Page 13 of Falling for Mindy

“One of the interns is her, Miss Front and Center.”

“Shit,” Drake said in sympathy.

“I second that,” Hamilton agreed. “Next round’s on me.”

“It’s a fucking nightmare. Now I have to meet with her one on one twice a week for this internship. I’m gonna need therapy. I may have to go get a Valium prescription, swear to God. I’m jumping out of my skin here.”

“Maybe you need to do yourself a favor and give your hand a break,” Aaron said. “Pick up a woman tonight, screw her brains out, see if that doesn’t help. You’ve been on a dry spell, right?”

“Are you suggesting that my crisis of ethics can be solved by having no-strings sex with a stranger?” I asked.

“Basically, yeah. Works for me. I’m not complicated.”

“Makes sense to me,” Rick agreed. “Since you can’t do anything about your attraction to a student, you have to do something. You can’t avoid her because of this damn internship. Isn’t there somebody else that could cover the advisory thing?”

“I’ve already thought of that. Since Clark is on sabbatical this semester, we’re already short-staffed and overscheduled in my department. I can’t stick a TA on this, not even to save my sanity. And the meetings have to be one on one, I confirmed that with the foundation. It’s intended to foster a closer mentor-mentee collaboration. The goal is a career-spanning relationship for each intern and mentor to work for social change over a period of years. It’s the literal opposite of what I need to deal with. She needs to work independently. Remember the good old days? When we could give them a syllabus, they fell off the grid and then they turned in a final project at the end of the semester?” I asked.

“No, and neither do you. You’ve only been here five years, Kyle. You’re not eighty and that was never a real course structure,” Hamilton said. “It’s your fantasy independent study plan so you don’t have to see Goldilocks.”

“Her name is not Goldilocks,” I said.

“Someone’s grouchy,” Aaron said. “I still think you need to get laid.”

“I’m not going to hook up with a random woman tonight just because I think it’ll be a Band-Aid for being attracted to a student.”

“Before you go all Lolita on us, you know you can’t act on this, right?” Drake reminded me. “Not under any circumstances. If she wasn’t your student, if she was just going to the university and you weren’t her teacher, it would still be shady. But this is impossible.”

“I know. And I’d never do that. I just never dreamed I’d be in this situation, where I wanted to. Where it feels like a tornado, like some kind of fucking extreme weather event just to be in the same room as her, even in a class full of people. In my office—I’ll keep the door open, but I don’t know how I’m going to be able to sit across from her and go through the course modules and these open-ended discussion questions we have to do, discussing scenarios from the program and relating it to our own personal experiences. It’s not going to be the standard instructional delivery, detached, read the slides, grade the test kind of interaction. It’s a lot.”

“That sucks, man,” Rick said. “I’m sorry. You know we’ll do whatever we can. If you want a chaperone, I can sit in on your meetings, be there for moral support. I’ll grade papers or play Candy Crush or some shit, but I’d be in the room with you.”

It gave me pause when he said that. That Rick, who was sort of the knucklehead of our club, had just made such a generous gesture to help me out.

“I can’t. There are privacy considerations involved with the shelter, and no one outside the cohort of her and the Chambers kid and myself can be privy to those discussions. But I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you would do that. I know you have a full teaching load this year plus your company to think of. Thank you for offering,” I said.

“What about if you record the sessions? With student consent, do it with both of them, get them to sign a disclosure and promise to destroy the recordings at the end of the semester. Say you’re working closely with Dr. Amboy and wanted her to help you improve in your advisory capacity? Have Amboy join by Zoom once or twice if she can,” Drake offered. “No hidden cameras or anything, all above board, but it’s a layer of accountability for you. To keep you on guard.”

“She’s on leave. I’m not going to lie about needing her help or involve her while she’s got a family emergency going on. I have to handle this on my own. Wouldn’t it seem strange to ask them if I could record our meetings?”

“Yes, but it’s college. They have to recite their social security number to get a damn donut in the student union practically. They’re used to having no privacy,” Rick said.

“You have a point. I wondered about doing the one-on-one sessions as Zoom meetings or on Google Classroom. Virtual meetings so we’re not face to face. It puts a layer of detachment there.”

“What would be your reason?” Hamilton said.

“I could say it was a scheduling conflict and I couldn’t always be on campus for the sessions. It’s bullshit obviously, but it’s a safety net.”

“You said two seconds ago you weren’t going to lie,” Rick said.

“Desperation,” Drake answered for me. “He doesn’t trust himself. And Kyle is the most confident man I’ve ever known. You know your subjects, you’re capable and you have integrity and you carry yourself like you can handle anything. The fact that you’ve got a crack in that armor tells me this is a bigger deal than you’re letting on. You don’t just think she’s cute. They flirt with you all the time and you’ve never blinked an eye.”

“She got to me. I don’t even know why. It’s like I have no defenses against her. We’ve never even had a conversation. She’s answered questions in class—and she’s so damn clever and insightful, like she really understands the foundational lack of empathy in these systemic problems—”

“Can we all take a minute to appreciate that the thing that turns Kyle on here is something about a foundation and some systemic problems, not tits or legs,” Aaron said. “That he’s been killing himself at the gym every night to try and sweat this out because he’s getting hard over some test answers.”

“Okay, that’s fair. I’m a leg man myself,” Drake chuckled, “but if injustice and good answers get Kyle off, that’s his business. Problem is, he’s not shutting it down like he normally would. We all know what it’s like to be caught off guard by a student who has a crush on us. What we haven’t done before is had to deal with this kind of attraction for one of our students. So, what are we gonna do to figure this out?”

“First off, never be alone with her. I get what you say about privacy laws and stuff with the women’s shelter. But you have to keep your guard up at this point. You know you’ve got a weakness here. So do the meetings at the women’s shelter or the job center or whatever. Have one of their junior staff sit in. Make sure it’s all on topic and above board. From a legal standpoint alone, that’s how you cover yourself. No one on one meetings.” Hamilton looked deadly serious, which I didn’t expect. It made me uneasy.

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