Love in the Time of Serial Killers(81)

The last thing I wanted to do in this state—the absolute last thing—was meet with Dr. Blake about my future career in academia. But it was all set up and I had the stupid blazer, and I didn’t want to let Dr. Nilsson down again in yet another way. So I dressed up in a black dress with a cute 1950s silhouette and topped it with the charcoal blazer and some red lipstick, hoping I looked better than the warmed-over death I felt like.

I closed the front door carefully behind me, making sure that Lenore hadn’t gotten out, and was in the process of locking up when I heard Sam’s truck pull into the driveway next door. I felt stuck on what to do—if I ran to my Camry and got in real fast, I would look like I was avoiding him. But maybe that was the respectful thing to do, since he appeared to be avoiding me.

I ended up standing stupidly next to my front door, my keys still in my hand, as he climbed out of his truck.

He’d gotten a haircut, so that now it was still long but not quite as shaggy as it had been. He was holding a bag of some takeout food, and he glanced over at me, giving me a tense smile. That seemed to be all he was going to do, which maybe was for the best, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

That monosyllabic intro out of the way, we both just stood on our respective driveways. The problem was, I couldn’t think of what to say after that. My instinct was to start apologizing all over again, but clearly that wouldn’t do any good. And even if I wanted to make small talk, I couldn’t think of a single goddamn thing—not an observation about the weather, not a piece of true crime trivia, nothing.

I miss you. That was what I wanted to say most of all, but of course I had no right.

He reached up to scratch his eyebrow, his body language saying he couldn’t decide if he was coming or going, until eventually he dropped his arm back to his side in resignation. “You look nice,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. There was a small, perverse part of me that was glad he had the chance to see me this way, after a summer of me wearing my most casual, worn-out clothes. “I have that interview thing.”

“I remember,” he said.

“And what about you, still teaching lessons at Jocelyn’s?” My insides were one giant Michael Scott yikes face gif repeating over and over. What a ridiculous question. He’d already told me he was, right up until school started back up again, and even then he said he might still do a few on the weekends for extra money.

Now, he held up the bag of takeout. “My food’s getting cold,” he said. “Good luck with your interview.”

“You, too,” I said, and luckily he’d already disappeared inside his house before he could see the cringe face I made at my own self. Our first interaction since that horrible day after Conner’s proposal. It could’ve gone worse.

It definitely could’ve gone better, too.

I tried to put it out of my head as I drove to Stiles College and parked in a visitor’s spot. Dr. Blake had said they’d meet me at a student-run café on campus, although they apologized that it would be closed for the summer still. But we can walk around the campus, and I’ll show you around, their email had said, which made me wonder again exactly what the point of this interview was. Dr. Nilsson had been very clear that it was not a job interview, and I’d double-checked Stiles’ website. There were no job listings, at least not for a professor in the English Department. If I could teach statistics it looked like I might’ve had a chance.

Dr. Blake gave off serious if you haven’t done the reading, I will call on you in class vibes, but as soon as we started talking about some professors in my program I relaxed a little. They were treating me more like a colleague than a student, and even referenced a paper I’d written, complimenting me on the way I’d tied two seemingly disparate pieces of media together by looking at them through a feminist lens. It reminded me of Sam, and the fact that he’d actually taken the time to search for my work on the internet, but that line of thinking was dangerous. I forced my mind to focus back on Dr. Blake.

“Ultimately, being in academia is service work,” Dr. Blake was saying now. “Our research, our teaching, our mentoring is all to serve future generations of thinkers. How do you intend to do that with your degree?”

Maybe it wasn’t fair to hear the echoes of studying true crime is not real scholarship in their question, but that was my natural defensive reaction. I spoke slowly, wanting to really think about my answer as I gave it.

“I know studying literature or rhetoric in general can get a bad rap,” I said. “There are a lot of people who ask what’s the point, poring over words that were written twenty, fifty, two hundred years ago. And doing it again and again, after there’s already been so much written on the subject. But ultimately I think it’s about learning to pay attention. Learning to examine something closely, and ask questions, and place it in different frameworks to see how it might change. As a culture, we are what we write about, and examining those texts can teach us a lot about how we see the world.”

I glanced at Dr. Blake beside me, but they were simply staring straight ahead, their hands clasped behind their back, as they listened to my answer. “True crime is a perfect example of that,” I said. “At its heart, it’s about what do we know about humanity’s capacity for evil and what should we be afraid of. The answers to those questions can tell us a lot, especially when you look at the intersections of privilege and power, who are telling the stories, who are the subjects of them. I know a lot of people think true crime is a pulp genre, and not worthy of analysis, but the fact that it’s so closely tied to mainstream fixations makes it more worthy. If I can help students to pay attention to those stories and the way they’re presented or received, I’d feel like I’d done my job.”