Teach Me(49)

I squirm a little in my seat. What if I’m not behaving?

Hmm. Not sure these handcuffs will be sufficient, then . . .

He is evil.

It gets so bad that the fourth time Butler calls on me and I have no idea what to reply, she actually sighs and pushes her glasses up her nose. “Harper, can you stop by my office after class? Thanks.”

Great. Just what I need.

For the rest of the lecture, I manage to follow along well enough to take notes, though I’m not sure I’ll understand the full context of them later. To be honest, I’m struggling in this class—I expected medieval history to be interesting, like the poetry I’ve read from that time period. Full of stories and factual tidbits about life in the middle ages.

Instead it’s all memorizing dates and trying to decipher medieval English, which is about as comprehensible as that one guy from Glasgow in my dorm when he gets totally wasted. I’m not even sure whatever it is he’s speaking should count as English.

So it’s with a sinking feeling that an hour later, I approach the office door of Professor Hannah Butler, according to her nameplate.

“Come on in,” she calls, and when I open the door, she’s pulling her long, blonde curls into a perfectly disordered topknot that makes my hair on a good day look like utter trash. “Hey there.” She flashes a smile and yanks a stack of paper off her spare chair.

Hannah Butler’s office looks like the complete opposite of Jack’s. There’s stuff everywhere, and none of it looks particularly organized. Stacks of manuscripts are piled on every flat surface (most of which is the floor, so I tiptoe around them to the chair). Books are piled haphazardly on the shelves in no particular order, and with weird odds and ends stuffed between them, like the snow globe from Austin, Texas jammed in between a compendium of ornithology and an English translation of an Icelandic saga.

“Sorry about the mess,” Professor Butler says as she leans on the corner of her desk, just high enough to tower over me. “I just got back from a sabbatical, so I’m still in the middle of reorganizing.”

I’m not quite sure how to respond to that, so I just nod.

Her friendly smile falls a little, which makes me feel guilty. Then she hitches it right back into place. “So. Your course grade.”

My stomach sinks, if possible, even farther. “Yeah, I know, I’ve been struggling a little here—history isn’t my strong suit I guess.”

“You’re a poetry major, right?” She’s still smiling in an almost too friendly way.

“Yeah, I needed an elective, so I thought . . . ” What the hell did I think when I signed up for this? “Well. Actually, I thought this might help inspire some poetry,” I admit with an apologetic grimace.

To my surprise, that makes her nod emphatically. “I completely understand.” She lowers her voice to a knowing-smirk kind of level. “I’ve dated poets.” She winks. “I know all about the hunt for inspiration. And you know, you’re actually right, there’s a lot of interesting content we’re covering, if you look closely . . . ”

She spends the next half hour talking about the texts we’ve been going over, including some elements I completely missed while struggling through the readings on my own. Like in a lot of the heavily Christian texts, where we can deduce some of the things people actually believed at the time (for example, that fish reproduced asexually, and therefore, since they weren’t “tainted” with sex like other animals, they were okay to eat on holy days).

After our conversation, I leave her office with a new spring in my step, and a fresh appreciation for what I’ve been struggling to read all semester. If I could make myself pay better attention in this class, I decide, it might actually be worth more than just an elective after all. I make a silent vow to try harder, if not for my sake, than for Professor Butler—Hannah, as she insisted I call her. She seems really sweet, and like the kind of professor who truly cares about her students.

Now, if only the rest of my afternoon will pass this quickly, I’ll be set . . .



#



Check your mailbox before you get here is the last text I receive from Jack, half an hour before I’m supposed to meet him in his office. I stopped at my dorm to change into spiked stilettos and a skintight dress, since with my winter coat on overtop, no one in the halls will be able to tell how I’m dressed. I don’t have any more classes after this. Nothing but me and him, and the whole night ahead of us.

Well, me and him and whatever’s in my mailbox.

I shuffle through a couple of reports and letters (mostly junk mail) until I spot one particularly fat envelope at the bottom. I undo the flap, and a single silk length of fabric falls out. At first, I mistake it for a tie.