A Killer Semester: Chapter 1

I heard someone outside the door and threw it open. “Did you do something with my--oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were Samantha,” I said. My neighbor, Lia, was fumbling with her room key while trying to keep her ice cream cone from dripping. “Have you seen her? I can’t find my Research notebook and I’m praying that she borrowed it. I have to meet with Ohlricker in fifteen, no, damn, ten minutes and there’s stuff in that notebook I need.”

“Yeah, I just left her and Quentin in the cafeteria. You’d better hurry if you want to catch her, though. Quentin looked like he’d been misbehaving again and she looked like she was either going to kill him or bolt.” She kept talking as I grabbed my keys and started down the hall. “You’re meeting with Ohlricker? Geez, you better get going, notebook or not. Talk to me when you get back. I’ll be here all night. I’ve got a test in Psych tomorrow.”

“Yeah, okay,” I flung over my shoulder. I was running by now, through the hall, down the stairs. Did I have time to stop by the cafeteria or should I just head straight to Ohlricker’s office? I didn’t really want to get anywhere near Samantha and Quentin if things were going to blow. And I certainly didn’t want to talk to Quentin alone. No, even if I caught Samantha, she’d have to have the notebook (unlikely) for it to do me any good. No, better just head on to Ohlricker’s office and hope that it wouldn’t be a problem. At least I’ll be on time, so she can’t yell at me over that. I slowed my pace. I wondered if he’d be on time.

He was, miraculously enough. As I entered Burley Hall, I saw him looking over the balcony that ran outside the door to Ohlricker’s office corridor. He saw me coming up the stairs and nodded. He was biting his nails again. Christ, I thought, get this guy a pair of mittens. “Hey, Dan. Is she in there?”

“I think so. But the door’s shut. I thought I’d wait for you. I didn’t want to have to be in there alone with her, you know. Safety in numbers and all that.”

“She isn’t going to bite you.”

“Easy for you to say. She likes you.”

“She doesn’t like anybody. Haven’t you figured that out by now? Let’s just hope she doesn’t dislike either of us enough to turn us down. We’ve got three minutes. We better go over our case.”

“Why don’t you just do all of the talking? You’re more articulate than I am,” Dan managed to spit out as he eyed his left hand. The nail on his index finger showed the merest sliver of white. He went to work on it immediately. Despite my foul mood, I couldn’t help but notice how perfect Dan’s skin was. I knew his heritage was African American and Italian, but could good genes be the only reason he had a flawless complexion? I self-consciously touched the pimple I’d discovered on my chin just this morning and turned away. What did I care about a Tom’s River boy’s complexion? Besides, he always seemed to have a piece of fuzz clinging to the fade he had shaved into his hairline.

“Oh, no you don’t, Dan Bishop. You are not going to put this off on me. I’m not going for it this time.” I went on, mocking his past compliments: “’Kristen can probably figure out the hard questions. She’s the smartest. Kristen can help us figure out where to find this. She knows the library the best. Kristen can write up the research. She’s the best writer. She’s just so much better than us in every way that she can do all of the work, while we sit on our lazy asses and watch TV and play beer pong every night.’ And you figured I’d do it, too, because I wouldn’t be able to put up with anything lower than an A. Well, I did it once. But I’m not about to do it again. You and those other two parasites will have to find some other host to latch onto.”

“Hey, I did my part. I answered my questions. And don’t start in on me about the typos again, okay? I told you my spellcheck wasn’t working. You acted like I’d killed your dog. Anyway, I’m with you. I have no--” he removed his finger from his mouth so I couldn’t mistake his emphasis, I suppose, “—make that less than no—desire to work with you again. I may have thought you were smart and all—and a good writer—but you’re also way too fussy. It all has to be just so. ‘Why did you do the margins that way. I don’t like the way you discussed your research strategy. Are you sure this is right? It doesn’t sound right to me. You should probably check some more sources. Don’t you know the basic rules of grammar? I’m going to have to rewrite this whole thing.’ You’re a frigging control freak. So you can take your little hissy fits elsewhere. That’s why we’re hooking up with Dodge. He’s smart, but he’s mellow, too. We don’t need you.”

I thought about quizzing him about sentence fragments and comma splices, but decided to let it go. “Great. Great. We agree then. So we tell Ohlricker that we’ve decided to establish different groups for the second research project. That we’ve got temperamental differences. Have you already talked to Dodge?”

“Yep. Dodge says fine. I don’t think he liked working with his group too much. He thought they were boring.”

“Yeah, they were at the library every night working. They probably wanted to actually learn something and not just talk about horror movies and comic books. I’m happy to team up with them. The switch sounds good, very neat. Ohlricker might just go for it.”

“We better get in there.”

As we started down the corridor to Ohlicker’s office, I thought Dan looked a little sad. It wasn’t an unbecoming look on him. For a big guy, he had a very sensitive sort of face. His eyes put me in the mind of my sister’s dog, Murph, when she told him he had to stay, that she couldn’t take him with her. A look of sad disbelief would come over his face before he sauntered off to sulk on the couch. I wondered if Dan was a sulker. I doubted it. He seemed not to take too much too seriously as far as I knew. He was clearly a smart guy, had good things, witty things to say in class when we were close reading poems and short stories in Literary Methodologies. In fact, he seemed like he had done a lot of reading before he got to college—not just Tom Clancy novels either, but real Capital L literature. He seemed to have read a lot of poetry, which surprised me. Most guys, even lit majors, don’t read poetry. I figure they think it’s too girly. But as far as I could tell from what he said in class, Dan knew Chaucer and Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and all sorts of other stuff I knew nothing about. I was impressed. I didn’t actually know what grades he got, but I always assumed they were pretty good. I had initially been glad when Ohlricker teamed us up. I figured I’d have a real partner in him, which I’d need since Quentin and Jessica Wade were the other two members of our group.

But I wasn’t so impressed once we got started on the project. I was pretty flattered at first, when he kept saying how smart I was and how glad he was that I was on the project. He just didn’t seem to care whether we actually got it done or not, let alone what grade we were going to get on it, once it started. I was prepared for Quentin to be useless and for Jessica’s constant complaints about how long it was taking to do everything and how claustrophobic she got in the library. But, I assumed Dan would be my ally. He’d help me whip the other two into shape. Wrong. We’d agree to meet in the library and he wouldn’t show. When I asked why, he’d say he was late and must have missed me. When I told him I was in the library all night, he’d mumble something about checking out the Sixers or Flyers on television when he couldn’t find me and commence biting his nails. When I’d ask if he was making any progress on his own, he’d just smile and say, oh, yeah, I’m doing great. When I asked if I could get the stuff he had so far so I could get a jump typing up the final document, he’d put me off. “It’s not quite ready yet. I want it to be perfect, you know. Don’t worry. I’ll give you plenty of time. I won’t let you down.” He finally e-mailed me his work the day before the project was due. It was far from perfect—and I sent him back a blistering message with a list of specific faults. I wasn’t going through that again, no matter how much he reminded me of Murph.

A terse “yes” sounded from behind Ohlricker’s door when he knocked.

“It’s Kristen Doyle and Dan Bishop, Professor Ohlricker, from your Research class. We had an appointment to talk to you about the second research project,” I said.

“What?” The door remained shut.

“We need to talk to you about the second research project.”

Nothing. We could hear Ohlicker talking to someone but couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. Suddenly the door flew open. There was no one in there with her. She must have been on the phone.

“I have a meeting in twenty minutes. I’ll give you ten. Sit.” Dan had to remove a stack of papers from one of the two “guest” chairs in her office. Not knowing quite where to put it down, he just held it.

“Put that on the radiator over there. More wretched student work. Now, what do you want? You’re down to nine minutes.”

She looked at her watch. I looked at mine. Dan started biting his nails again and looked at me. We both knew that she wasn’t kidding. Indeed, she would throw us out of her office in mid-sentence if we weren’t gone in nine minutes.

Leslie Ohlricker was one of those professors who made it clear, in no uncertain terms, how very busy and important she was—and how unimportant you were. She was famous for never learning students’ names, not even the best junior or senior lit majors. Even if you had her for more than one course, she would still just point at you in class and ignore you in the hall. She would even joke about it. “I’ve got better things to do with my brain and my time than commit either to useless information. Besides, you people won’t be around here for more than three or four years anyway—at the most. Frankly, I don’t see some of you getting past this class.”

She was a bitch. And, the name thing was only the beginning. Her classes were a nightmare. Her specialty was 19th century and 20th century Anglophone literature and theory, so she was always assigning enormous amounts of reading: big fat Dickens novels and really complicated theoretical essays. She never lectured. My personal theory was that spending time preparing a lecture was too much work for her to do for lowly college students. So, she’d ask “read my mind” questions in class, then mock anyone who ventured a wrong answer. Once the voluntary victims clammed up, she’d rant a little about our dullness, and then resort to calling on people. The results of this tactic were so painful that usually some of the braver (and smarter) souls would speak up to spare everyone else even greater misery. She never provided any commentary at all on papers, just a letter grade, so you never knew what you did right or what you did wrong.

I’m convinced that no one would have taken any courses with her at all, but the literature faculty was so small that you couldn’t avoid her. Everyone had to take at least one course in 18th or 19th century literature and course scheduling meant that you couldn’t always get around her to Audra Sussman’s American or Ted Kinnell’s 18th century offerings. And she always taught the Research course—one of the prerequisites for upper-level work—so there was no avoiding it. Given how sour she seemed on students, I wondered why she wanted to teach a required sophomore course, until I realized that because of the extensive research projects, the class is run more like a work-study. Class time is limited. We’re mostly in the library on our own.

Even her own colleagues didn’t seem to care for her. I once asked Sussman how she could be so rude to students, such a lousy teacher, and still keep her job. She told me that Ohlricker had tenure. That was the first time I ever heard about it. They couldn’t get rid of her unless she did something totally outrageous. And besides, they wouldn’t want to. Despite her unpopularity with students, Ohlricker was smart, and did a lot of publishing in well respected journals. Her first book was with a good press and she had one out now at an even better one. According to Sussman, that was the name of the game in academia now that the job market was so tight. Twenty years ago, she went on, being a good teacher and doing some scholarship was enough to get you a job at a place like Osprey College because really ambitious scholars went on to bigger name, higher profile schools. But now that literature jobs were hard to come by, scholarship had become more and more important. Publish or perish had become the rule everywhere. Ohlricker, she told me, would love to go elsewhere—and she’d had offers, but all from places she didn’t want to go. She wanted to remain on the East Coast. South Jersey is a lot closer to New York than North Dakota or Alabama or even the middle of Pennsylvania, so she just kept working and hoping she’d be able to make her move eventually. Tending to students wouldn’t help her, so she simply didn’t do it. And, she was only 48, so unless she got another job, we’d be stuck with her for at least fifteen more years.

But it was the next nine minutes that mattered now.

I cleared my throat. “Professor Ohlricker, we’d like to change our group for the second research project. We found that we didn’t work very well together on the first one and we thought that we’d all do better with different partners. Dan talked to Marcus Dodge and he’s eager to leave his group, too. So, we figured I could take his place, since I like the folks in his group, and Dodge could take mine and everyone would be a lot happier. But, we wanted to talk to you about it first. That’s why we’re here.”

Ohlricker looked at me impassively, then turned to look at Dan. He just nodded and said, “Yeah. Yeah. We’d all be a lot happier.”

She reached down into one of the three briefcases on her floor and drew out a large green gradebook. “What are your names again,” she asked.

“Doyle and Bishop.”

She ran her finger down a column of grades, then closed the book. “You got an A on the first project, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t see any reason to change the groups around. You did well on the first assignment and you’ll do well on the next. My answer is no. Sorry.” She reached for another of the briefcases on the floor and loaded a stack of papers from her desk into it; she had given us our cue to leave, but we didn’t. “But Professor Ohlricker, we really didn’t get along on the first project. We know we got a good grade, but we don’t want to work together again. It’s an easy switch. Dodge and his group aren’t getting along either. All I have to do is give the questions to Dan. I’ll pick up Dodge’s questions myself. You won’t have to do anything. We’ll handle everything. We’d really appreciate it if you’d let us do this.”

Ohlricker pursed her lips in an obnoxious smile as she shook her head no. “One of the points of this assignment,” she said levelly, “is to negotiate working with other people, whether you get along with them or not. You’re going to have to do that your whole life, you know. You might as well learn it now. Most of us aren’t fortunate enough to get to pick the people we work with.” She sighed, as though we had reminded her of an unpleasant subject she had been doing her best to forget. She even looked a little angry when she resumed, ”So, you’re just going to have to live with it. Besides, if I give in to you, I’ll have a line at the door and I absolutely don’t want or need one. Now, I have to prepare for my meeting.” She made little shooing motions at us.

I really hate little shooing motions. Dan was standing, but I stayed where I was. “What’s the big deal? We’re not trying to avoid doing the work. This isn’t fair. I think you’re just doing this because you get a kick out of turning us down. You’re unbelievable, do you know that?”

“What did you say?” She turned a high-beam glare on me, designed, I knew, to reduce me to tears. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

“Unbelievable!” I was practically shouting now. “ I know I’m just a wretched student, so I’m not worth hearing, but now that I’ve got your attention, let me add that it’s really too bad you’re such a pompous, arrogant, bitch. Not bad for you, but bad for us. No other school is ever going to offer a bitch like you a job, so we’re gonna be stuck with you forever. Now, I’ve got a meeting myself. Let’s go, Dan.”

I was halfway down the hall by the time she made it out of her office. “You’ll regret that little outburst Miss Doyle,” she shouted after me. I heard her office door slam as I went through the door to the balcony. Dan came scuttling along a few moments later. He was wide-eyed. “What meeting do you have?” he asked.

I couldn’t believe he’d actually asked me that. “What are you--stupid? I just said that.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I guess we better get to the library then, huh? I told Dodge we’d meet him there for the question switch. Maybe we’ll just give him the bad news and get started on the research instead.”

“Tell Dodge by yourself. I’m not going to the library with you. Besides, I don’t have the questions with me. I didn’t bring my notebook. I couldn’t find it.”

“You lost the questions?”

“No, I didn’t say I lost the questions. I just can’t find my notebook. It’ll turn up.”

“I can’t believe this. You lost the questions.” He was gnawing at his right hand.

“He’s stupid and deaf. I told you I didn’t lose them. And even if I did, I’m not working with you on this anyway. You can forget that.”

Dan straightened up and gave me a look of his own. “It seems to me you’re the stupid, deaf one. Didn’t you hear Ohlricker? You’ve got no choice, doll face.”

“Don’t doll face me. I said I wasn’t working with you and I’m not. Let her fail me. I don’t give a shit. And what’s with you and this, ‘let’s go to the library and get started’ bullshit. Are you trying to impress me with your new improved work ethic? I’m figuring that’s good for about an hour and a half.” I looked at my watch. “Oh, I’m sorry. Make that forty-five minutes. Aren’t there Baywatch reruns on at five-thirty?” I headed for the stairs.

“Save it, Doyle. Go ahead, walk out. But I know you; you’ll never put up with an F. You can’t even stand getting an A-. So call me when you’re ready to get to work.” He was walking along the balcony to keep me in sight. “And I’m sure Ohlricker will be happy to give you another copy of the questions.”

He had moved away from the balcony when I looked up so I don’t know whether or not he saw me give him the finger.

Chapters 2 and 3.