Page 6 of Sweet Violence
I should’ve been thinking about the interview—about what to say, how to hold myself, and how to make this count.
But standing there, taking in the imprint of him, I felt something low and stupid shift in my chest.
I wasn’t just inside his office.
I was inside hisworld.
2
HENRY
I’d managed foryearswithout a TA. I preferred it that way. Fewer moving pieces meant fewer eyes on my work. Control wasn’t just a preference. It was how I kept my life from becoming public property. How I made sure no one saw a fragment of my past before I decided whether or not to bury it.
No assistants. No witnesses. No bright, eager little liabilities touching things they didn’t understand.
I’d made that clear.
Repeatedly.
Sometime between last semester and this one, Wexley decided to treat my refusals as suggestions, and now I had twelve applications for an assistant I didn’t fucking want.
Predictable.
It never took long for a simple decision to stop being yours the moment an institution got its hands on it.
My memoir had been out long enough for the public to stop acting like my survival was breaking news. The interviews had faded. The interest moved on to the next tragedy.
Wexley never did.
Of course not.
To them, my past was a credential they could point to and claim. The fact that there was another book coming only made it worse. The damn thing wasn’t even written yet—not even close—but that fact hadn’t stopped anyone from talking about it as if it already existed.
It wasn’t a book. It wasresearch—raw data, sleepless nights, and endless transcripts.
The ink on my publishing deal had barely dried before Dean Randolph started parading the idea of it around campus.
He pitched the position like he was doing me a favor, like the institution cared about my workload or my sanity.
Bullshit.
I agreed to it, anyway, because part of my job at Wexley was learning how to smile through performances I could dismantle in half a second
This assistantship wasn’t about me. It had never been.
Wexley liked to call it opportunity, but it was simpler than that—make something coveted and let students bleed for it.
A teaching assistantship under Henry Rothwell wasn’t help.Fuck no.It was a trophy, and trophies always came with strings.
The applications proved it.
Some of them were impressive. Most of them were eager.Allof them knew exactly how to write the kind of sentences that sounded good on paper—trauma-informed, research-driven, and intellectually curious.
I wasn’t looking for worship or someone who wanted to orbit my name. I needed someone who could handle the work—someone who didn’t flinch at the ugly parts and understood that trauma wasn’t poetic. It wasprocedural.
I’d sat throughelevengoddamn interviews, politely placating students who wanted to impress me.
By the time the last chair scraped back and the door closed behind it, my jaw ached from holding the same expressionfor too long. I’d heard the same answers delivered in different voices, the same reverence dressed up as ambition, and the same careful language polished until it reflected exactly what they thought I wanted to see.
