The Black Hour (12 page)

I was early to class, but someone else was earlier. Nathaniel paced the hall outside our classroom, his hair flopping into his eyes and his lips moving as though he was rehearsing lines for a play. He looked up, caught me watching. “Did you need something?” I asked. “Dr. Talbot said you came to see me.”

He shook his head slowly. “I just—”

“You just came to see if I needed my armed escort to class?” I handed off the stack of papers I’d brought and the key to the door. “You don’t need to promenade me from place to place, Nath.” I glanced to see what he thought of that. As a nickname
Nay-th
probably belonged to a different name, a different boy, but it saved me syllables and therefore time. Plus, the kid could use a little lightening up. “I’ll give you some actual work to do.”

He managed the door, flicked the lights.

“Start with those.” I nodded to the papers in his hands. “Put one on each desk in the first four rows, and if you see any of the students pick one up to take to the back rows, break their hands.”

He laughed. And he hadn’t blinked on the nickname. Good boy.

The teacher’s desk was a skinny-legged table at the front of the room, cold on the elbows and no bulk to hide nervous hands or jumping knees. I’d have to pull it together. I’d managed a rousing discussion with my grad students the night before, but these were the true customers of Rothbert’s wares. These were freshmen mostly, ripe but still attached to the vine, or sophomores shopping around. Some would be sociology majors, but some would be picking up a social science requirement and counting the minutes until they could get back to their theater or marketing majors. Most of them would be too immature for such a rigorous university. But this was the first day, and first days held promise.

For one thing, freshmen were the only people who hadn’t lived through last year’s gunfire. They didn’t know anything about me. I didn’t have to start with violence. I didn’t have to explain myself.

I sat behind the table and let my cane lie at my feet.

“We’ll get back to normal, Nath. I promise.”

“It’s no problem. Working with you is—interesting.”

That was the truth, poor kid. “Let’s hope these students think the same thing, without knowing how interesting I am.”

They started to filter in, their hulking backpacks over their shoulders. Nath took a seat at the back and shot unwelcoming looks to anyone who edged away from the designated area. Within a minute or so of the official start time, the front four rows were filled with beautiful youth, young people all studiously ignoring me. The promise of a new year.

“I’ll call roll in a minute,” I said, drawing the languid attention of the room away from their phones and laptops. “For now, let’s get to know one another a bit.”

I saw Nath look up, his face wide and concerned. I shook my head at him. We weren’t going to get to know
me
. “In the back is my esteemed colleague, Nathaniel Barber. Mr. Barber is your teaching assistant for the semester.”

Nath brushed the hair out of his eyes and tried to withstand the weight of the entire room’s attention.

“I’m Amelia Emmet. How many of you are sociology majors?”

Two students raised their hands, hesitating when they saw that no one else did.

I looked them over. Why so few majors? This was going to be a tough room. “You two, as peers, may well someday call me by my first name, but for now let’s all go with Dr. Emmet, and I will extend you the same courtesy.” They all stared at me until I began to think I had something smeared on my forehead, something green between my teeth. What had I been thinking? The first day wasn’t full of promise. It was full of dread, always the worst, and I was out of practice. “Mr. Barber, will you call roll for us?”

Nath rose and came to the front of the room. I slid the roll sheet toward him, hoping he wouldn’t see that my hand shook. “Let’s also hear your major and hometown.”

“Debra Anderson,” Nath said.

One of the sociology majors raised her hand again. “Sociology, and I’m from—here?”

I would never get used to the inflection the young women used—everything was a question. They were certain of nothing. If I did my job right, I might train that uncertainty out of them, but it was only the first week. I wasn’t sure I could do my job right. I watched the students shift in their seats, already bored. This was the only thing I could do. What if I couldn’t do it?

The sight of my manuscript on the barbecue came back to me. That hollow feeling I remembered from early adventures in shame. Discount lunch hollow, cheap shoes hollow.

“From Chicago?” I said.

The girl nodded. End of conversation.

Nath was staring hard at the list of names.

“Mr. Barber?”

“James Baker,” he said. Nath raised his eyes to study the class, zeroing in on the boy who put his hand in the air.

The boy wasn’t the baker, but the dough. He was pudgy, with small eyes behind glasses too big for his face. As soon as everyone turned to look at him, he blushed a deep and alarming red. “H-here. I mean. Undeclared.” He swallowed hugely and stared at his desktop. He looked like a lab rat. “Pittsburgh.”

I’d have to train the girls to speak in the declarative and the boys to speak in sentences—maybe I was in the wrong room, and this was supposed to be an English course. For foreign speakers.

No one here wanted to be a scholar. They’d chosen the class for reasons their parents handed them, or they hoped someday for a job and a paycheck. None of them loved the topic, not even the majors. They had no sense of the scale of the world and how it worked. Or the dangers in it. I saw—

—the dark hallway, the hand and gun rising out of the blackness—

Stop.

The walls flying away and the red carpet rushing at my face.

Stop now.

My eyes darted from student to student. I’d hoped the younger students would be my blank slate, but what did we know about any of them? Their backpacks were huge, lurking. They could have carried anything into my classroom.

The next name didn’t come. I glanced at Nath and found him watching the previous student like a specimen in a jar. Nath’s mouth hung open, as though he were counting his teeth with his tongue.

“Nath?”

His attention snapped back to the list. He studied it for another moment and then went on with the names until we’d learned that the rest of the class studied a varied list of topics and hailed from all over the country. I couldn’t concentrate. Criminal justice, one said. I looked up but couldn’t even separate the kid from the crowd. Where had these kids been last fall? Had they arrived for a campus tour, eager to choose Rothbert, and been turned away?
Sorry, folks, but for your safety . . .
Had they seen the news online while they researched their college choices? What did they think when they got their Rothbert acceptances in the mail? Why had they chosen to be here? Why had they chosen to be in this room with—of all the professors who taught the intro course—me?

Nath returned to his seat. I’d led this course every semester I’d ever taught, including the years when I was in a position like Nath’s. Introductions, outline of the class, the expectations I had for the semester, early dismissal if I needed it. I could do this.

“Sociology is the systematic study of our human society,” I started. The words unlocked some deep layer of memory. I spoke from knowledge I’d taken in years and years ago, hoping, for once, that the students weren’t paying serious attention. “To study society means that we adopt the sociological perspective. That means we pay close, detailed attention to particular behaviors in particular people in order to find larger truths.”

I didn’t normally sit during a lecture. Something possessed me to grab my cane and stand before the class. They all looked up from their laptops and phones and watched me excavate myself out of my seat.

They’d know. They either knew already, or by the end of the day they’d find a way.

I imagined the room spilling out and the students returning to their own orbits, the questions they’d ask someone in their dorms or their next classes, the rumors they’d hear, the jokes. Some of them were probably sophomores. They would know. They would tell the others.

The next time I walked into this room, they would all turn to stare.

“We have to dig beyond the easy answer, beyond the assumptions that get categorized as common sense or worse—”

Autopilot failed. I stopped mid-sentence.

I walked the perimeter of the class, buying myself a little time. What had I been saying? Nath’s head swiveled to watch me.

“Or worse, stereotype,” I said. “We have to look at the ways that society, not individual decisions, determines our lives. Take your situation here at Rothbert. If I asked you how you’d chosen to study here, you might say that one of your parents went here, or that you didn’t get into Harvard and this was your second choice.” Had I begun to sweat? “But when we look at things from the sociological perspective, we’d have to admit that you’re here, first and foremost, because you’re a particular age—you’re at the age at which people go to college in America.”

The room wasn’t particularly useful for pacing. I reached one side of the room and turned around to start back. The cane squeaked on the floor.

“Another reason many of you are at Rothbert is that your family can afford to send you here. If they couldn’t, you might have chosen from a pool of different schools, based on financial aid considerations. Or you might be looking for a job right now in a terrible economy.”

I looked out at the sea of boredom. “But you get a four-year reprieve from that,” I said, noticing that none of them as much as blinked. These kids. They really did think the world would be fixed by the time they graduated. Or that it didn’t matter if it were still broken. It wouldn’t matter to them, because they’d had years of privilege behind them and decades more ahead. I fanned myself and continued, “Someday you’ll want a profession of some sort, and the good news is that sociological study is good for lots of careers out in the private sector. Advertising, journalism, law. Any type of work in which it’s helpful to understand your fellow man.” No reaction, no interest. Nothing. Only Nath in the back nodded. I was definitely sweating. “In other words,” I said, “all types of work.”

Had I not taken my medication? At the thought of the pills, I believed I could hear them rattling in their bottle. Like Pavlov’s dogs, I could feel their texture on my tongue, could taste the bitter orange oval before I swallowed. They were upstairs in my bag. Safe and close, and I didn’t even need one now. My pain, already buried under their influence. I ached for them anyway, and for a day when I wouldn’t have to know their precise satellite coordinates.

Sweating. Sweating and maybe breathing too hard.

“The study of society can encompass almost any aspect of our daily lives.” The room seemed wider now. “What are some of the things you’re interested in? Hobbies, habits.”

No one spoke. Had they all gone? No, they were all here, staring up at me. I felt as though I were seven feet tall, Alice in Wonderland with the brackish taste of cake in my mouth. Had they always been this far away? Hadn’t Nath made them sit in the front rows? “Things you’re passionate about,” I said. I felt really hot. “Nothing? Nothing interests you?”

One of the students cleared his throat.

“Yes? Did you want to say something?”

He shook his head. They’d all shrunken in their seats, unwilling to share the spotlight. I saw two students exchange confused looks and, sticking out from an open backpack, a
Rothbert Reader
, and my face, glaring.

They knew. They knew, and they were unwilling to associate with me.

I saw them spilling out the door and going straight to the registrar to find another social science course. My classes, diminishing by twos and threes until only Nath and I—

“No one—” Burning hot and then, suddenly, cold. Had someone opened the door?

The hand rising out of the dark, a gun.

I whipped around to see the door, the cane catching on the tile and then free. Something flew at me from the corner of my eye. The cane rattled to the floor, then nothing. Nothing but black and silence.

I woke up in the white room, a hand heavy on my stomach.

I heard moaning. Me. Me, moaning. I blinked into the light until I knew I wasn’t in the ICU.

“Dr. Emmet, are you OK?”

“No ambulance,” I said. Tried to say.

“Be still now, Amelia.”

“Nath.”

“Yes.” Far above me.

“Nath, dismiss the class.”

“They’re gone, Amelia. Stay down—”

Doyle?

I sat up, holding my head onto my shoulders with my hands. “What happened?”

“You fell,” Nath said.

“Mr. Barber.” Doyle knelt next to me. “Could you run down and meet the EMTs?”

“Sure.”

“No ambulance.”

Nath stopped and looked between us.

“No choice, Amelia. Go on, Mr. Barber.”

The door shut behind him. Doyle reached up and took my hand away from my temple. “Is that where it hurts?”

All over, I wanted to say. I hurt all over. The back of my head, the front, my left shoulder. My leg, of course, and pelvis, outside and inside, and deep, deep down.