FALSE ANALOGY
“Plus other people do worse things than this,” says Laura. “My best friend? She pays her algebra tutor to do her homework for her. I mean, that’s way worse, right? And she doesn’t even get punished! Why should I get punished and she doesn’t?”
“She’s not in my class,” Samuel says.
“How about Larry then?”
“Who?”
“Larry Broxton? From our class? I know for a fact that everything he gives you was written by his older brother. You don’t punish him. That’s not fair. That’s way worse.”
Samuel recalls that Larry Broxton—sophomore, major undeclared, buzz-cut hair the color of cornmeal, usually in class wearing shiny silver oversize basketball shorts and a monochromatic T-shirt featuring the gigantic logo of a clothing chain found in roughly all of America’s outlet malls—was among the boys who had crept toward and, later, bolted away from Laura Pottsdam. Larry fucking Broxton, skin as pale and sickly green as the inside of an old potato, pathetic attempts at a blond mustache and beard that looked more like his face was lightly crusted with panko bread crumbs, a kind of hunchiness and withdrawn, inward manner that for some reason reminded Samuel of a small fern that could only grow in the shade, Larry Broxton, who had never once spoken in class, whose feet had outpaced the rest of his body, growth-spurt-wise, and had resulted in a kind of floppy walk, as if his feet were two large and flat river fish, feet on which he wore these chunky black sandal things that Samuel was pretty sure were designed for use only in public showers and pools, this same Larry Broxton who during the ten minutes Samuel gave to each class for “freewriting and brainstorming” would idly and subconsciously and casually pick at his genitals, he could, almost every day, invariably, during their two-week sitting-together period, on the way out of class, make Laura Pottsdam laugh.
SLIPPERY SLOPE
“I’m just saying,” continues Laura, “that if you fail me you’ll have to fail everyone. Because everyone’s doing it. And then you won’t have no one left to teach.”
“Anyone,” he says.
“What?”
“You won’t have anyone left to teach. Not no one.”
Laura looks at him with an expression she might also give someone who’s speaking to her in Latin.
“It’s a double negative,” he says. “Won’t and no one.”
“Whatever.”
He knows it is a graceless and condescending thing to do, correcting someone’s spoken grammar. Like being at a party and criticizing someone for not being well-read enough, which in fact had happened to Samuel his first week on the job, at a faculty get-to-know-you dinner at the home of his boss, the dean of the college, a woman who had been a member of the English Department before bolting for her current administrative gig. She had built her academic career the typical way: by knowing everything there was to know about an extraordinarily small field (her specific niche was literature written during the plague, about the plague). At dinner, she had asked his opinion on a certain section of The Canterbury Tales, and, when he demurred, said, a little too loudly, “You haven’t read it? Oh, well, goodness.”
NON SEQUITUR
“Also?” Laura says. “I thought it was really unfair that you gave a quiz.”
“What quiz?”
“The quiz you gave? Yesterday? On Hamlet? I asked you if there was going to be a quiz and you said no. Then you gave a quiz anyway.”
“That’s my prerogative.”
“You lied to me,” she says, affecting this injured and aggrieved tone that sounds inherited from thousands of television family dramas.
“I didn’t lie,” he says. “I changed my mind.”
“You didn’t tell me the truth.”
“You shouldn’t have skipped class.”
What was it exactly about Larry Broxton that enraged him so much? Why the actual physical revulsion when he saw them sitting together and laughing together and walking home together? Part of it was that he found the boy worthless—his manner of dress, his casual ignorance, his prognathic face, his total wall of silence during classroom discussions, sitting there motionless, a lump of organic matter contributing nothing to the class or the world. Yes, these things angered him, and that anger was magnified at the knowledge that Laura would let this boy do things to her. Would let him touch her, would actually nuzzle up willingly to his tuberish skin, let his crusty lips press against hers, allow herself to be felt by him, his hands, his raggedly chewed fingernails that held little purplish globs of goo. That she might willingly remove his oversize basketball shorts back at his squalid dorm room that surely smelled of sweat and old pizza and body crust and urine, that she would allow all these things willingly and not suffer for them made Samuel suffer for her.
POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC
“Just because I skipped class,” says Laura, “doesn’t mean I should fail. That’s really unfair.”
“That’s not why you’re failing.”
“I mean, it’s just one class. You don’t have to go so, like, nuclear about it?”
What made Samuel suffer even more was the thought that what brought Laura and Larry together was likely a mutual dislike of him. That Samuel was the glue between them. That they both found him boring and tedious, and this was enough to make small talk on, enough to fill in the gaps between the heavy petting. It was, in a way, his fault. Samuel felt responsible for the sexual catastrophe that was ongoing in his class, back row, left side.
FALSE COMPROMISE
“I’ll tell you what,” says Laura, sitting up straight now and leaning toward him. “I can admit I was wrong about copying the paper, if you can admit you were wrong about giving the quiz.”
“Okay.”
“So as a compromise, I’ll rewrite the paper, and you’ll give me a makeup quiz. Everybody’s happy.” She lifts her hands, palms up, and smiles. “Voilà,” she says.
“How is that a compromise?”
“I think we need to get beyond the conversation of ‘did Laura cheat’ and toward the conversation of ‘how do we move forward.’?”
“It’s not a compromise if you get everything you want.”
“But you get what you want too. I’ll take full responsibility for my actions.”
“How?”
“By saying it. Saying that”—and here she puts her fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks—“I take full responsibility for my actions”—end air quotes.
“You take responsibility for your actions by facing the consequences for them.”
“You mean failing.”
“I mean, yes, failing.”
“That’s so not fair! I shouldn’t have to fail the class and take full responsibility for my actions. It should be one or the other. That’s how it works. And you know what else?”
RED HERRING
“I don’t even need this class. I shouldn’t even be in this class. When am I ever going to need this in real life? When is anyone ever going to ask if I know Hamlet? When is that going to be essential information? Can you tell me that? Huh? Tell me, when am I ever going to need to know this?”
“That is not relevant.”
“No, it’s very relevant. It’s like the most relevant thing ever. Because you can’t do it. You can’t tell me when I’m going to need this information. Because you want to know why? Because the answer is I won’t.”
Samuel knows this is probably true. Asking students to examine Hamlet in terms of logical fallacies seems pretty stupid. But ever since a certain provost came to power who is obsessed with teaching hard sciences and mathematics in every class (the reason being that we have to funnel our students into these disciplines to effectively compete with the Chinese, or something), Samuel has had to show on his annual reports how he promotes mathematics in his literature classes. Teaching logic is a gesture in this direction, and one that he now wishes he taught more thoroughly, as Laura has used, by his internal count, maybe ten logical fallacies in their conversation so far.
“Look,” he says, “I didn’t make you take the class. Nobody’s forcing you to be here.”
“Yes you are! You’re all forcing me to be here reading dumb Hamlet, which I’m never going to need for the rest of my life!”
“You can drop the class whenever you like.”
“No, I can’t!”
“Why not?”
ARGUMENTUM VERBOSIUM
“I cannot fail this class because I need it to satisfy a humanities credit so I have room in my fall schedule to take statistics and micro so I can be ahead for the next summer when I’ll need to get internship credit so I can still graduate in three and a half years, which I have to do because my parents’ college fund won’t cover four full years even though there used to be plenty of money in it but they had to use it for the divorce lawyer and they explained to me that ‘everyone in the family has to make sacrifices in this difficult time’ and mine would be either taking out a loan for my last semester in college or busting my butt to finish early and so if I have to repeat this class it’ll screw up the whole plan. And my mom wasn’t doing very good post-divorce anyway but now they’ve found a tumor? In her uterus? And they’re operating next week to take it out? And I have to keep going home once a week to quote-unquote be there for her even though all we do is play Bunco with her stupid friends. And my grandmother who’s all alone now after Grandpa died gets confused a lot about which medications to take on which days and it’s my responsibility to take care of her and fill her weekly pill cases with the right drugs or she could go into a coma or something, and I don’t know who’s gonna take care of Gramma next week when I have to serve my three days of community service, which is so stupid because everyone else at that party drank just as much as I did and yet I was the one arrested for public intoxication and the next day I asked the cop on what grounds could he possibly arrest me for public intoxication and he said I was standing in the middle of the street yelling ‘I am so drunk!’ which I totally do not remember doing. And on top of all this my roommate’s a total pig and a total slob and she keeps stealing my Diet Pepsi and not even paying me back or saying thank you and I’ll look in the fridge and there’s one more Diet Pepsi missing and she leaves her stuff everywhere and tries to give me advice about eating healthy even though she’s like two hundred and fifty pounds but she thinks she’s some diet genius because she used to be three hundred and fifty pounds and she’s all like Have you ever lost a hundred pounds? and I’m like I never needed to, but she goes on and on about her triple-digit weight loss and how she totally changed her life since she began her weight-loss journey and blah blah blah weight-loss journey this and weight-loss journey that and she’s so incredibly annoying about it and even has this giant weight-loss calendar on the wall so I can’t even put up any of my posters but I can’t say anything because I’m supposed to be like part of her support network? And it’s like my job to ask her if she’s hit her calorie burns for the day and congratulate her when she does and not tempt her by bringing in quote-unquote self-destructive food and I’m not sure why I’m the one who gets punished for what is in reality her problem but still I go along with it and I don’t buy Doritos or Pop-Tarts or those individually wrapped Zebra Cakes even though I love them because I want to be a good supportive roommate and the only thing I allow myself and like my only pleasure in life is my Diet Pepsi, which technically she’s not even supposed to have anyway because she says carbonated beverages were one of her food crutches before she began her weight-loss journey, but I say Diet Pepsi has like two calories so she can deal with it. And—oh, yeah—my dad was stabbed at a foam party last week. And even though he’s doing fine now I’m finding it hard to concentrate on school because he was stabbed and also what the fuck was he doing at a foam party anyway, which is a question he completely refuses to answer and when I start asking about it he just tunes me out like I’m Mom. And my boyfriend went to college in Ohio and he constantly wants me to send him dirty pictures of me because he says it takes his mind off all the pretty girls out there so I’m afraid if I don’t do it he’ll sleep with some Ohio slut and it’ll be my fault, so I take the pictures and I know he likes it if girls are shaved and I’m okay with doing that for him but I get all these little red bumps that are really itchy and ugly and one got infected and imagine having to explain to some ninety-year-old nurse at student health that you need an ointment because you cut yourself shaving your pubes. And besides all of this now I have a flat tire on my bike and one sink in our kitchenette is plugged up and my roommate’s gross hair is always all over the shower and sticking to my lavender bar soap and my mom had to give away our beagle because she cannot deal with that level of responsibility right now and there’s all these low-fat ham cubes in our refrigerator that are like three weeks old and starting to smell and my best friend had an abortion and my internet’s broken.”
APPEAL TO EMOTION
It goes without saying that Laura Pottsdam is now crying.