The Latino was taller; the blond beat him by inches. He tagged the ball with straining fingertips, lofted it to his team. And then he landed lightly, knees flexed, sucked in a deep breath while his elbows hovered back and up, and pivoted.
It wasn’t a boy, unless a man in his early thirties counted.
“Holy crap,” said Gina, who only swore in Puerto Rican. “Girls, that’s Doctor S.”
Wednesday at noon, the three mismatched freshman girls who sat in the third row center of Matthew Szczegielniak’s 220 were worse than usual. Normally, they belonged to the doe-eyed, insecure subspecies of first-year student, badly needing to be shocked back into a sense of humor and acceptance of their own fallibility. A lot of these young girls reminded Matthew of adolescent cats; trying so hard to look serene and dignified that they walked into walls.
And then got mad at you for noticing.
Really, that was even funnier.
Today, though, they were giggling and nudging and passing notes until he was half-convinced he’d made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up teaching a high school class. He caught the carrot-top mid-nudge while mid-sentence (Byron, Scott), about a third of the way through his introductory forty minutes on the Romantic poets, and fixed her with a glare through his spectacles that could have chipped enamel.
A red tide rose behind her freckles, brightening her sunburned nose. Her next giggle came out a squeak.
“Ms. Martinchek. You have a trenchant observation on the work of Joanna Baillie, perhaps?”
If she’d gone any redder, he would have worried about apoplexy. She stared down at her open notebook and shook her head in tiny quick jerks.
“No, Doctor S.”
Matthew Szczegielniak rubbed his nose with the butt of his dry-erase marker, nudging his spectacles up with his thumbnail. He wasn’t enough of a problem child to make his students learn his last name—even the simplified pronunciation he preferred—though the few that tried were usually good for endless hours of entertainment.
Besides, Matthew was a Mage. And magic being what it was, he would be hard put to imagine a more counterproductive activity than teaching three hundred undergrads a semester how to pronounce his name.
Enough heat of embarrassment radiated from Melissa’s body to make Katie lean on her opposite elbow and duck her head in sympathy. She kept sneaking looks at Doctor S., trying to see past the slicked ponytail, the spectacles, the arch and perfectly bitchy precision of his lecturing style to find the laughing half-naked athlete of the day before.
She’d thought he was probably gay.
Sure, books, covers, whatever. It was impossible to believe in him exultant, shaking sweat from his hair, even though she’d seen it, even though the image fumed wisps of intrigue through her pelvis. Even though she could see the black rings on every finger and each thumb, clicking slightly when he gestured. She couldn’t understand how she had never noticed them before. And never noticed the way he always dressed for class, though it was still hotter than Hades; the ribbed soft-colored turtleneck that covered him from the backs of broad hands to the tender flesh under his throat, the camel- or smoke- or charcoal-colored corduroy blazer that hid the shape of his shoulders and the width of his chest.
It was maddening, knowing what was under the clothes. She wondered if the barbaric tattoos extended everywhere, and flushed, herself, at least as bright as Melissa. And then brighter, as she felt the prof’s eyes on her, as if he was wondering what she was thinking that so discomfited her.
Oh, lord, but wouldn’t that have hurt?
On the other hand, he’d had the insides of his arms done, and the inner thighs. And that was supposed to hurt like anything, wasn’t it?
And then she noticed that his left ear was pierced top to bottom, ten or a dozen rings, and sank down in her chair while she wondered what else he might have had done. And why she’d never noticed any of it—the rings, the earrings, the ink, the muscles—any of it, before.
“Oh, God,” she whispered without moving her lips. “I’m never going to make it through this class.”
But she did. And leaned up against the wall beside the door afterwards, shoulder-to-shoulder with Melissa while they waited for Gina to come out. Quiet, but if anybody was going to do something crazy or brave or both, it would be her. And right now, she was down at the bottom of the lecture hall, chatting up the professor.
“Oh, God,” Katie moaned. “I’m going to have to switch sections. I didn’t hear a word he said.”
“I did. Oh, God. He knows my name.” Melissa blushed the color of her plastic notebook cover all over again. Her voice dropped, developed a mocking precision of pronunciation. “Ms. Martinchek, maybe you can tell me about Joanna Ballyhoo . . . ”
“Baillie.” Gina, who came up and stood on tiptoe to stick a purple Post-it note to Melissa’s tit. “He wrote it down for me. This way you can impress him next week.”
Melissa picked the note off her chest and stared at it. “He uses purple Post-it notes?”
“I was right,” Katie said. “He’s gay.”
“Do you want to find out?”
“Oh, and how do you propose we do that? Check the BiGALA membership roster?” Melissa might be scoffing, but her eyes were alight. Katie swallowed.
Gina checked her wristwatch. She had thick brown-black hair swept up in a banana clip, showing tiny curls like inverted devil horns at her pale nape. “He’s got office hours until three. I say we grab some lunch and drop off our books, and then when he leaves we see where he goes.”
“I dunno.” Katie crossed her arms over her notebook. “It’s not like playing basketball with your shirt off is a crime . . . ”
“It’s not like following someone to see where they go is a crime, either,” Melissa pointed out. “We’re not going to . . . stalk him.”
“No, just stalk him.”
“Katie!”
“Well, it’s true.” But Melissa was looking at her, and . . . she had come to Manhattan to have adventures. “What if we get caught?”
“Get caught . . . walking down a public street?”
Right. Whatever. “We could just look him up in the phone book.”
“I checked. Not listed, amigas. Maybe it’s under his boyfriend’s name.”
Even Melissa blinked at her this time. “Jesus Christ, Gomez. You’re a criminal mastermind.”
Those same three girls were holding up the wall when Matthew left the lecture theatre, climbing up the stairs to go out by the top door. He walked past, pretending not to notice them, or the stifled giggles and hiccups that erupted a moment later.
He just had time to grab a sandwich before his office hours. Almost one o’clock; probably nothing left but egg salad.
He needed the protein anyway.
He supplemented the sandwich with two cartons of chocolate milk, a bag of sourdough pretzels and three rip-top packets of French’s mustard, and spread the lot out on his desk while he graded papers for his Renaissance drama class. With luck, no students would show up except a lonely or neurotic or favor-currying PhD candidate, and he could get half of the papers done today.
He had twenty-four sophomores and juniors, and of the first ten papers, only two writers seemed to understand that The Merry Wives of Windsor was supposed to be funny. One of those was a Sociology major. Matthew was a failure as a teacher. He finished the sandwich, blew crumbs off his desk so he wouldn’t leave mayonnaise fingerprints on the essays, and tore open the pretzels before he sharpened his red pencil one more time.