Adultescence: a novella

The Academy

9.

"Hey, I'm outta here," said Sabeena Pillai, the new Junior Program Coordinator, one temperate spring evening.

Hunched over the computer in her demi-cubicle, Clarke's eyes darting across a backlit screen, she barely acknowledged her.

"Don't stay too late."

"I won't," Clarke promised. "I'm leaving in ten minutes." Her eyes remained married to the pixels, the curve of her spine an affront to good posture. She was often the last one out, killing all the lights and computers to reduce the ruinous drain of phantom load. What kind of activist would she have been otherwise?

"Hey..." Sabeena said again, more forcefully.

"What?" Clarke looked up.

"Go home. You're not getting paid past 5:00."

"I'm not getting paid past 2:30," she corrected her. "But this is a part-time job that requires full-time energy."

"More like a full-time job with part-time pay," Sabeena noted.

"You finish the new draft of the Brown proposal?"

"The Brown-noser?" Going with their begging bowls in hand to another private foundation. "No, I need to go over it again tomorrow. I'm useless today."

"Yeah..."—eyes back in repetitive scan mode.

"Clarke," Sabeena tried and failed to divert her. "You've done your duty for today. Go home."

"Okay. Five minutes, I promise." She made a quick pencil note on a scratch pad and began tidying the paper on her desk. "Where're you off to, anyway? Got a hot date?"

"No, of course not. I have my Hindi course."

"Why on earth are you taking that? It must be moronically easy for you." Frankness and familiarity were the currency between them, except in matters of the heart.

"It is. Total bird course. Requires about 0.1 percent of my brain capacity, which is all I have left after thirty hours a week here and twenty more working for Granger. Anyway, it's my language requirement so I can do primary-source research."

"Doesn't seem fair that they let native speakers take it."

"Only way to keep the enrolment up, I guess. It's pretty hilarious. Ninety percent of us are on autopilot, but the rest are out-their-depth guys who are either looking for girlfriends or think they're going to crack the Indian high-tech market. Like Indians don't speak English!"

Clarke gave a hearty laugh while stuffing her backpack with another two hours of work for home. "So... any interesting prospects?"

"You're obsessed. We've got to set you up with somebody."

(She was okay, thank you very much.)

"No, all commerce majors," Sabeena lamented. "Ve-e-ery boring. The charming ones are the hapless Indian boys who grew up here not speaking a word. They're so pathetic and clueless, you can't help feeling sorry for them. And their accents are appalling. It's adorable."

"Well, go easy on them. Sounds humiliating."

"Oh, it is," she said with a smile, and was off.

___

Professor Shashastri was of the old school. He believed real, life-long learning took place only through a painful series of abject humiliations. He saw nothing perverse in this. Life was hard. University was preparation for that, not shelter from it.

Once a week, two or three students were called upon to make speeches on topics of their choosing. The first two who stood up on this night were fluent Hindi speakers who addressed themselves to standard topics in Indian history and culture. Half of it was plagiarized, but this was closer to an elocution class than any sort of academic course. Safe, safe. A's all around.