My Professor(21)

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he offered.

Questions…was I supposed to have questions?

I think I settled on something trite like “Do you love her?”

He admitted he did, and the real zinger came next—he was leaving me for her.

Right. Well that complicated everything. I was in the middle of making spaghetti. Was I supposed to let the water keep boiling or…?

I ended up just turning off the stove and leaving the pot there to sit. Something for him to worry about later, I suppose.

I should have realized something was going on with Cooper weeks ago. Things had been off between us. I’d been staying away from the apartment more and more, finding any excuse to hang out at bookstores and coffee shops, going for long brunches with Sonya and taking walks around the city on my own. He’d been working longer hours than usual. And our sex life…yeesh. That’s been nonexistent for a while now, but I was okay with it. Which, looking back, should have been a huge red flag, but I was content to ignore it.

I’ve been content to ignore a lot of things in my life for the last few years.

Since graduating from Dartmouth and getting my master’s degree in architectural conservation from NYU, I’ve taken my foot off the gas. I’ve been letting life pull and push me any ol’ way it wants, like a plastic bag whipping in the wind.

When a position opened up with New York City Parks after I graduated in May, I applied for it. Never mind that it isn’t exactly my dream setup. Never mind that I’m not in the trenches, helping to preserve the buildings and architecture around the city. Never mind that I’m a glorified assistant. I do a lot of desk work, a lot of scheduling, filing, errands. To say I’m using my degrees is a stretch.

So that about covers work. As far as my personal life goes…

Well, I’ve already mentioned Cooper. We originally got together because when Sonya started dating her now fiancé, Wesley, Wesley mentioned he had a single friend named Cooper, and everyone thought it would be fun to go on a double date. I agreed because, why not?

When Cooper seemed to fall head over heels for me and I didn’t exactly feel the same, I didn’t overthink it. I liked the setup. Best friends dating best friends is as easy as it gets.

And when Wesley proposed to Sonya and Cooper hinted that he saw us following in their footsteps sooner rather than later, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, locked the door, and felt like I was having a heart attack.

So yeah, when you look at it all smashed together, my life for the last few years hasn’t been great.

I know that.

Or at least I know it now.

Sonya whips the door open.

“Ugh! Men! Can’t keep their freaking hands to themselves! I swear to GOD.”

She’s already wheeling my suitcase inside, so I grab a box. Together, we take my things to her spare bedroom. Quite a luxury in New York, but Sonya’s job in the marketing department at a tech startup pays well.

“I hate him. That asshole. He thinks he can cheat on you and get away with it?! You were too good for him from the start.”

There’s a lot more of this. Any sort of motivational tidbit that comes to mind, she’s going to say it. There’s the quintessential “He only dulled your shine” and “You’re better off without him” and “He just made the biggest mistake of his life!”

I let her keep going because I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to do. It doesn’t feel right to cop to the enormous amount of relief I feel right now.

“You can stay here as long as you want,” she assures me. “You hear me? Mi casa es su casa. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was in the process of ordering a voodoo doll lookalike for Cooper so we can torture and torment him, and if I check out in the next fifteen minutes, I get free shipping.”





The next few weeks living at Sonya’s apartment pass in much the same way as the last few years. I continue right on lying to myself and ignoring my elephant-sized problems. I’m used to it by now. I’ve been forcing the truth down for so long I’d almost be surprised if I could unbury it all at this point.

Knowing I’m unhappy is only the first step. Doing something about it…well, would you look at that? Old Navy is having a 25% off sale.

Instead of making changes, I continue working for a boss I dislike at a job I hate.

I tell myself (and Sonya) I’m looking for apartments to rent, but really, I just procrastinate by looking up multimillion-dollar homes in exotic locations on Zillow and critiquing the owner’s interior design choices. Zebra print couches in an Aspen ski lodge? Really?

I contemplate getting on dating apps and putting myself out there again then decide I’d rather flush my phone down the toilet.

Three weeks to the day since I first moved in with her, Sonya knocks on my bedroom door. Well, technically it’s her bedroom door, but whatever.

She cracks it open and peers inside.

“Heyyy, champ. How’s it going?”

I close my laptop before she can walk in and catch sight of all my open tabs, though for once, they’re not all Zillow.

It’s worse.

I’m doing what I always do when I’m feeling sad: looking into things I shouldn’t be, picking at proverbial scabs. It usually starts with a search into Frédéric, Emmett, and Alexander. Then, when that doesn’t satisfy me, I go down the rabbit hole of Googling Professor Barclay. It’s easy enough to check up on him. He’s no longer at Dartmouth. The year I graduated, he left the university and took up residence at MIT, likely because it’d become impossible to commute to Hanover and keep up with the growth of Banks and Barclay in Boston. His architecture firm is massive and ever-expanding. They’re always being written about for one thing or another: renovations at the White House, restoration of the Los Angeles Vietnam Memorial. They’ve even been a consulting firm on the reconstruction of Notre-Dame since the fire that happened a few years ago.