Page 9 of Director's Cut

“Thank you for agreeing to help me out,” I say. Is my voice cracking, or do I always sound this high-pitched?

She straightens some papers, gazes away from me. “Of course. I’ve never had a co-professor before, so it’ll be new for both of us. You can call me Maeve.”

My eyes fall on the papers. I catch the word syllabus on one. Should I have brought my own copy?

“Oh, I’ve taught before,” I say. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

She still doesn’t look up. “Still, it’s been a while. It’ll be good to keep the pressure off you for the first couple of sessions. Like we talked about.”

My insides melt. Not in a good way. “What do you mean? Aren’t you just helping with the administrative portion? Feel free to sit in…”

Finally, she locks eyes with me. Yes, her eyes are expressive. And she’s not happy right now. “I emailed you the updated syllabus this week. We talked about co-teaching. We’re each handling a part of the lecture.”

I find myself glancing at Ty, whose own gaze rests heavily on a piece of art on the wall. The email account Maeve has been corresponding with is usually filtered through Trish’s assistant. Trish says my teaching is part of my professional business, so it should go to a professional email. Trish said she and her assistant would send them to me. My mind’s been so occupied by the TV directing and the Winston interview that the idea of these emails didn’t even cross my mind. I haven’t checked it in weeks.

And they were apparently important emails. Shit.

“That email must be having problems,” I blurt out. “Let’s use my personal one for class.”

She raises her brows. “On the syllabus too?”

Probably going to regret it, but…“I’ll tell the class.”

“Okay. What email?” She clicks a pen, writes down my email on two packets, and hands one to me.

Maeve’s handwriting is beautiful. I shouldn’t be feeling this hot just from seeing my name in those slanted lines of hers.

The heat only continues to rise as I look over the syllabus. My original syllabus was focused on cult classics and analyzing both successes and failures in the musical genre: Les Misérables, Chicago, Little Shop of Horrors, The Phantom of the Opera, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mamma Mia!, Rocketman, and the like. But this syllabus has dared to remove Cats and put in Carousel and West Side Story (1961).

“I see there are…other changes,” I say. My legs are starting to cramp up.

“Again, we talked about this. We agreed there should be some cornerstone pieces for deeper analysis along with the more pulpy, modern pieces that have less complex styles.”

I mean, at least she kept Little Shop, Chicago, and Rocketman, but—?

“Okay,” I say. “We can…see what happens after the first class.”

I cross my legs.

Her gaze slips right off my face, down to my shoes.

Down to that flash of a red sole. Her eyes shine in recognition.

She doesn’t look pleased.

I was supposed to go to the classroom early to prep and get in the teaching mindset. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I bid Maeve and Ty goodbye and head over to a screening room across the courtyard at my assigned building, SCI. My stomachache is back, but my head’s swimming so much that I can’t even feel it. I can’t focus on one train of thought, when teaching theory, my memories of guest appearances and Q&A’s I’ve done at this school, and embarrassment over the way Maeve looked at me are all swirling in my head. Especially the Maeve thing, which I can still see in vivid Technicolor: the break in eye contact, the pulsing tightness of her jaw, locked in annoyance.

No one’s looked at me that way since my dissertation got rejected.

As I step into my classroom, I identify all the basic classroom shit. Thank god. I’ve been having stress nightmares that none of it would be here. But the room has a projector and forty empty chairs facing a table, and a couple of chairs in the front for me and—and Maeve, I guess. Does she really plan to co-teach with me? Who made these fucking arrangements without telling me? I mean, she seemed very poised about this. It’s not like I would’ve been opposed per se, it’s just that I prepared this entire class under the assumption that I’d be giving all the lectures. It’s like being on a set with a writer-director who keeps changing the lines I spent weeks considering and memorizing. Like, I get it, I’m part of a team and shit changes, but I’m not trained in improv. If I have any chance of making this class a success, I sure as hell can’t start by looking like a huge fucking clown.

One hand stays on my racing heart as I open my laptop and scan my email. Hundreds of unopened emails, including, fuck, the correspondence between Maeve and “me.” Including an updated syllabus, and I’ll intro you and go over class logistics, you take the first basic term lecture, and I’ll pick up the slack. No one wants to work hard first class, so don’t stress.

I’m filled with a new bout of self-loathing. This has escalated to a huge, months-long problem that will mess up at least the first class but possibly the next month, but it’s also something I could’ve caught up on in one night. I wouldn’t have looked like such an asshat in front of Maeve if I had even considered prepping for class today instead of picking out a good outfit. It’s downright embarrassing. What professor, guest or not, doesn’t check their emails before class starts?

I massage my temple as my head starts to ache. If Maeve can be this nice to Trish’s assistant posing as me, maybe there’s hope. If not, Trish’s assistant can just teach this class and I’ll go walk into the sea. I shake the frustration out of my body and look at my phone, about to call Trish. But no. I can do this. My antiperspirant is working; I’m a literal expert in music pop culture studies. I’m just teaching eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds basic film theory and making them watch bad musicals. I have at least twenty-five minutes to catch up as best I can. I scan the syllabus.

So we’re doing West Side Story for our first film. I don’t know why my argument for The Sound of Music was rejected, but okay. I know that one. Natalie Wood played a Puerto Rican woman, it won a record number of Oscars, and was a product of its time? Was that the point we were making? It definitely aged worse than The Sound of Music.

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