2
LAURA POTTSDAM SAT in the frightening office of the university dean, explaining exactly what had transpired between herself and Samuel. “He told me I didn’t have a learning disability,” Laura said. “He told me I just wasn’t very smart.”
“Oh my goodness,” the dean said, looking stricken. Her office shelves were filled mostly with books about the Black Death, her walls decorated with old-looking illustrations of people suffering from boils or lesions or being piled into wheelbarrows, dead. Laura had not thought any wall art was more insufferable than her roommate’s giant weight-loss calendar, but the dean’s apparent interest in the history of open sores proved her totally wrong.
“Samuel really said, out loud, that you weren’t smart?”
“It was a pretty big blow to my self-esteem.”
“Yes, I’d imagine.”
“I am an elite college student with a perfect GPA. He can’t tell me I’m not smart.”
“I think you’re very smart, Laura.”
“Thank you.”
“And you should know I take this very seriously.”
“I might also mention that Professor Anderson sometimes curses in class. It’s really distracting and offensive.”
“Okay, here’s what we can do,” the dean said. “Why don’t you rewrite your Hamlet paper for a new grade. Meanwhile, I’ll smooth things over with Professor Anderson. Does that sound like a plan?”
“Yes, that sounds like a great plan.”
“And if there’s anything else I need to know, please call me directly.”
“Okay,” Laura said, and she walked out of the administration building feeling the bright, buoyant warmth that accompanies victory.
It was a feeling that lasted only briefly, only until she cracked open her Shakespeare and sat on her dorm-room floor looking forlornly at all those words and realized she was right back where she started: trying to complete yet another worthless assignment for yet another worthless class, Intro to Lit, one of five classes she was enrolled in this semester, all of which were, in her opinion, bullshit. Just totally stupid time sucks that had nothing to do with real life, was what she thought about college classes, so far. And by “real life” she meant the tasks she’d be asked to perform upon graduation with a bachelor’s degree in business, tasks she couldn’t even really guess at now since she hadn’t taken any advanced communication and marketing classes and hadn’t held an internship or “real job” ever, unless you counted her high-school gig working part-time at the concession stand at a second-run movie theater, where she learned several important lessons about workplace etiquette from a thirty-two-year-old assistant manager who liked staying after hours to smoke weed and play strip poker with the pretty teenage girls he always hired, which required of her a careful social negotiation to continue having access to the weed without doing anything so retrograde she couldn’t show her face at work the next day. But even if this was the only quote-unquote work experience she’d ever had, she was still pretty sure her inevitably successful future career in marketing and communications would not require the stupid shit she was currently learning in college.
Like Hamlet. She was trying to read Hamlet, trying to form a thought for an essay she had to rewrite about Hamlet. But the thing that was more interesting to her right now was a fistful of paper clips that she tossed lightly into the air and then watched as they bounced and scattered all over the linoleum of her dorm-room floor. This was more fun than reading Hamlet. Because even though every paper clip was shaped exactly like every other paper clip, they bounced in chaotic, random, unduplicatable ways. Why didn’t they bounce exactly the same? Why didn’t they all land in the same place? Plus there was that delicious click-chhh sound when they all hit the floor and slid. She had lofted the paper clips into the air roughly fifteen to twenty times in the last few minutes—a pretty transparent Hamlet-reading stalling maneuver, she had to admit—when her phone dinged. A new message!
Heeeee-eeeee-eey honey
From Jason. And she could tell by the several iterations of the letter e that he was feeling that very special urgent way tonight. Boyfriends were so transparent sometimes.
Hey! :-D
The reason college was so stupid was due to learning things she would never need in life, ever. Like knowledge of Greek statuary, for example, such as she was memorizing for the Intro to Humanities class that was required of every student and that the university offered online. This was such a dumb waste of time because she was sure when she interviewed for her first real job they would not show her flash cards of statues and ask “What myth does this represent?,” which was what she had to do in the timed two-minute weekly quizzes the class required and that were such a total joke— Her phone chirped. It was an update on iFeel, the excellent new app that was the social media darling du jour among the college set. Laura’s friends were all on it, and used it obsessively, and would abandon it as soon as it was discovered by the late-adopters, meaning old people.
Laura looked at her phone. iFeel happy tonight!!! one of her friends had posted. It was Brittany, who had so far survived the several purges Laura had made to her Alert List.
The phone asked: Do you want to Ignore, Respond, or Autocare?
Laura selected Autocare. Placed the phone back on the floor, on the paper clips.
What had she been thinking about? Right, the art quizzes, which were a total joke because all she had to do was scroll through the quiz taking screen-grabs along the way and then unplug her modem, which the test interpreted as a “crash” or “network failure” (i.e., not her fault), thus allowing her to take the quiz again. So she looked up all the answers and plugged in the modem and aced the quiz and didn’t have to think about Greek statuary for another week.
Then there was biology, which pretty much made Laura gag just thinking about it. Because she was pretty sure the first week of her powerful marketing and communications job that she would someday have would not require her to identify the chemical chain reaction that converted a photon of light to photosynthesized sugar, such as she was currently memorizing in her Intro to Biology class that she was stupidly forced to take in order to satisfy a science requirement even though hello? she wasn’t going to be a scientist? Plus the professor was so dry and boring and the lectures so unbearable—
Her phone dinged again. A message from Brittany: Thanx girl!! Responding to whatever message iFeel selected to Autocare with, obviously. And because Laura was in the middle of studying and trying really hard to read Hamlet she decided not to engage and instead sent back the universal glyph signifying the end of a conversation:
:)
Anyway the biology lectures were so unbearable she’d begun paying her roommate twenty bucks a week to record herself reading aloud from the important parts of the textbook so Laura could listen to the recording during the biweekly chapter tests, when she sat inconspicuously next to the wall about halfway down in the three-hundred-person lecture hall and slipped one small earbud into the wall-side ear and leaned against the wall and listened to her roommate reading the chapter while scanning the test for keywords, vaguely impressed by her own multitasking skills and her ability to pass the test without ever studying once.
“You’re not using this to cheat, are you?” her roommate asked a few weeks into the operation.
“No. It’s so I can study. At the gym,” Laura said.
“Because cheating is wrong.”
“I know.”
“And I’ve never seen you exercise.”
“I do exercise.”
“I’m at the gym all the time and I’ve never seen you there.”
“Well, rats’ eggs on you!” Laura said, which was something her mother always said instead of cursing. Something else her mother always said is Don’t let anyone EVER bully you or make you feel bad about yourself, and at that moment her roommate was making her feel very bad indeed, which was why instead of apologizing Laura said, “Listen, feeb, if you haven’t seen me at the gym it’s ’cuz some of us don’t need to be there as long as you do,” because her roommate was, let’s face it, objectively morbidly (almost fascinatingly) obese. She had legs like sacks of potatoes. For real.
The word “feeb” was something she made up on the spot and felt pretty proud of, actually, how sometimes a nickname can capture a person’s essence like that.
Her phone dinged.
Whatcha doin 2nite?