Bad Habits Read online

  I slowed down when I turned the corner and spotted Rocky standing in front of the library smoking, but I was still sweating and panting when I got there.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “I’ve only just arrived,” Rocky said with a mysterious smile that made me wonder if he was lying. His cigarette wasn’t even half-smoked, but who knew how many he’d already gone through?

  “Well, thanks for waiting. I mean, thanks for giving me a ride.” Everything was coming out breathless, but, then, I had a feeling any conversation with Rocky was destined to leave me a little out of breath. Despite his hints last night about a hangover, he looked bright-eyed and freshly shaven, and his dark jeans and strategically rumpled sweater made my work uniform of black pants and a white button-down seem somehow both fussy and sad.

  “How was the root canal?”

  I followed his glance down to an errant smear of whipped cream on my pants leg and laughed sheepishly. “I made forty bucks.”

  “Not bad for one tooth. I’ll have to try it.” Rocky grinned. “Come on, I’m parked close by. You look ready to drop.”

  In the car, we stayed silent for a while. I listened to Rocky’s retro-punk playlist and spot-cleaned my pants with a bottle of fizzy water. But as we drove farther away from campus and out toward the suburban and exurban sprawl, he turned the music down.

  “So where are you from, Mackenzie?”

  “The Chicago area. People call me Mac.”

  “Like the computer.” He twisted his mouth ruefully. “I know, I’m one to talk.”

  “Where’d you get your nickname?” I already felt so comfortable with him. At Urbana College, I was never the kind of student who fraternized with professors or friended them on social media, but Rocky was different. He seemed more like one of us than a professor.

  “In America, nobody really likes saying foreign names.” He scratched his nose. “I was born in Ukraine and came to the States for college. Everybody expected me to be really good at fútbol because I was an international student, but I was terrible.”

  “So . . . Rocky?”

  “Pyotr means ‘rock,’ more or less. Someone thought they were very clever.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “Maybe it was a comment on my passes, as well. I never asked.”

  “I didn’t pick mine either.”

  “I was just happy to have an English-sounding name. When you’re shy like me, every little bit helps. Besides . . .” He flashed a grin. “I look like a Rocky, don’t I?”

  “What you don’t look is shy.” I immediately regretted it. Too flirty.

  But he smiled. “I hide it well with charm,” he said gracefully. I noticed he played up his accent for jokes. “So, what about you? What are you interested in?”

  “I’m studying—”

  “I know what you’re studying. I was on the admissions committee. I meant outside the Program.”

  I blinked. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would want to know. “Film.”

  “So why study them? Why not make them?” He sounded more eastern European with every word. “The world needs good movies more than it needs academics.”

  “And what if the academics are good?”

  “Good, bad. Doesn’t make a difference,” he said offhandedly. “It’s all garbage.”

  The wind rushed out of my lungs as if I’d been punched in the stomach. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all.”

  Rocky looked sideways at me, hands tightening momentarily on the wheel. His eyebrows furrowed for a moment, and I could have sworn I saw a flicker of pity in his black eyes. Then he looked at the road again. “That’s good. You’ll do well here.”

  He turned the music back up.

  * * *

  The “farmhouse” was a two-story glass box set high up on a hillside surrounded by trees. From the gravel drive where Rocky parked the car behind a trail of hatchbacks and sedans, I could see straight into the large front room, an atrium with walls of glass and a dizzyingly high ceiling. The back wall, in contrast with the modernist furniture and glass walls, was weathered gray shiplap hung with giant sculptural farm machinery parts, three stories high, like the side of a barn sliced off and displayed in a museum showcase. In the open-plan kitchen, tin and cast-iron appliances were set in austere concrete blocks that seemed to rise from the concrete floor on their own. A floating staircase led up past the barn wall to a balcony perched high over the main room.

  “Wow,” I said as we made our way up the drive.

  Rocky kept his eyes on the path ahead. “Impressive, isn’t it? Bethany hired a German architecture firm for the remodel.”

  I was speechless. So, the farmhouse belonged to Bethany and Rocky. On the whole drive up, he hadn’t even mentioned it.

  “She wanted it to blend in with the surroundings,” he continued. “Many of the materials were harvested from other buildings on the property.”

  “Other buildings?”

  “It’s a farm. The land was slated for development at some point, but it had been sitting there for years when Bethany bought it and restored it to its former glory. The new working farm is on the other side of the hills, over there.” He waved his hand vaguely. “There are horses. It’s all very American.”

  I gathered that Rocky didn’t care much for his wife’s project. Looking up at the walls that were all window, I said, “It must be hard to get work done in a place like that. With everyone looking in.”

  “There’s plenty of privacy in the loft. I just don’t like working.” He laughed shortly.

  “Bethany does?” I stumbled over her first name. It felt normal when discussing her with Gwen but weirdly intimate when talking to her husband.

  “I assume that’s what she uses it for.”

  Before we reached the door, Gwen emerged from the woods with two other grad students, carrying a basket and laughing. She waved. “Mac! Come join our team.”

  “Team?”

  “We’re in the middle of a scavenger hunt.” Gwen held the basket aloft. “For dinner.”

  “That’s my exit cue,” Rocky said, gesturing toward the door, a splotchy metal slab set in the glass wall. “It was lovely to get to know you, Mac. Best of luck being a good academic.” He leaned in very close, with a wry grin. “I hope your team wins.”

  “Thanks.” My face burned, but he was already walking away.

  Gwen thrust the basket into my hand. “I think your team was supposed to be dessert, but nobody’ll care if you help us with the sides.” A dozen or so ears of corn rolled and bumped around the bottom of the basket.

  “They grow corn here?”

  She gave me a look. “I presume it’s from the Food Lion. It was hidden in a well. We have to find butter next. Come look at the clue sheet, I think Connor and Letty have almost got it.”

  There was a round of quick introductions. Connor Yu was tall and gangly, wearing a multicolored scarf and just a few too many coordinated layers to be straight; Letty McMillan’s pixie cut made the tiny redhead look even tinier. Letty glanced up from the paper and frowned, pushing her green-rimmed glasses up her nose. “This part is a reference to The Anatomy of Melancholy.”

  “Letty’s a medievalist,” Connor said. “She knows her Latin.”

  Gwen flashed me a look of pride. “Show it to Mac, she’s really good at spotting patterns.”

  As I leaned over the page of clues, a warmth spread through my chest. It was almost four, and the sunlight had the emphatic strength it gets just before the slant becomes noticeable. I was finally in the right place, at the right time, surrounded by the right people, after a lifetime of having always been a little wrong.

  By the time we made it back to the glass house on the hill, the spaghetti crew was already chopping garlic while a giant pot of water came to a boil on the big black stove. Team Salad stood rinsing greens over the antique double-basin sink. The only team we had beaten back to the house was dessert, presumably still roving the grounds in search of apples and frozen pie crusts
, and I felt slightly guilty for having abandoned them. But nobody seemed to be keeping score. A small group of professors chatted on the white sectional sofa under the floating staircase, their thumbs squeaking across stemless wineglasses like a tiny orchestra of mice. I dumped the basket of corn on the kitchen island, a brick kiln topped with a huge square of teak, and Letty, Connor, Gwen, and I started shucking.

  The kitchen seemed to get louder and tinier as the evening wore on, the glass walls going opaque with steam between us and the darkening night. Tiny Letty was shucking corn opposite me, and I found my gaze drifting over her head toward the knot of professors conversing just beyond her. A pair of nearly identical white men in their mid-forties with rectangular glasses and tight-fitting sweaters (specialties: economimesis and future shock) waved their hands at each other in animated discussion. Rocky (virtual museum studies) chatted with Margaret (diasporic feminisms or the feminist diaspora, I’d seen it both ways). Alone in the corner, an ancient, white-haired Shakespearean fidgeted.

  “Where do you think she is?” Connor hissed into my ear.

  I pulled back, startled. “Who?”

  “You know who. Bethany Ladd. Do you think she donated her house just so she wouldn’t have to come? Like a Faustian bargain? After all, she’s the reason most of us are even here.”

  I glanced at Gwen, who was the reason I was here. She was tugging husks off corncobs on the opposite corner of the kitchen island. I shrugged. “Maybe she’s busy.”

  “Drinking the blood of virgins, you mean?”

  “If that’s what she drinks, it’s no wonder she’s not hanging around here.” I was rewarded with a chuckle.

  “Who’s going to sleep with whom?” Connor whispered. “Point your corn.”

  I let the tip of my corncob drift more or less at random to the right, where it settled on Arjun, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, currently whipping vinegar and oil together with screeching fork tines.

  “So far, I approve.” Connor pretended to be absorbed in the strands of silk clinging to his cob. “And . . . ?”

  Morgan, a swanlike hipster with a waterfall of blue hair.

  Connor squinted. “Darwinian. I like it.”

  “Your turn.”

  Connor flattened a thin strip of green corn husk on the counter, placing one fingertip right in the center. Then he rotated it like the hand of a clock until the frayed end pointed diagonally across the table at Gwen.

  I gasped, giggled nervously. “And . . . ?”

  Keeping his pointer finger firmly in place, Connor scooched the compass needle counterclockwise.

  “Little Miss Latin?” Anything seemed possible in this world.

  “Not Letty, dummy.”

  I looked past Letty and flushed so hard it felt like opening an oven door. There was a pause.

  “Come on, he’s hot, right? You drove up with him—​don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”

  I shucked furiously. “I didn’t know professors were in the game.”

  “Everyone’s in the game, hon,” he said with a grim laugh. “Even me.”

  A few minutes and a lot of kitchen bustle later, we perched on barstools balancing loaded plates on our knees. A knife clinked insistently against a glass, and a flutter of earth tones drifted toward the center of the room. Margaret Moss-Jones, flushed with wine, stood in the center of the white fur rug, backlit by antique lanterns hanging from the high ceiling. The professors fell silent around her.

  “As department chair, it is my gracious duty every year to welcome a new group of scholars to the Program. Every year, in every market, graduates from this Program continue to fill tenure-track positions in emerging studies departments at top-tier Research I universities. That is because we do not tolerate anything less than the best from our students. Not all are well-suited for the level of academic rigor they will find here. On average, by the end of the first year, thirty percent—​four of you, rounding up—​will drop out of the Program. If you wish to avoid this fate, you would do well to find allies among your colleagues.” She waved her glass vaguely. “And that includes faculty. You’re graduate students, not undergrads. We are your colleagues now. And now, without further ado—”

  A blast of cool air in the kitchen announced a late arrival. I whirled, expecting Bethany Ladd, but it was Tess, the only black first-year in the Program, and Soo-jeong, a Korean international student. Each carried a shopping bag with “Minty’s Bakery” printed on the side.

  “Team Dessert,” Connor murmured.

  Margaret looked flustered, as if she had just remembered their existence. “Tess and Soo-jeong! I hope you don’t mind us starting without you. You’ll want to get started chopping apples for that pie.”

  “No need.” Tess set her bag on the counter and pulled out a bakery box. “Sorry it took so long. It was kind of a hike driving all the way into town and back.”

  “You were supposed to—”

  “Use our resources. That’s what I did.” Tess smiled. “Minty’s is where I got my wedding cake. They make the best apple pie in town, and I know the owners, so I get a mean discount.” She put up one hand, as if staving off objections. “Trust me, it’s for the best. I don’t bake.”

  Soo-jeong said, “Me neither.” She had evidently been eating a slice in the car.

  Tess poured herself a glass of wine and sat down next to the Shakespearean.

  “Well,” Margaret said, her expression unreadable. “Looks like dinner is served.”

  * * *

  After dinner Lorraine, the department secretary, crouched over the fire pit with lighter fluid for an hour, while the smokers—​students and professors now freely intermingling—​leaned together tipsily under the awning. I wandered a little apart from the group, admiring the house, until Gwen appeared at my elbow. She bumped me with her shoulder, and I bumped her back. We drifted down the path that wrapped around the rear of the house, and for a moment it felt like we were strolling the Riverwalk again, arm in arm on a coffee-buzzed night, under stars like icy flowers.

  Gwen broke the silence first. “So, what do you think of all this?”

  I thought it was a place where gracelessness could not survive, where ugliness would be redeemed by the study of ugliness, and where those who studied it would be lit from within by fires of intellect and passion.

  “It’s okay,” I said carefully.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Feels more like summer camp than grad school to me.”

  I shrugged. I’d never been to summer camp.

  “Scavenger hunts and bonfires are fun, I guess, but I’m here to learn. I want to be talking to the professors about ideas. Not doing trust falls into their arms.”

  So, there had been a trust fall. I quashed the impulse to reply with a winking Connor-ism about it. Earlier, I’d seen Rocky reach out from the smokers’ circle to tap drunkenly at the shoulder of Gwen’s pea coat as she walked by, and they’d had a long conversation. She’d even accepted a cigarette, as she sometimes did after a few drinks. “Weren’t you talking ideas with Rocky back there?”

  She looked amused. “Poor Rocky. He really does look like a raccoon, doesn’t he? With those big circles around his eyes. I was trying to pick up some clues from him about working with Bethany.”

  I’d had him all to myself for an hour in the car, and the thought hadn’t even occurred to me. “I tried to register for her class, but the website wouldn’t let me.”

  “He said you have to submit an essay. Like an audition.”

  “A personal essay?”

  “An impersonal essay.” She scrunched up her forehead. “I tried to get Rocky to tell me what that means, but he wasn’t very cooperative.”

  “He doesn’t seem to like talking about her very much.”

  “I guess not.” Gwen grabbed my forearm. “Just promise me you’ll at least try to get into her class.”

  “Of course.”

  Gwen slipped her fingers into the crook of my elbow, and we walked like that for a while, the
sounds from the house growing quieter behind us as we continued down the trail. “I’m so glad you’re here, Mac,” she said in a low voice, and I realized she was a little drunk. “It would be awful without you.”

  I imagined an alternate universe in which I hadn’t gotten into the Program. I probably would have stayed in Wheatsville forever. “I’m glad I’m here, too.” Gwen’s presence didn’t seem to be in question.

  A burst of drunken singing came from the direction of the bonfire, which had evidently roared to life at last. We turned and walked back around the hill, following the trail of sparks vaulting skyward like fast-dying stars.

  4

  For the next three days, I labored over my impersonal essay. I saw it as a chance to redeem myself for my ignorance about Bethany and prove, to myself more than anyone, that I belonged.

  The topic stymied me, though. What was an impersonal essay? How could I articulate why I deserved to be in the class without referring to myself? I picked up Ethical Negation again, hoping for guidance, and found only Bethany’s repeated assertion that there could be no ethical selfhood, only the negation of selfhood.

  Finally, at 1 a.m. the night before the deadline, I began writing.

  I was born Mackenzie Claire Woods in Wheatsville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago with a historic downtown and an ice rink in the shopping mall . . .

  I wrote about the pageants, how I won them and why I stopped. It was both simple and cathartic to tell the story of a girl who had so thoroughly disappeared. As I wrote it, I felt myself wondering what happened to the Little Miss Sweetness Upper Midwest Division in the pictures, the way you wonder about someone who moved away abruptly, before you ever learned her last name. Probably she’d grown up poised and graceful in a modest house with enough money and a father who’d stayed. Maybe she’d studied broadcast journalism in college and then quit the local news to become a housewife. Wherever she was, I imagined she was very happy. She’d never lost.

  I attached a few pageant photos and sent the whole thing to the email address Gwen had given me for submissions.