Page 30 of Trust Again

“Okay. Thanks.”

He unbuckled himself.

“Spence? Do you want to talk about it?” I asked cautiously.

“No.”

One more try. “Who’s Olivia?”

His expression iced over. “I said no, Dawn. That means I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

It was dead out there on the street. Everything was silent, except for us.

“Sorry for everything, I mean. Including what I said in the club. I didn’t mean it that way. I was an ass, and…”

He placed his hand over my mouth.

“I don’t want to hear it, Dawn,” he said gruffly. “I made my point, and you told me pretty clearly what you thought about it. You don’t have to try and make it better just because you suddenly feel sorry for me now.”

He took a deep breath and looked back at me. He seemed to be lost for a moment; he studied my freckles as if he were counting them.

Tick… tock.

“I need some space.” He removed his hand from my mouth, and it felt like slow motion.

Before I could respond, he got out of the car, shut the passenger door with a bang and strode up the walkway to his house.

Chapter 10

Early American Literature through 1865 was one of my toughest courses. Not so much because of the subject matter, but mainly because of Professor Walden. He was super strict, unfair, and seemed to take pleasure in harassing students. In short—he was scary. It was risky to sit too far back in the lecture hall, because he liked to pick on students there. But it was also a gamble to sit too close to the front, because there he’d address you by name. Isaac and I occupied two seats on the aisle in the middle row of the lecture hall. Walden rarely called on anyone there.

“Do you think we’re safe here?” I whispered.

“No idea, but I hope so. I don’t want to take a grilling like the one he gave Darren,” Isaac responded.

Isaac and I were a lot alike when it came to speaking in front of others, so we became allies from the first day of class. When Darren had read his paper aloud a few weeks earlier, Professor Walden had interrupted him and made it crystal clear how bad he found it. It was upsetting to see Darren—a totally self-confident, you might even say cocky guy—break out in a sweat and start stuttering. When a few students demanded that Darren at least be allowed to finish his presentation, Professor Walden had kicked them out. By now, the class was pretty well thinned-out because so many had dropped the course.

I was terrified of the man. Today, Isaac and I were even more jittery than usual: after class, we wanted to ask Walden if we could do a term paper instead of a presentation.

“Is that why you dolled yourself up?” Isaac asked, nodding toward my hair.

I raised my hand and touched the braid that I’d secured with bobby pins across my head like a crown.

“Would it sound stupid if I said ‘yes’?”

He shook his head. “No, man. I did, too.” He pointed to his white shirt and the white on black polka-dotted bow tie. Together with his brown-framed eyeglasses and deliberately rumpled hairdo, it made for an admittedly pretty picture.

After class, we waited for the room to empty before daring to approach Professor Walden.

Making him even more intimidating was his nasty tweed suit, under which he wore a sweater vest in the same greenish-beige color scheme, with an abstract pattern. The knot of a cognac brown tie bulged out at his neck. His hair was gray, nearly white, and his lower face engulfed by a full beard. It was hard to tell if he ever smiled. Actually, it was hard to even imagine him smiling, period.

“Professor Walden,” Isaac said, clearing his throat. “I hope we’re not disturbing you.”

He didn’t look up; he was too busy shuffling his papers together. He made a gesture that seemed to invite us to continue talking.

“Your course requires a presentation as the final project,” I began. “We’ve got an interesting topic that we think can be expressed best in writing, so we were wondering if we could submit a 10-page term paper instead of doing an oral presentation.”