Page 14 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“It’s really nice of the university to provide complimentary coffee.”
“Well...” She clears her throat and adjusts her headband. “It’s not provided by the university in the traditional sense. It’s more that the university provides me with a salary and I earmark a portion of the salary to stock the coffee bar.”
I pause mid-whiff of fresh coffee. “Junie, these punk-ass kids must be bleeding you dry. You walked in with fifty dollars’ worth of creamer this morning, at least.”
She shrugs. “I want this place to feel cozy. Last semester, the library was a ghost town until finals. If I don’t have enough traffic, I risk a budget cut. So complimentary coffee it is. I’m thinking of doing doughnuts on Fridays, though—”
I smack her hand before it can drift to her chin in thoughtful contemplation. “No,” I tell her. “Bad librarian.”
She lets me loiter at the reference desk for the next thirty minutes while she tells me all about my favorite kind of gossip: drama between people who I will never have to deal with myself but am vaguely aware of. The latest is about an old high school friend of hers and a recent run-in with her former bully. The first guy sounds like a tool and the second sounds like a dick.
Before I leave, I berate her once more about blowing her own money and plant the seed that she should include the coffee in her future budget, especially if it drives traffic into the library.
She lets out a longhmmmmas we both watch a first-year boy fill two cups full of nothing but mocha creamer before pocketing a handful of wooden stirrers.
“Were we all that feral during undergrad?” she asks.
I laugh, but fail to mention that I am currently as much of a mooch as that kid.
“Don’t forget to grab the campus paper on your way out,” she says. “There’s a coupon in the back for a free appetizer at Cinzetti’s.” She winks. “No purchase required.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re too pure for this world?”
“No, but I do have to wear medicated sunscreen.”
I’m not sure if the nearly translucent hue of her skin is constitutional or earned by spending every waking moment in this cavernous, neo-Gothic library, but either way, I believe her. I say goodbye, scoop up the coupon, and drop it into my leather tote bag before heading over to Salih for my first section of the day.
When I applied for the job at Astra, I was hot-spotting off my phone in a Costco parking lot eighteen hours after Gentry Cooper Wadethe Thirdbroke up with me. Well, technically his family’s longtime political adviser initiated the conversation. I had graduated a month and a half prior and was still studying for the California state bar exam when Penelope Pike sent me a calendar invite. She wanted to meet at our townhouse, which I assumed would involve talking strategy for Gentry’s first run at the California State Assembly that we were all gearing up for this year.
Back in January, Penelope had sat me down for a conversation with an action plan after some polling she had run (unbeknownst to me). Apparently, I was lacking in image and likability. Men felt like I appeared to be unhealthy, which very clearly translated tofatandunfuckable. Both women and men found me to be stiff, overly rehearsed, and lacking warmth. Which translated toa bitch. No one mentioned the endless hours I’d spent doing philanthropic work in the midst of full-time law school and occasional work-study programs. And they definitely didn’t mention how I’d untangled the financial mess that was the domestic violence arm of the Wade Foundation and salvaged the programs planned for that year after Gentry’s seedy great-uncle had gone on a cocaine bender with cash he had pulled from the foundation accounts.
After graduation, my polling results plummeted even more. It could have been any number of things. There was the charity auction I was required to attend with Gentry’s mom during the week of finals where I was asked by a reporter if I felt that the National Association of Pet Sitters was a worthy cause and I gave a clipped response about the importance of subsidized childcare. Or the time I wore a two-piece swimsuit to a family weekend at the lake and posted a picture online. Gentry’s fitness-podcaster cousin reposted the group photo only for his loyal listeners to fill my comments with concern-trolling about my weight and claims that Gentry was only dating me because I had dirt on him. I love being a woman on the internet. Truly.
So I wasn’t surprised that Gentry was breaking up with me, but I was surprised to find Penelope was doing it for him. As a parting gift, she even provided me with a copy of the fully executed NDA I had unwisely signed the summer after undergrad.
I sat gobsmacked, and after Penelope was through, Gentry gave me a one-armed pat-on-the-back hug like I’d just lost a Little League game. One year of secretly fucking, followed by three years of dating, and it all ended with a pat on the back.
Three years spent drowning in law school courses that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to take and curating a palatable image of someone who was anyone but me. All because I thought Gentry and I could change the world together. I was bit by the political bug back in high school and it only took volunteering for a few underdog (and often female-led) campaigns to wonder if I could do more good in the passenger seat of someone like Gentry’s life than I ever could on my own.
So after living the last four years in service of someone else’s ambitions, the adjunct job was a desperate attempt to return home to Kansas, where I was born and raised. It was a place where I didn’t feel like I was existing under a microscope.
My brother and mom had moved to LA a few years ago, just after I graduated high school, so there was always the option of going to stay with them, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of being in the same state as Gentry. Not when he had just won the primary and his name was beginning to be a regular in the news cycle. Sure, a state assembly campaign wasn’t normally a big deal, but it was when the only heir to the Wade political dynasty was making his debut. It also didn’t help that despite their attempts to be supportive, it was painfully obvious that my family didn’t like Gentry or the person I had become. I’m good at a lot of things, but admitting that I’m wrong isn’t really one of them.
So I fled the state and took the first job I could get... and then also signed up with a childcare agency to supplement my meager adjunct income, because I’d worked at a church nursery on Sundays in high school and had liked it fine enough.
What I did not do was a good job of planning where I would live and how I would survive before I got my first few paychecks, hence the car camping. Anything I had saved from my work-study programs before graduation was spent on the trip out here.
I walk into the classroom with just a minute to spare. I made the mistake of showing up to one of my lectures too early last week and was met with the empty stares of the first-years who had waited too long to register and therefore ended up with my 7:30 a.m.class. Not to mention that I was cornered by one of my later-in-life students (who looked like the Unabomber and smelled like beef jerky) so he could get my thoughts on filing a FOIA request related to some unhinged theory involving legislators in the basement of a pizza parlor covering up proof of aliens.
As I stride to the lectern, I call out, “Good morning, class.”
I’m met with a chorus ofgood mornings and groans. In the last two weeks, my class size has visibly shrunk. After I got my first list of student drops, I hid in the shared adjunct office upstairs and spiraled. Could I get fired for this? What if they just kept dropping and eventually there was no class at all? Was I really that bad? I had TA’ed for a legal-writing class during my second year of law school and I felt like I’d done a decent job. But there were just so many students, and it was an intro class mostly full of people whohad torather thanwanted tobe there.
The political science department chair, Dr. Miranda Salazar, found me about thirty seconds away from huffing into a paper bag when she explained that this was totally normal for an early morning class full of younger students. It helped that her voice was soothing to me (if you found theReal Housewivesfranchise to be a source of calming energy) and she looked like Marissa Tomei inMy Cousin Vinny, but twenty-five years later. I’d read online that she was a retired New Jersey state senator who’d moved to Kansas after falling in love with her husband, who was a higher-up with Hope Inc.,*which was headquartered in the Kansas City area.
I have found, however, that I like the smaller class now, actually. It feels more manageable, like I’m dipping my toes into the warm pool of academia rather than taking a cold plunge. My second section, however, is another story.
“Let’s move down to the first five rows,” I say to the very sporadically filled auditorium.
