And with such thoughts fluttering within her it seems actually a piece of these thoughts, like an escaped fragment, when the air itself bursts into violence just above her head—a sudden flurry and a kind of shriek as a bird nearly crash-lands on her head, close enough to fan her with wingbeat, low enough to sweep something soft and alive along the part line of her hair; it’s the plush tail of a squirrel, she just sees, a juvenile, who rides like a pilot in the bird’s claws, this bird and rodent combo descending with flaps and cries to earth behind a low wall of hedges, a troubled landing that no one—she looks: students plodding head-down, locked into phones, ear-stoppered—no one but her has seen or heard.
And she steps around the hedges slowly, coming all the way around before she sees the bird—a hawk, sure enough—standing with its back to her, wings fanned out on the dirt like the wings of a broken craft, great riffling wings that become arms, crutches, here on earth, keeping the hawk upright atop the body of the squirrel; young, round-eyed squirrel, unsquirming in its cage of talons.
The hawk rotates its head halfway round, puts two black eyes on Audrey and opens its sharp beak soundlessly. Audrey standing there doing nothing. Saying nothing, just watching. A passive but rapt witness to this instance of wildness on a college campus. Predator and prey. The hawk watching her with those black eyes, that sharp beak, considering her—Audrey’s—intentions here, the pros and cons of waiting it out, until at last in a single high note the hawk says, You little bitch, and lifts the great wings and unhooks the talons and with one windy beat is aloft again, and with another is gone.
The young squirrel remains, wide-eyed, belly to the ground; in a state of rodent shock maybe. Or maybe it’s the dead-like stillness prey is said to adopt when all hope is lost, when it’s time simply to die. But then, suddenly, the squirrel leaps to its feet and flies into the hedges and there’s nothing where it had been, where the hawk had been, but a random patch of ground—and no one sees any of this but Audrey, and she will tell no one, not even Caroline; it’s her own personal event flown down from the sky—some kind of sign, surely, some kind of message: a last-second reprieve from death.
And so enlivened—so incited—by this vision, she takes the four wooden porchsteps of the little gray rental house in two bounds, then likewise flies up the staircase that leads to the two upstairs bedrooms and begins tossing things onto her bed like one making her own escape. Like one whose own reprieve has just been assured.
AFTER CLASS, AS per his email, Caroline follows him down the hall and into his office and watches him close the door behind her but not all the way, no click of latch, just enough gap to keep it private but not too private in the cramped little room—“Have a seat, please.” Two old leather chairs from somebody’s yard sale. Books everywhere. Authors on the walls: old dead white men in offhand moments, as if he’d known these men himself, snapped the shots himself between cigars and whiskeys in the sepia past.
She sits, crossing her legs, and he takes the other leather chair and crosses his too, showing her a length of brown dress sock and a light-brown wingtip, the nose of the wingtip so close to her knees the decorative perforations seem olfactory, almost, like pores by which he might sniff her. The office is so small she can smell the French perfume like there’s another girl in the room, and her heart thuds with embarrassment.
He doesn’t look anywhere below her throat, his eyes a light clean steady blue, and so it’s surprising when he says, “You look nice today,” and keeps his eyes on her face. “Is it a game day?”
“No,” she says, “it’s Tuesday.” As if everyone, including an English professor, knows the women’s volleyball schedule.
“Ah,” he says, and nods, and she nods too in the silence that follows.
“So,” he says, turning to lift a sheet of paper from the desk, then turning back. “I just wanted to ask you about your response to last week’s reading.” And holding the paper before him he reads: “‘Highly accomplished work of the post-9/11 epoch, incorporating multiple points of view to great effect, but to what end? Empires, entire civilizations vanish, so what matter these living few? These little human lives?’”
He holds the paper, his eyes on the sentences. As if with patience they might replicate. Spawn others. She thinks about recrossing her legs and decides against it. Audrey Sutter’s flushed, wet face comes to mind. The way a tear dove through the latte foam and left its neat tunnel.
The professor floats the paper back to the desktop, turns back again, and fixes her with those eyes.
“So—what’s the deal here?” he says, and Caroline glances down at her knees, brushes at the topmost one, and when she looks up again he looks up too, just an instant late.
What is the deal here, Prof? she thinks. How do these things generally work? Who makes the first move? In the movies, in a book, how would it go? Would I click the door shut or would you?
“What do you mean?” she says finally.
“I think you know what I mean,” he says. “Why do you make so little effort with these responses? You are a smart, articulate young woman, and I… well, I—” He falters, and just then a group of students pass by the gapped door—boys, laughing and cussing down the hall. Shit, they say. Motherfucker, they say.
The professor clears his throat. He folds his hands together and rests them on his knee. He looks her in the eye again.
“Caroline,” he says, drawing the name out like it’s something sweet and melty in his mouth. “Come on, now. Am I asking too much?”
What are you asking? she’d like to ask. What do you want from me?
But in the end she’s only sorry—very sorry, she says. She understands. She’ll try harder next time, she says, even as she feels pretty certain that what he really wants is another excuse to call her into this little room. That what he really wants is to open up one of those folded hands and let it fall through space, through every kind of alarm going off in his heart, and place it, under the eyes of the dead authors, smack onto her knee.
And then what, girl? What happens when the ol’ dog wants a bite?
After that it’s back across campus for Caroline, to Troy’s dorm—she is dating a boy who still lives in a dorm—and ten hard bangs on the door before it unsticks like a gummy eye and there stands Phil, the roommate, in nothing but boxers. Annoyed and bony and pale as any cadaver, giving her the up and down—the skirt, the tights—and saying finally, “He’s not here.” A fact she already knows by the smell coming off him, the stink of burned weed among several notes of stink. Because Troy does not abide smoking of any kind in the dorm room, most especially weed, which just a whiff of on his clothes could get him kicked off the team. Good-bye scholarship. Good-bye college. Good-bye warm Caroline in his bed.