There was a murmur of assent from a couple of upperclassmen, and one girl, Flonia Rugova, who had roomed with Nicky last year, reached over and squeezed her hand. I imagined Flonia knew, as I did, that Nicky’s mother, Jaycee Ballard, had joined A.A. and was trying to sober up. “Absolutely,” Flonia said. “People can change.”
“That was lovely, Nicky,” I said. “I think Nicky has answered Adam’s question for me. That’s the kind of fairy tale I believe in, Mr. Sinclair. The kind that gives us the courage to persevere through hardship and fight for what we believe in. Think about Nicky’s story while you’re reading the Bettelheim chapter for the next class.”
With only ten minutes to make it to their next class, most of the students took off in a panicked stampede. But Nicky lingered behind and fell into step beside me as I left Fraser Hall.
“I don’t want you to be late for your next class, Nicky. You know the new administration has a zero-tolerance policy on tardiness.”
“I’m free next period,” Nicky said. “What’s up with all the new rules, anyway? Fairwick College is totally changed.”
I sighed. “I know. It’s the new administration. They have a rather different … um … pedagogical philosophy.”
“No kidding! We’ve got curfews! And mandatory dorm meetings. I get, like, twenty emails a day from campus security—and those new security guards are downright creepy.” Nicky lowered her voice as we passed one of the new guards, a short, broad-shouldered man in a green jumpsuit. He leered at Nicky in an unsavory manner. “I don’t mean to be mean, but they look like trolls.”
Now that Nicky mentioned it, they did indeed. I wondered … “Stay away from them,” I told her. “If you have a problem, call me or Professor Delmarco or Professor Lilly.”
“Thank God you guys are still here, but so many of my favorite teachers are gone. I was going to take Stones for Poets with Professor Van der Aart, but he’s gone on a sabbatical. Now I have to take two required science classes and a class on Milton.”
I let out an involuntary groan. I’d barely been able to get through Paradise Lost in grad school; the new requirement for the entire student body to read it seemed crazy. “Some of the faculty are trying to … er … persuade the administration to change their policies. We’re meeting this evening to go over our … er … strategies.”
“I’m sure you’re doing everything you can, Professor McFay. I don’t mean to complain. It’s just that everything is so different now—even the students. Like that Adam Sinclair and his frat brothers. I mean, one of the things I liked about Fairwick was that it didn’t have a big Greek life like the state schools. But this new fraternity … well, look at this flyer I got in my mailbox this morning.”
Nicky took out a piece of bright magenta paper and unfolded it. Beneath three large Greek letters—Alpha, Delta, Chi—was a crude drawing of a muscular man in a toga. Hey, ladies! the speech bubble by his head announced. It’s never too early to try out your Halloween costumes. Whether you’re going this year as a slutty vampire, a slutty cat, or just a total slut, we invite you …
“Ew,” I said, taking the offensive page from her. “That’s gross—and completely inappropriate. I’m on my way to the dean’s office right now with a list of complaints. I’ll add this invitation to them.”
Nicky shrugged. “Don’t get yourself in trouble over it. No one I know is going. It’s just that those Alphas act like they own the campus—”
Nicky’s next words were drowned out by the pealing of bells. Loud, obnoxious bells ringing the quarter hour. “And that’s another thing,” she yelled over the clanging. “Those bells! They wake us up at the crack of dawn!”
“It’s on my list,” I told Nicky, offering her a wan smile. We’d reached Main Hall. The Gothic gray stone exterior had always given me a sense of calm and stability, but now that it housed the new dean it felt like a brooding, unassailable castle right out of Dracula.
“I feel better knowing you’re doing something,” Nicky said. “But I didn’t follow you only to complain. I wanted to talk to you about my research paper.”
“Let me guess, you want to do it on Tam Lin.”
“Well, not exactly. You see, the thing is, I’m actually feeling a little … well, disenchanted with fairy tales these days.”
“Oh,” I said, unable to hide my disappointment. “You’re not dropping the class, are you?”
“Oh, no! You’re my favorite teacher, Professor! It’s just … well, when I was in Scotland this summer I came across this collection of fairy tales and ballads that were collected by a woman folklorist named Mary McGowan—there’s a ballad in it that’s a sort of variation on Tam Lin. I wrote about it in my essay, but I didn’t read that part in class. Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the stories were collected by a woman folklorist and I’d like to find out more about her … like what made her interested in folktales and how she came to write about them. I thought it would be interesting to write about a real person instead of just writing about fairy tales.”
“Hmm … I’ve never heard of her. It sounds like a fascinating topic, Nicky. Of course you can write about that. I look forward to seeing what you dig up.”
“Thanks, Professor. And I hope you don’t mind what I said about fairy tales. I know they’re your thing.”
“It’s perfectly all right, Nicky,” I told her as I turned to go into Main Hall. “There are days lately when I wish I had specialized in something a little more practical.”
CHAPTER TWO
I paused for a moment outside the door to the dean’s office to collect myself. The conversation with Nicky had unnerved me a bit. It was one thing to watch my college taken over by evil forces and another to see the effects of that takeover on the students I cared most about. The students had no way of knowing why the college was so different. They didn’t know that the Grove—a club for ultra-conservative witches, to which my grandmother happened to belong—had conspired to close the door to Faerie with a mysterious all-male British club that turned out to be run by nephilim. I hadn’t even known about nephilim a couple of months ago. My specialty was fairy tales, not Bible studies. Truthfully, I’d never had much interest in angels, fallen or not. They always seemed much less interesting to me than fairies, pixies, elves, and goblins.
But the nephilim weren’t even fallen angels, as much as they liked to think they were. According to Soheila Lilly, they were elves who had been kicked out of Faerie because they couldn’t keep their hands off human women. For hundreds of years they had nursed their resentment of the fey—and the human witches who aligned themselves with the fey—and conspired with the Grove to close the door to Faerie. Once the fairies—and a number of humans, including Dean Elizabeth Book, who had gone to Faerie with her partner, Diana Hart—were gone, the nephilim had free rein to take over Fairwick. Duncan Laird, their leader, had taken over as dean. I wondered if Liz would have left if she had known what would happen to her beloved college. She would be furious to see the changes that had been made …