. She liked thick-necked athletes and wan poets but didn’t have much interest in the preppy sort of handsome for which Lainey insisted she was the perfect, catalogue-ready analogue. Sailboat beauty, Lainey called it, like you’re always laughing on the dock at your lake house. Alice wanted to say something against Walker, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Ji Sun, frozen on the window seat, and Alice feared she would blurt out the wrong thing.
Mac went on reading, oblivious or unconcerned with his hosts’ discomfort. “Blah-blah, accused of ‘inappropriate amorous relations,’” Mac made air quotes, “with at least two graduate students in the course of his tenure at Quincy-Hawthorn College.” He stopped, moved closer to Margaret. “Huh, wouldn’t mind having some inappropriate amorous relations with a certain coed I know.” He moved his hand from her knee up her thigh and squeezed. Margaret blushed and squirmed.
“Ugh, can you not,
” Lainey said.
“Not what?”
“Not make a joke out of all this. It isn’t funny.” Lainey stood up from her seat.
Adam sat up straighter, reached his hand out for her. “Laine,” he said, and maybe “it’s not worth it,” but this last part was muttered, and Lainey’s rage had begun to crowd out other sounds.
“I didn’t realize you were so in the tank for this guy,” Mac said, still leaned back in his seat. “Looks like you’ve got it pretty bad.” He looked her up and down.
Lainey felt his eyes on her like they were slugs, sliming lines along her body. She was incandescent with anger, at herself for how in the tank she had been indeed, at Mac for thinking he had any right to say so.
“Those women,” Lainey said, “have a lot of courage to stand up for themselves. To stand up to this whole place!” Lainey could feel Ji Sun, stock-still on the window seat.
“Seems like they probably just want attention,” Mac said, and slapped the paper down on the futon. “I’ve got to run, girls,” he said, looking at Adam. “Didn’t mean to cause such a stir.” He stood to go, an ogre filling the entire room.
“Aw, babe,” Margaret said. “It’s not about you. We all had class with Walker and we really respected him. Now we find out he’s just like all the rest.”
“Well, not all the rest, I hope,” Mac said, and lowered his large cleft chin, pouted out his bottom lip, chivalrous again, to kiss Margaret on the forehead. “Call you later, sweetness.”
When he was gone, Lainey had nowhere to unleash her rage but upon everyone else in the room.
“Where the fuck were all of you right then?” She trembled, felt anger course up from her throat.
“I’m sorry, Lainey,” Adam said. “I just didn’t think it was really my place to—”
“Not you,” Lainey said. “This isn’t about you either.”
His face crumpled, but he nodded and looked down.
“Not like that,” Lainey said. “But look, we need to talk.” She raised a pointed finger at each one of her roommates and turned back to Adam. “Can I meet up with you later?” She wanted to leave with him, watched as he packed up his backpack and closed the door gently behind him.
“What was that? Not my type?” Lainey looked at Alice. She couldn’t really ask more of Ji Sun, understood why she would clam up. “And you, you think these girls want attention?” She looked at Margaret, now charged with answering for what Mac had said, what everyone said: that the girls were confused, heartbroken, mad about their grades, bitter about rejection, jealous of Walker’s wife. They wanted better grades, money, attention. Attention, attention, always attention. Even unnamed, they were desperate for the spotlight. There was simply no universe where Walker was in any way responsible for hurting young women. The girls were to blame, no matter what he had done.
“No, I don’t know!” Margaret said. “I don’t think that, but I don’t know—I don’t know what happened between him and the other girls! How am I supposed to know how they felt about each other? And I don’t think, well, I don’t think Ji Sun should say he did something to her if he didn’t!” Margaret’s eyebrows shot up her forehead, and she put her hands over her mouth.
Ji Sun, rooted to the window seat, only nodded. Her face cracked into a frown and she brought the backs of her hands up to her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Sunny!” Margaret leaped up from the futon to go sit beside Ji Sun, who waved her away.
“No, no. I get it. It’s complicated. It’s not clear-cut. But what is clear is that Walker shouldn’t be a professor here, and I can help make that happen.” Ji Sun’s eyes were glassy, but she had stopped herself from crying. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, a move so childlike and incongruous with her elegance that Alice and Lainey shared Margaret’s impulse to run to her.
“So what, you’re like the Robin Hood for Title Nine?” Alice asked. “I mean, I get it, but just, like, what if it came out? That it wasn’t true, what you were claiming. Wouldn’t that make them not believe the other girls, too?”
“Why would it come out!” Ji Sun’s wail came out more a whine, like Margaret’s. She looked at Alice. “I thought you agreed it was a good thing, what I’m doing. Protecting future students. Believing victims!”
“I do, I do!” Alice said. “I’m sorry, it’s just, it still feels risky. I’m thinking of you, Ji Sun. I’m on your side!”
“Yeah, but if it didn’t happen to her, it’s wrong, isn’t it, to say it did? He might lose his job,” Margaret said, nestling herself back in the corner of the futon.
“He should lose his job!” Lainey threw out her arms, tried to shake some adrenaline loose through her fingertips.
“His kids . . . think of how they will feel. And they’ll have to leave their school.” Margaret pulled her knees up against her chest.
“What, why?” Ji Sun asked Margaret.
“Well, he won’t live here anymore! His wife doesn’t work. . . .” Margaret trailed off.
“He has boatloads of money. Don’t worry about his money. Who cares about his money? Who cares about him at all?” Lainey said.
“Not his money, I mean, but why would they stay here if he wasn’t teaching here? And he’ll be so ashamed.”
“He should be ashamed! Why shouldn’t he be made to feel shame!” Lainey was trembling again, felt her cheeks burn. She wished in a way that she could do what Ji Sun planned to do. That it wouldn’t make a difference if she joined the complaint made her even more furious, though, and even though it wasn’t Ji Sun’s fault that Lainey didn’t have her money, she still felt a small burr of resentment stick itself inside her ribs. She recognized that it came in part from associating Walker’s fall with Ji Sun, and from still wishing on some level, even now, that they were all wrong, that Walker wasn’t really as bad as all that. So much of who she’d become was staked on who he was, what he’d taught them. She couldn’t hold in her head that he could have given her so much but taken so much from others, and it made her feel like she had to throw away everything he ever touched, even the parts of herself he’d helped forge. Where would that leave her?
“Okay, okay, we all need to take a breath,” Alice said. She picked up the newspaper, opened it to the opinion page, where a small photo of Adam appeared beside his latest column. “You guys really don’t think that Adam looks like him? He’s like the nonevil mini Walker!”
It had been a running joke since before Ji Sun found out about Walker, that Lainey had befriended Adam in part because he looked like Walker. But Lainey and Ji Sun maintained that he looked nothing like Walker, other than their wavy hair and shared affinity for corduroy.
“Oh, what, all white people look alike to you?” Ji Sun said, smiling at Alice, glad for the break. She did feel that the two shared a certain lithe physicality that had less to do with looking alike than both looking good in pants.
Alice burst out laughing while Margaret looked hurt.
“Of course not,” Margaret said. “I mean, they could be in the same lineup! A composition sketch artist would—”
“Composite,” Lainey said, interrupting.
“What?”
“It’s composite. A composite sketch artist. Made from multiple accounts. Not composition.”
“Okay, sorry, gosh, but that’s not the point!” Margaret said, and burst into tears. “All I’m saying is that, well, they’re handsome. And the girls might have wanted to be with Walker, and they regret it now.”
“For fuck’s sake, Margaret! You sound exactly like a defense attorney!” Lainey shouted, and she caught herself, shook her head. “I hope in your last two years here you manage to actually learn something.” This, said quietly but so close on the heels of correcting her about composition sketches, proved too much, and Margaret’s sniffling turned to blubbering.
“I hope you learn something about how not everything is so black and whit
e!” Margaret paused to blow her nose, moan. “You say so yourself, that it’s nuanced what Ji Sun is doing, well, can’t it be nuanced what the other girls are doing, too, and even what Walker did?”
“No! He’s in a position of power, Margaret, and maybe you don’t understand that because, more than any of us, you’re in that position, too.”
“What do you mean?” she wailed.
“Look at you! People do anything you want!” Lainey could feel herself losing the high ground, but she couldn’t stop now. “They’ll let you believe anything! Has anyone ever told you you were wrong about something in your entire life? Am I the very first?”
Margaret cried without trying to respond.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Ji Sun said, and went to the futon to comfort Margaret. Lainey glared at her and Alice leaned back against the desk, hands across her chest.
“What? She’s wrong, but she’s not the enemy. Don’t be so hard on her,” Ji Sun said. Margaret folded herself into Ji Sun’s arms, and Ji Sun found herself struck by how easy it was to misinterpret desires: for comfort, for knowledge, for acceptance. All these ways people wanted to connect with each other that weren’t about sex, but that it was easy to mistake as such, especially here, with all their bodies so electrified by the urgency of awakening to their powers. She didn’t feel sympathy for Walker, only disdain. But she understood him. Holding a girl in her arms—trembling, needy—she understood him well.
Chapter 19
Ji Sun’s father immediately learned the name of everyone he met, no matter their station, so that he could better make requests of them. He’d given Ji Sun the advice to do the same in college, to learn the name of every student she met, but also every administrator, janitor, and mailroom worker, commit all these to memory should she need to call upon them. But he hadn’t been able to explain to her how she would remember their names, seemed befuddled that it wouldn’t come as naturally to her as it did to him. The lesson he offered was about the usefulness of the practice, not its mechanics. What, your young brain has already so many holes in it? he’d asked her.
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