1

I hate how history keeps coming back to haunt you, no matter how much you try to run away from it.

Right now, on the first day of classes for the 2016 spring semester, Chloe and I were catching up over an early lunch at Sullivan’s, the nicest (and only) restaurant on campus, and trying to deal with a little of our own history.

Chloe and I had both started teaching at Crimson College the previous semester, me as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, her as an Assistant Professor of Chinese. I was a “regular” hire. She was a “Special Diversity Hire.” Crimson had brought her in as the college’s first-ever African-American faculty member after a report had come out about the college’s utter dearth of black faculty, and their overall unwelcoming atmosphere to black students. But as the college liked to remind us, thanks to a generous donation from Security Solutions, the private prison company that had given a pile of money to Crimson, they were able to hire Chloe, and to a tenure-track position.

We had both been incredibly grateful to have jobs, and ones that paid almost living wages. The sheen of our gratitude had dulled somewhat over the course of the fall semester, especially after one of my students had attempted to shoot one of Chloe’s students during finals. I had tried to talk down Chris, my student, while Chloe had pulled Taylor, her student, to safety. Taylor, Chloe, and I had all escaped unscathed, at least physically. Mentally, we were maybe a little bit scarred. Especially, it seemed, Chloe.

Now she was pushing her Caesar salad around on her plate without looking at it. But she also couldn’t bring herself to look at me. She had greeted me by saying that she had to talk to me, since no one else could understand what she was going through. Then she had chattered nervously about nothing for 20 minutes while failing to eat a bite of her salad. Judging by the weight she’d lost over winter break, she’d been failing to eat a lot.

“Taylor was in class this morning,” she finally said, still not looking at me.

“How was that?” I asked.

“It was…it was weird. The whole thing was weird. I felt weird all break, and now that I’m back, I feel even weirder. It was so…it was so awful, what happened…Did you think you were going to die?”

“A bit,” I said.

“I did. I could feel Death rising up to take me. As I lay there, my face pressed into the carpet, I could feel Death all around me, rising up out of the carpet to take me, filling the air all around me so that I was breathing it in with every breath, absorbing it with every pore. Death was coming for me, and there was nothing I could do about it.”

“I know,” I said.

“Yeah.” Chloe shook her head, still not looking at me. “Yeah. And now it still feels like Death is with me every minute of every day. Especially when I was there. In my classroom. As soon as I stepped across the threshold, I felt Death rising up to take me once again.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“And you know, I didn’t know I was going to save Taylor until I did. Right up until the moment I grabbed her and pulled her into the classroom with me, I thought I was going to leave her there. I wanted to leave her there, with her blonde curls and all the men chasing after her. But then—it’s funny how you can have so many thoughts at a moment like that—I realized that the way I felt about Taylor, and all those other blonde, pretty girls like her, the ones I kept hoping would have something bad happen to them, was like the way Celie felt at first about Sophia and Shug Avery in The Color Purple.”

“Mmmmm,” I said. Chloe did have a problem with other women. I had just never known how to point it out to her. Luckily, it was looking like I wouldn’t have to.

“You know, I always hated Celie, especially at that moment, but here I was, thinking and acting just like her. Me hoping that men would come and teach all those pretty blonde girls a lesson was like Celie telling Harpo to beat up on Sophia because she wouldn’t mind him. And I—I felt so ashamed of myself. And I knew that’s not who I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be the kind of woman who goes around telling men to beat up on other women.”

“So you weren’t,” I said. “Just like Celie, in the end you stood up for yourself and other women.”

“Yeah. Only…that was just the one time. What am I going to do the next time?”

“You’ll do the right thing,” I said. “I’m sure you will. And each time you do it, it will get easier.”

“Maybe,” said Chloe. “Anyway, since the…you know…the panic attacks I had all last fall have gotten really bad. I can’t even set foot in Bedford Hall”—our classroom building was named Bedford Hall, quite possibly after the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest— “without getting one. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the semester. And I’ve started seeing a therapist, and I’ve been really good about taking my meds and stuff, and none of it’s helping. My therapist told me to go get a full physical work-up because I was freaking out about how maybe there was something really wrong with me, so that’s what I spent winter break doing.”

“What did the doctors tell you?” I asked.

“Well, first I went to see Doctor Blake, the same one who Mel”—Mel had joined the Crimson faculty at the same time we had, as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic—“went to see last semester when she thought there was something wrong with her. You know, he wouldn’t even do a proper physical exam? I know Mel said he was way too handsy for comfort, but with me he just sat on the other side of the examining room and told me I needed to see a psychiatrist. And maybe he’s right, but it sure didn’t make me feel any better about myself to have a known groper refuse to lay a finger on me. Like, am I really that ugly? I mean, Mel’s a lesbian, and she’s getting more action than me in that department. It’s not right!”

“Um,” I said. “Maybe. I mean, sure, being ignored by men is bad, but so is being groped and fondled in a gross creepy way.”

“I guess. I’d like to have the chance to find out, though.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, uh, so did you go see a psychiatrist?”

“Seems like I’ve seen dang near everybody. My dad—he’s a surgeon—had to call in a bunch of favors to get them to see me so quickly, since normally you have to wait for weeks or months to get in to see a lot of these specialists. I don’t know what happens if you’re really sick. I guess you just die.”

“I guess,” I said. “So what did they say?”

She snorted, starting to loosen up now that she was angry instead of scared. “They all lectured me about losing weight and staying in shape and told me I have an ‘aversive personality’ and I’m just having a hard time adjusting to a ‘real job.’ They obviously thought I’m a total wimp who can’t be trusted to get out of bed in the morning. I’m a black woman with a PhD from an Ivy League, Research 1 institution and a tenure-track job at a selective liberal arts college. What kind of person do they think I am? But they just told me to stop whining and lay off the fried chicken.”

“I’m sorry. That’s awful.”

“I know. And then they kept going on and on about somatization disorder or some shit—did I just say that? I didn’t mean to. It just kind of slipped out!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve heard worse.”

“Yeah, I know you have, but I was still raised not to talk like that!”

“I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”

“Deal. So, they kept going on and on about somatization disorder and did I have any episodes of childhood trauma and what was my difficult childhood like growing up in the ‘hood. I told them I grew up in a loving nuclear family in a well-to-do suburb of Atlanta and I had about the least traumatic childhood a person could have, but they just shook their heads and muttered stuff about repressed memories and sent me to get more psychiatric counseling.”

“Is it helping?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Maybe. I keep trying to tell myself that at least they didn’t find anything really wrong with me, but I tell you what, there were times when I was hoping they would, just so that I could get them to take me seriously—is that girl trying to talk to us?”

A girl in a headscarf was edging towards us. Gosh, she looks North Caucasian, I thought.

“Professor Halley? The Russian professor?”

She sounds North Caucasian too. “Yes?” I said.

“I, um…I hoped I can talk to you,” she said in a rush.

“Yes, of course.”

“In Russian?” she asked hopefully.

“Of course,” I said in Russian.

“Oh, thank God! I’ve been here for years but I still don’t feel comfortable speaking English. My name’s Aishat, by the way.”

Boy, does she sound Chechen. The hairs on the back of my neck had risen at the sound of her distinctive Caucasian hard “n.” Which was completely unfair. Probably she was a perfectly nice person who had nothing to do with the man who had held me at gunpoint in Moscow. But the visceral terror provoked by her accent remained.

“So is Russian your native language, then?” I asked.

“Well…” She looked down, twisting her toe on the floor. “Chechen,” she mumbled, not catching my eye.

“I thought so,” I said.

“Really?” Now she did look up. “Do you know many Chechens, then?”

“I’ve known some,” I said. “Do you want to take Russian classes?” I couldn’t think of any other reason for her to seek me out, although I was surprised that she would do that. There was not a lot of love lost between Chechens and Russians, as a general rule. But maybe it was the closest she could get here in small-town Georgia to reconnecting with her native culture.

“No.” Now she was looking down at the ground again. “I, um…I might need your help. Over a question of honor.”

Get a signed copy in the Kickstarter campaign!