Page 80 of The Friendship Study

Lulu

Audrey shares an office with a professor emeritus who is hardly ever on campus. He teaches one class a week, a comprehensive history of China. He doesn’t read from his notes, just spouts the knowledge from his brain, and he doesn’t assign essays or tests. Student grades hinge entirely on the end-of-the-semester exam, since he doesn’t want to waste what’s left of his precious time on grading.

The man is a legend.

Audrey opens the door when I knock, nodding to the chair on his side of the office.

“Ready to go?” I sink into it, the orthopedic backrest doing strange things to my posture.

She spends a lot of time unplugging her laptop, rearranging books on the shelf above her desk.

Three paintings, Mondrian-esque with geometric shapes and blocks in primary colors, lean against the brick outer wall. A stylized fruit bowl sits on her desk, spared of any clutter, filled with pomegranates. A faux sheepskin runner hangs effortlessly over the decades-old wooden rolling office chair provided by the university. Some of Audrey’s things creep into Professor Yi’s space, her modernity at odds with the dynastic maps of China.

“I, uh, I don’t think I’m gonna come.” She crosses her arms over her chest.

I breathe deeply through my nose and hope my nostrils don’t flare. “You’re canceling on dinner with Miranda and me half an hour before we’re supposed to meet her?” I state the obvious but she looks embarrassed.

“Yeah. Well. Sorry, I guess.”

I want to mirror her, cross my arms over my chest, scowl, but all I can do is snort at her absolutely abysmal apology.

Audrey looks up at me through her fringe as I laugh and slowly she smiles; slower, she laughs, too. Once we pull ourselves together, Audrey pulls a book off her shelf. “I was reading this and I thought...well, I wasn’t going to show it to you but I do think you’d like it. If you haven’t read it yet.”

She passes it over and I take it. I don’t even bother to check the title to see if I’ve read it before. “Thank you. I’ll read it,” I say.

I scan the other books on her shelves. She has a lot of the same books I do, a lot of the same authors. There’s so much that’s similar about our work that if we weren’t competitors, we could be contemporaries. Weshouldbe contemporaries.

“Hey, so...” Jesse’s inkling of an idea burns in my mind. There are so many reasons for her to say no, and hearing another no will hurt. No is scary, but I owe it to myself to try. Jesse’s voice, positing that maybe the people here are different, echoes in my mind. And he was half-right, but mostly I thinkIam different. Despite the fact that I, quite recently, climbed a tree to avoid confrontation, I think I might be...braver?

“Listen, I know you have no reason to trust me. Or to want to work with me but...what if we worked together?”

She frowns. “We do work together.”

“No. What if we workedtogether. We’re both untenured, early modernist contract instructors in a history department that prioritizes American history. What if we cultivated a space for ourselves in this department,” I say. “Remember that course idea I was telling you and Miranda about? What if we combined our courses and came at the history of witchcraft and magic and gender from different directions, but ended up in the same place.”

Now that I’ve gotten going, I’m on a roll. “I mean, we share a department withtheDr. Miranda Jackson, one of the greatest early modernists...ever? What if one day students and academics alike camehereto work with the three of us?”

Audrey looks suspicious, and I don’t blame her.

“You’d stay and teach here rather than go to Lancaster?”

I weigh whether or not I’m willing to tell Audrey about all the reasons I do not want to go back there. I am willing, but just not ready yet. “There are a lot of reasons why I don’t want to go back there but mostly, I don’t want to rest on my father’s laurels.”

She snorts. “Can I?”

“Audrey, Lancaster would be lucky to have you,” I say.

She frowns. “I thought you wanted to work together?”

“No. I mean, I do, I just...” I flounder for the right words. “I just want you to know that you can do either. You can do anything. We’re colleagues and I want to help you.”

“So, we’d combine our specialties? The history of magic and the history of how we perceived magic.”

I nod. “It’s a good idea, right?” I want her to say it is, and on the heels of that, I want to be able to tell Jesse he was right. I shove that feeling down.

She leans back in her chair, tipping her head to gaze up at the ceiling. It’s her thinking pose, I think, and she holds it for a long time until slowly she turns to me, and she smiles. “It is.”

I lean forward, the chair squeaking under me. “Well, see. Now you have to come to dinner.”

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