Page 64 of Past Present Future

“You don’t know if he’s seeing anyone, do you? Like, is he bringing girls back to the room or anything?” Then she pauses, scrunches up her face. “Wait, I don’t want to know.”

“He’s not seeing anyone,” I say from across the table. Between work-study and study-study, Bobst Library has become something of a second home to me.

“Not that I care,” she answers quickly, and then returns her attention to her laptop screen, where her notes are typed in organized, bullet-pointed sections. Karen Horney has made another appearance in this week’s reading. “I fucking love this woman. Look, there’s this bit where Freud called her ‘able but malicious’—I need that on a T-shirt.”

I push my jaw muscles into an impossible smile. I want to get as excited as she is about Karen Horney, about this course. But the words swim in front of my glasses, my vision blurred and unfocused. As much as I try to enjoy the time I spend in class and exploring the city with Skyler and Adhira and Zoe and Steve, I can’t understand why it all feels like so much. As soon as I got back to New York, some dark cloud seemed to settle over me.

Adhira types away on her laptop while my thoughts spiral me backward. Those days my dad stayed in bed, none of us allowed to disturb him. Why is my brain so intent on bringing me to that place?

Maybe because it all comes back to him, no matter where I am. Always. Surely, that’s the way he’d want it.

This is absurd. Rationally, I know that—two people being tired does not a pattern make. My dad battled fatigue, but he also drank too much and swore at his children. And yet I can’t explain why this exhaustion comes with it such a sense of the familiar, the meaning beyond my grasp.

“Do you understand this bit about expectancy-value theory?” I ask Adhira, flipping a page in my textbook, trying to stay in the present. “I’m not sure I’m getting it.”

And she launches into an explanation I only halfway follow.

The next week, before our first big test of the new semester, it happens again: I sleep through my alarm.

Or at least, that’s what I tell myself happens.

What really happens is that my alarm goes off, and it goes off, and it goes off, and Skyler took an early class this semester so he’s not there to groan at me, and then I switch it off because the idea of getting out of bed suddenly feels too difficult. I feel pinned to the mattress, my limbs aching and chest tight, as though there isn’t enough room in there for my lungs. I’m not sick, I don’t think, but I don’t know how else to explain the symptoms.

I make it to class just as the last exam is being turned in, a horrible shame hitting me square in the chest. Adhira throws me a concerned look from the second row, and I purposefully glance away.

I have never missed a test, missed an assignment.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to Dr. Serrano after the classroom has cleared out. Pleading my case. “I—I overslept. I don’t know how. I swear I’ve never had anything like this happen before. I know there probably isn’t a chance to retake it, but I really love this class, and if there’s any way I could make up for it…”

I will him to believe this is firmly out of character. Fortunately, he must be able to tell that I’m panicking and takes pity on me.

“I don’t know if I can give you a retake,” he says, “since that might not be fair to the other students, and I don’t have another version of the test.” Right. I hadn’t even considered the potential for cheating. “But I could use some help with data entry for my own research, if you’re interested. Just a few hours a week. I could give you extra credit that would be enough to account for this zero as long as you get high marks on the rest of the exams.”

Zero. A word that has never been associated with my own academics, except for: there is a zero percent chance Neil McNair will fuck this up. Until now.

Dr. Serrano lifts his eyebrows at me over his glasses. “If you can be on time,” he adds. “This isn’t a three-strike system. I’m giving you one chance, and I expect you to recognize it as the privilege it is.”

“That’s all I need. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Those few hours a week become a much-needed bright spot as the city veers toward spring. Gradually, Dr. Serrano starts to trust me, maybe because he can tell my interest in psychology is genuine. We meet in his office, a small room with messy bookshelves that demand reorganization, and while I bury myself in spreadsheets and he goes through emails or grades papers, we talk about what was discussed in class that week.

Just like my heart being rooted in two different places, I feel as though my mind is split too. I told Rowan I was uncertain about my major, but not the degree to which it’s suddenly become a massive destabilizing force. I was so focused on linguistics before I got here, to the point where anyone who knew me would consider it a core piece of my identity, but now there’s a new option: double-majoring in psychology, although right now the notion of even majoring in one thing sounds exhausting. Twice the credits, hours, assignments, exams. None of it has ever intimidated me before, but then again, I’ve never been so far from home.

Seeing Rowan in Boston… she seemed so natural there. She fit. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for me to do the same. I have always loved words, and maybe I’ve spent too many hours with dictionaries and language-learning guides, gone down too many OED rabbit holes. Psychology is new to me in a way linguistics hasn’t been for quite some time.

Obviously I am far from a linguistics expert. But I’m even further from a psychology one, and something about that is immensely appealing. If I fully dedicated myself to this, if I really understood—then maybe I could rediscover that spark I’ve been searching for since I arrived in New York.

Everything feels like it might be okay until Dr. Serrano asks me to organize some news and journal clippings one afternoon.

The Role of Genetics in Predicting Severe Mental Illness, reads the title of one article, and I just stare while my heart plummets to my toes.

Because this is what Dr. Serrano’s research is about—I’ve known that since my first day in his class.

“That was from a study we conducted last year,” he says when he sees me frozen, the article clutched in my hand.

I blink myself back to my senses. “So it’s very likely,” I say, “that a parent’s mental illness might be passed on to a child?”

The small office grows even smaller, my throat dry. I’m sure somewhere in my mind, I knew this was possible, but I’ve never imagined it in connection with my own family.

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