My Professor's Secret

16|

sixteen

When I'm alone and free of all the inescapable burdens life has to offer, I write. Hoping something tangible will escape from the endless stream of words jumbled in my brain. Hoping I can write myself into the life I want, or the one I once thought I deserved. Hoping that maybe my mother could still exist somewhere in an intangible world crafted only by my subconscious.

It works most days.

The days when I don't feel like crumbling on the walk to a lecture, or when waking up doesn't feel like a punishment in itself. The days when grief doesn't sit so close to the surface that even breathing feels like too much of an effort.

This was different.

I sat at the chipped white desk in my room, eyes fixed on a blank Word document, willing something worthy of twenty thousand dollars to appear. Nothing came. Nothing but my father's voice looping over itself in the back of my mind, telling us that he was moving on, as if that phrase alone could make it feel gentler than it was.

The cursor blinked against the pale screen like it was mocking me.

My name, the name of my university, and Professor Thornton's name—since he had nominated me for the competition—were the only words sitting in the top left corner of the document. They looked pathetic there. Small. Incomplete. Like even the page knew I had nothing to give it.

I leaned back in the chair and shut my eyes for a second, but that only made it worse.

All I could picture was my mother's vanity at home. The way she lined her perfume bottles up in perfect order. The way her cinnamon-and-sugar fragrance clung to sweaters, bedsheets, scarves—even days after she'd worn them. I wondered if her lingering scent gave Lorelei a bad taste in her mouth when she made an appearance at our house, or if Dad even noticed how it collided with the expensive perfume Lorelei left in her wake the night she walked out our front door in stilettos and a smile too polished to mean anything other than kindness.

Lorelei wasn't a bad person. She was quite the contrary, which made the decision to hate her—or the relationship between her and my father—that much more petty.

Surely my father had to know what that would feel like. Surely he had to know our house still looked the way Mom left it. That the framed picture of the four of us in New York hanging above the fireplace should never be replaced. That the one on his nightstand—the last decent picture we took together before cancer turned her skin a sick gray and hollowed her out from the inside—was the kind of thing you didn't just place beside a new woman and expect no one to notice.

A part of me had expected to handle the news with more maturity. At least enough to grant him the humanity of wanting companionship. Enough to separate what he needed from what I was capable of seeing.

It hadn't changed anything.

If anything, it only made everything from that first night make more sense. The stew. The awkward timing. The look on his face when he saw us standing there in the kitchen. Even the Beetle in the driveway. Lorelei hadn't been some random coworker stopping by late. She had already been something more, and we had walked right into it without knowing.

The thought was enough to poison the screen all over again.

I opened my eyes and stared back at the document until the brightness started to burn. The competition, the money, the chance to publish—all of it felt impossibly far away from the version of me sitting there now. I had nothing in me that wanted to sound hopeful. Nothing that wanted to invent worlds when the one I was in already felt warped beyond recognition.