Take a Hint, Dani Brown (The Brown Sisters #2)(7)
The sleepy-eyed teenager wrapped a strand of long, blue hair around her finger and said promptly, “Totally about banging.”
Dani approached the board and wrote Goblin Market in a bubble. Traditionalists might find writing on the board unnecessary, but not all learners were aural, no matter their stage of education. So she scrawled a little arrow coming out of her bubble and wrote: Banging.
Then she turned back to Emily and said brightly, “Please elaborate.”
“Well,” Emily hedged, “I mean, it’s either banging or Christianity. One of those. Maybe both.”
“I think it’s both,” added the boy beside her, Will.
Dani nodded, drew another arrow, and wrote Tits out for Christ? Then she asked, “Anything more specific?”
“Tits in for Christ,” Will corrected.
“Tits wherever you want for Christ,” Emily said firmly, “because he’ll totally forgive you. It’s an allegory. Lizzie suffers, right, for Laura’s sin?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Dani grinned, grabbed a board cloth, and replaced Tits out for Christ with Allegory: original sin, savior’s suffering. “Okay, someone else . . .” Her eyes landed on an unfamiliar face—the new girl. She’d received an email from scheduling about that. “Fatima, yes?”
The girl nodded, small and serious and alarmingly well dressed. “That’s right.”
“Did you have time to read?”
“I did.”
“Hit me, then.”
Fatima cleared her throat. “I got the Christ thing, too. And I think the goblins are anti-Semitic.”
The girl next to her, Pelumi, clicked her fingers. “Like in Harry Potter.”
“Hey,” someone piped up from across the table. “Don’t shit-talk Harry Potter.”
“It’s not shit-talking if it’s true.”
Dani clapped her hands. “Robust discussion is precisely what I want from you, but unless you can connect Harry Potter to Rossetti’s themes more solidly, I’m going to ask that it’s taken off the table.”
There was a pause before Pelumi said, “Excess sensuality and the private cost. Hogwarts has magically refilling tables as a result of underground slave labor; the girl in the poem dies of too many orgasms or something because she tasted some dick. I mean, fruit.”
Dani nodded gravely. “For sheer ingenuity, I will allow it.”
The debate burst to life.
Dani spent the rest of the class listening to a mix of razor-sharp insight and meme regurgitation, directing the conversation when it seemed necessary, shutting up when it didn’t. Time skipped ahead of her until the seminar was over, notebooks were being stuffed into bags, and the cupcakes at the union stall started calling her name.
As the students filed out with waves and good-byes, Dani paused to open her laptop and take a quick look at her emails. One had to stay on top of these things. Someone might need her to—
Ah.
There was a new email at the top of the screen with a bolded subject line that made her gut squeeze. Whether that squeeze was excitement or a warning sign of nervous diarrhea, it was hard to say. All things considered, it might even be both.
DAUGHTERS OF DECADENCE, THEN & NOW: A PUBLIC RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM.
Hi, Dani . . . the preview read, and was doubtless followed by something like: Just need final confirmation re: topics for discussion panel with Inez and co.!
The discussion panel was a public speaking event Dani had foolishly agreed to take part in when she was presumably high on (then undiscovered) asbestos fumes the previous year.
Well, the decision hadn’t been entirely foolish—or even mostly foolish. It would give her more academic exposure, increase her experience and her profile, and help cement her as a trusted voice in her topic of interest. Taking part would be an honor, and certainly fit with her careful plans to gain a professorship by forty-two. (Forty-five, if she couldn’t squeeze everything in within the next fifteen years.)
Really, the only reason she was close to shitting herself was that she’d be speaking on the panel alongside Inez fucking Holly. You know: one of fewer than thirty black female professors in the United Kingdom, the woman who made feminist literary theory her bitch, Dani’s eternal Beyoncé-level idol, et cetera, et cetera. The one woman she would rather die—literally, she would rather actually die—than embarrass herself in front of.
Not that Dani tended to embarrass herself at work. Her profession was straightforward and easily controlled and required qualities she naturally possessed, such as laser-like focus and an enthusiasm for close reading and analysis, instead of qualities she didn’t, such as the ability to process and express irrelevant rubbish like her own emotions. So, no, embarrassment at work wasn’t likely. But still. Stranger things had happened.
She pressed a hand to her chest and touched the moonstone hanging beneath her dress, letting calm sweep through her in waves. Then she exhaled, typed out a painstaking reply, and snapped the laptop shut.
“Everything is under control,” she told herself. “This is your work. This is your thing. This is the kind of pressure you can handle.”
She was still repeating that mantra a few minutes later, when she sailed out of the lab and came face-to-face with her ex–friend with benefits.
Well, shit.