who I tutor, making a sad face when she sees me. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh,’ I say, staring at her. She is wearing dark red lipstick and thick black eyeliner, a pair of harem trousers and a sports bra. ‘Yes. It’s all fine.’ I smile brightly and give her a thumbs-up.
I keep my eyes focused ahead of me as I walk quickly past the student towards the stairs that lead up to my office. I can do this. This still makes sense. Of course people are going to want to know what happened, and why I’m not on my honeymoon. But as news stories go, I’m sure I’m not the most important of the day. And, in any case, I am not going to let an eighteen-year-old who thinks underwear is suitable to wear around campus ruin my day.
‘Rilla!’ another voice says, as I place one foot on the stairs. I slowly turn around. It is one of my professors. Professor Maxine is French, she teaches phenomenology, and she tells her students: Talk with your body, yes? Your heart, she is the same as your crotch, yes? ‘What happened? Why are you here?’ she says to me now, her face a picture of deep distress. ‘Come here!’ She embraces me. ‘Cry, ma petite! Cry!’
I shake myself like a dog when she lets go of me. ‘Professor Maxine,’ I say, though there is a breathlessness to my voice now, ‘really, it’s all fine.’
I run up the stairs before she can say anything else. I look left and right, and pass by a meeting room in which a few of the admin staff are having a meeting. It is glass-fronted, and I resist the urge to hide my face behind a book as I pass by. The department administrator pauses in the act of giving a PowerPoint presentation whose title reads, What does your work allocation say about you? and does a double-take. No way! she mouths, her face aghast.
Now I’m running. I can’t get to my office fast enough. Why on earth did I think it was a good idea to come to university today? Of course I’m the scandal of the week, and I should have known I would be! I run inside my office, slam the door shut and press my back against it. I look frantically around at the broom cupboard that is my office: the grey cabinet, the posters of philosophy conferences that other grad students have left on the walls, my work desk and chair, my old department-issue desktop, the thick leaves of the aloe plant that a student gave to me as a present.
And then I realize it. I’m alone here, I’m alone in my office. No flatmate, no GIF, no students or professors. Yes, I am alone here and that’s a good thing. I am still feeling the weight of the onslaught, but perspective slowly starts to return. I can stay in here and I can work. I put my bag down, take off my jacket and scan my workspace. I move things around. I place my water bottle and a chocolate-and-orange cereal bar next to my computer, fiddle with the height of my chair, place my spring jacket on the back of it. There, the room looks familiar now. I feel safer, I can breathe.
I automatically reach out to the desk calendar to change the date. And there it is. Monday, March 13th.
I have neatly crossed out the words ‘Office Hours’ and instead written ‘First Day of Honeymoon’. My hand snaps back like I’ve been stung. I stand staring at the words, feeling trickles of something crawling up my spine.
Why, why not even one exclamation point, I think irrelevantly. Why not more excitement at the thought of spending ten days with Simon in Hawaii? Tears prick my eyes and I turn blindly around.
Why am I here? I had woken up with the idea that if I could just carry on as normal, then maybe all this would go away. But what is normal now? What is normal for me? In the time I’ve been with Simon, my ‘normal’ seems to have morphed into something I no longer recognize. I stand with my back to my desk, a hand on my mouth, eyes tightly shut. I’m unable to move, unable even to think clearly.
After many minutes, I slowly open my eyes. And there is a thought in my head, a clear one. Focus, I need to focus. I turn slowly around, refusing to look at my calendar. I turn on the computer, I slowly sit on my chair, tentatively now, not daring to move too fast. I open a file I’ve been ignoring for too long – the file in which I have made notes for my MA thesis.
Just as I click on the file, there is a knock at my door that nearly makes me jump out of my skin. I creep to the door, open it a notch and sneak a peek. What looks like the entire undergraduate population of the philosophy department is standing outside my office. I slam my door shut. Another invasion. First the GIF, now this.
I have something of a reputation for saying it like it is, for not being nice, but getting straight to the heart of the problem. And not just about undergraduate papers, but also undergraduate lives, so my office hours (held twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays) are usually full with back-to-back tutorials. I’m employed as my supervisor Professor Grundy’s teaching assistant, so I assist in classes, mark essays and give feedback to students on their coursework. But today, two days after my non-wedding, there is already a line snaking its way out of my office and down the corridor to the common room. Popular or not, my office hours have never been this well attended.
There is a knock behind me again. I close my eyes, willing the student to go away, but the knock is repeated. I open the door an inch, heave a shuddering sigh, then reluctantly gesture in the first student.
‘Oh no, what happened?’ It is Sara, a redhead with Britney Spears pigtails.
I purse my lips. ‘I thought I’d cancelled my office hours.’
Her green eyes are wide. ‘Yes, but then we saw you were in. You look so sad!’ She reaches out a hand.
I stop myself from springing back. ‘I’m fine,’ I mutter. ‘Now, what did you want to talk about?’
I gesture her to the ‘student chair’. Sara settles into it like she’s here for a picnic. She seems to have no questions about her essay or about my feedback, but it still takes me fifteen minutes to get rid of her.
The next student comes in. ‘Oh no, what happened?’ Mimi gasps, as soon as she walks in. ‘I am so sorry for you! Did you literally leave him at the altar? In front of all the guests? At the very last minute?’
My heart is pounding, and I can hear a busy hum from outside the door, the swarm of locusts is expanding further. I decide that my best strategy is to attack.
‘You need to think about whether this is what you want to do with your life, Mimi,’ I tell her, finding her paper on my desktop and clicking on the file. ‘Look at this paper – it’s so awful I don’t even want to use it as a coaster!’
She peers closely at the computer. ‘Well, you can’t,’ she points out. ‘It isn’t printed out.’
‘Totally not my point,’ I say sternly. ‘How much time did you spend writing it? Half an hour?’
This strategy works. I use this form of address with each student as they filter in.
‘Tell your girlfriend how you really feel,’ I say to Jacob. ‘Don’t be a douche-bag.’ He looks mildly hurt at my words, but his natural laziness kicks in and the hurt vanishes. He lounges back in the chair, the front legs of the chair come off the ground and now he is almost horizontal. ‘She’s, like, you don’t talk, and I’m like, whaaaa?’
Several more students come in. Each one asks me what happened, and why I look so awful (one actually uses the word decaying) but I am like an Olympic ping-pong champion, I thrust the ball right back at them.
I have been at it for almost two hours, and am starting to feel more like myself, when Wu Li comes in. She gives me the standard sad face and question. I prepare myself for attack. It is harder to do with Wu Li, though, because she is one of the top undergraduates in the department, and her personal life seems spotless as well, not riddled with broken relationships, binge-drinking, flatmate crises or chlamydia scares like everyone else’s. I search her paper frantically for any of my comments that don’t read, Excellent! Great point! Wow, never thought of it that way! Have you thought of doing a PhD (talk to me about this!).
She’s looking at me seriously for what feels like minutes on end, her eyes unblinking beneath curly eyelashes. ‘Maybe you’re like Nietzsche,’ she says