FF (May 2013) Eliza Lentzski - Winter Jacket

It all started with a broken classroom heater…

Graduate school prepares you for many things – the rigor of academic life, how to pull consecutive all-nighters, and living off a meager stipend without having to be roommates with cockroaches.

Elle Graft might have made it through six years of graduate school, but she's not convinced she'll survive her first position as an Assistant Professor.

Because for all she learned, graduate school never prepared her for dealing with a student crush.

(250 pages)

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Sample

PROLOGUE

It’s funny how seemingly unconnected events can come together like a perfect storm and change the entire trajectory of one’s life. In my case, none of this would have happened if not for a broken space heater.

It was winter in the upper Midwest, and I was starting a new semester of teaching academic writing at a university where I’d been hired a few years prior. I liked the school; it was similar to the university where I’d received my own undergraduate degree not that long ago – a small, intimate, private, liberal arts teaching college. I liked teaching at these kinds of schools because the students always seemed so bright, polite, and hard working. This school was no exception. I taught the core writing class in the English Department and sections were capped at a dozen and a half students. It made for a congenial environment where you got to know the students well and they you in return. Students didn’t have the luxury of hiding in the anonymity of a large lecture hall, but that was part of the attraction of the college.

Despite the small classroom size, students could still fly under the radar if they really wanted to. Being absent from class or never making eye contact were a few ways to do so. I had a handful of students who regularly participated in each section, and during the 50-minute class period my attention was divided amongst the more active students. I certainly knew and was friendly with the other, more silent students, but not to the extent of those who eagerly and regularly participated. And if not for a broken in-room heater, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed her.

Her name was Hunter. And she was lovely.

I knew from introductions on the first day of the new semester that she was a student in the nursing program and that she’d grown up in a nearby suburb. Her name was a bit of a misnomer. I had learned years ago during grad school not to make any preconceived judgments about students based on their names, but I still found myself doing it at the beginning of each semester. Hunter could either be a male student with shaggy hair and a star on the university baseball team, or one of those undergraduate women who predictably wear UGGs every day and pink sweatpants with something equally obnoxious scrawled across their ass. The Hunter enrolled in my class, however, was neither of these people.

She was one of the more quiet students, reticent to volunteer an answer in class discussion, but I was struck by how when I did call on her, even if she didn’t have her hand raised, she was ready with a thoughtful answer and spoke in a confident, even tone that surprised me. Most undergraduates stumbled over themselves if they weren’t voluntarily participating, too nervous or too shy to put themselves out there for fear of being wrong in front of their peers. But not Hunter. It was as if she knew what question I was going to ask even before I asked it. As if she knew I was going to call on her, and was thusly prepared, even before I knew myself that I was going to ask her to participate.

But these were all things that I only took stock of after the heater in the classroom broke.

We’d been having typical Midwestern, winter weather – snowy, cold, and blustery. I was born in this part of the country, so the harsh weather was certainly no stranger. The building where I taught was one of the oldest on campus and hadn’t been updated in decades. There was no central heating or cooling in the building either, so each room was equipped with its own wall unit that controlled the temperature in each individual classroom. Unfortunately, the units were never that reliable and had the tendency to break, either leaving us to deal with the cold or suffer through excessive heat. The windows were painted shut, too, not affording the opportunity to at least regulate the temperature with outside air if the heater was on the fritz again.

On this particular winter day, we were dealing with a hot, muggy, sauna-like classroom. As soon as I walked into the small room, I was hit by the stifling heat wave. The students who had arrived early to class were already seated in the U-shaped table configuration, each stripped down to t-shirts and tank tops and fanning themselves with the homework for that day. They looked at me forlornly, their eyes collective begging that I do something. But we all knew that I was powerless to the University Physical Plant. Numerous calls and work orders to the college’s maintenance department had gone unanswered. We’d all have to suffer.

I pulled my wool jacket off and silently cursed that I’d chosen to wear a sweater that day. I could have stripped down to the tank top that I wore beneath it like all the students, but that felt unprofessional. As a junior academic, I always did my best to put on a professional front since I was only a handful of years older, and in some cases younger, than my students.

I started the lesson for that day, my face feeling flushed from the unsavory heat. But as I looked around the room, I knew that I was in good company. We were all suffering. We were all miserable together. Except for her. Except for Hunter.

While everyone else was down to their last clothing layer possible without becoming indecent, she sat in the far corner of the room, right next to the broken heater, still wearing her winter jacket. It was one of those puffy down jackets that practically reach your knees. They’re especially popular around this part of the country because of our brisk, winter winds. I remember taking note of the jacket earlier in the week because my ex-girlfriend had had the same coat. Instead of being a dripping, sweaty mess like the rest of us, Hunter looked amazingly comfortable.

The unexpected sight nearly caused me to forget what I was even lecturing about. I couldn’t fathom how she could sit in the back corner of the room, looking anything but distracted by the heat, calmly taking notes in her spiral notebook, all while wearing her heavy winter jacket. I mentally shook myself, perplexed, but didn’t put too much thought into it and continued on with the lesson.

The next day the heater still wasn’t fixed, and Hunter was still wearing her jacket. At no point during the class session did she make a move to take off her coat. And it wasn’t that she’d come to class late and needed to hustle into her seat and immediately start taking notes; she was always early to class with ample time to get settled and take off her jacket. The classroom was slightly cramped, but not so packed that there wasn’t room for her to hang up her jacket on the back of her chair like everyone else.

This persisted over the next few class periods, and as a result of this funny quirk, I took more of an interest in her. I even mentioned her and the jacket in passing to a few friends – my funny student who never took off her winter coat. I made up scenarios in my head why she couldn’t take off her jacket: she’d woken up late and hadn’t had time to put on a shirt, or it was laundry day and everything else was dirty. The scenario reminded me of a ghost story I’d heard told around the campfire when I was young. The story was about a girl who always wore a scarf, even in the summer. She was horribly taunted and teased because she refused to take it off. One day some bullies stole the scarf from her, and her head fell off. My friends and I joked, not unkindly, about what would happen to Hunter if she took off her jacket. Would her arms fall off? Did she even have arms?

Because I had started to take more of a keen interest in perpetually coat-clad Hunter, I began to notice a lot more about this usually silent student. Since it was an English composition course, my students had to do a lot of writing in class. At the beginning of a new period, I’d ask them to reflect and write on a question about a contemporary event, a memory, or something from one of the assigned readings. It wasn’t anything they had to turn in; it was simply meant to get their brains ready to actively participate in class that day.

Hunter, still in her winter jacket, seemed to take these writing prompts very seriously. She’d hunch her body over her desk, her face just inches from her notebook, and she’d scribble furiously on the page; she wrote with a purpose. I couldn’t tell if her unusual posture was to keep others from peeking at her page, but it turned into another one of her quirks that caught and kept my attention.

Because I observed how frantically her pen worked along the lined pages of her college-ruled notebook, I also noticed her hands – long, feminine, tapered fingers with short polished fingernails. Most of the time she wore a clear coat of nail polish, but sometimes she’d come to class with a dark blue polish that coincidentally matched the color of her winter jacket.

Over the span of a few class periods, Hunter transformed for me. She went from being a quiet student who would have easily slipped under the radar to something akin to an obsession. Firstly, she was beautiful – traditionally so – blonde, fair skin, tall, long-limbed, and angular. Her mouth was wide, but not unattractively so. Her facial features on their own could have been described as “too large,” but for some reason everything seemed to fit proportionately on her face.

Unlike the other undergraduates who stumbled into the morning class still in their pajamas with their hair hastily thrown in a ponytail or covered beneath a baseball cap, Hunter always came to class looking polished and put-together. It wasn’t that she dressed up (not that I could see much of her clothes with her jacket on), but even her jeans looked crisply fitted and not baggy from multiple uses without having been laundered. Her natural blonde hair was always meticulously flat-ironed and perfectly parted to one side. Even when she wore it up in a ponytail, her hair was smooth and the part was immaculate.

Day after day, as she walked in and out of the classroom, I came to appreciate the gracefulness and poise that seemed to come without much effort and how she possessed a quiet maturity beyond her years. I noticed the way her grey-blue eyes crinkled at the corners when she made small talk before class with the people who sat near her. Other students would flop into their chairs and loudly announce how hung-over they were or how much they hated a particular professor. Hunter, while still being friendly and cordial with her classmates, seemed uninterested in contributing to those kinds of conversations. She appeared content to set out her homework and get a page ready in her notebook for that day’s class.

But even more so than this grace and poise and maturity, what really drew me in was her silent intensity. In a sea of laptops and smart phones and tablets, a plethora of devices students brought to class that distracted them from the content of my class, Hunter’s eyes followed me around the classroom. I could practically feel them on me as I paced the room and talked about Thesis Statements and Quote Sandwiches. It was my Achilles’ Heel – women who make unwavering eye contact.

And damn me if I couldn’t stop wondering what she looked like beneath that puffy jacket.

CHAPTER ONE

"No need to thank me, but I found your future wife." My friend Troian threw her messenger bag onto my desk with her usual, dramatic flair.

I looked up from my grading with a bemused look. "Is that so?"

She sat down in the chair on the other side of my desk, the one usually reserved for my students. "Yup. I think she's a keeper," she confirmed with a crisp nod. Her eyes scanned around my sparsely decorated faculty office. I had been hired as an Assistant Professor nearly three years prior, but you'd never know it from the empty walls and bookshelves. The office still felt unsettled; I suppose I was superstitious – as if putting my personal mark on the space might jinx my good luck to have landed the tenure-track position.

"I appreciate the effort,” I started, not bothering to set down the paper I was grading. I had too much grading to let Troian suck me into this conversation. Finding me a “future wife” had recently become a self-appointed duty for my friend. “Cady and I haven't even been separated for three months,” I pointed out. “Isn't there supposed to be a longer grieving process before I start dating again?"

Troian waved a dismissive hand. "No offense, but you and the Cat Lady were emotionally separated long before the official break up. And for how much you used to whine about it, physically you'd both gone your separate ways a long, long time ago."

I audibly sighed. Her words weren't untrue, but that didn't make it any better.

“Also, it’s totally weird that you still hang out with her as ‘friends.’” She used air-quotes and everything. “That doesn’t seem healthy.”

“You can’t judge me about that; you’ve never had an ex-girlfriend before. Exes can totally be friends.”

“It’s weird,” Troian said, wrinkling her nose. “And Nikole agrees. Are you and Cady broken up or not?”

“We’re broken up,” I insisted. “We just hang out sometimes. And it’s not even like we talk everyday. I see you more often than I see her. So does that mean that you and I are dating?”

Troian snorted. “You wish, Bookworm.”

I tossed my pen onto the daunting stack of ungraded papers on my desk. Experience told me I'd never get anything done until Troian had had her peace. "So tell me about my future wife."

The smile on Troian's face broadened. She loved getting her way. She rubbed her hands together, looking eager. "So I don't actually know her name, but she's the new bartender at Peggy's."

Peggy's was the name of a horrible little gay bar across the train tracks that I sometimes frequented with Troian and her long-time girlfriend, Nikole. Of the pair, I had met Troian first, but I couldn't remember a time when she and her other-half hadn't been together.

"You don't know her name, but apparently she's my perfect woman?" I could feel my eyebrows lift toward the ceiling.

"Perfect for you, yes," Troian nodded. She leaned forward in the chair. "Just think of all the free beer!" she chirped.

"But you don't even drink," I pointed out. "You get all red."

Troian sighed and rolled her eyes. "Which is why she's the perfect woman for you, not me."

"So my soul mate is a beer slinger," I deadpanned. "You must really think I'm an alcoholic."

Troian shrugged, unaffected. "Well, you are from Wisconsin."

"Using that logic, my soul mate could also be a cow."

Troian wiggled her eyebrows. "You said it. Not me."

"Well as enlightening as this conversation has been, I need to get back to these papers." I picked up the discarded pen and tapped at the unwieldy pile. Spring Break was on the horizon, but I still had a stack of grading to wade through until I could mentally check out for a week.

"Is that a paper for your English comp class?" Troian asked.

"Yep."

"Have you gotten to Winter Jacket's paper yet?"

I didn't know what had possessed me to tell Troian about my quirky, yet attractive, student. I suppose it was the novelty of the situation that had compelled me. I'd never before had such an acute crush on a student. I frowned and shook my head. "Not yet. But our meeting isn't for a few days."

Students had to meet with me in my faculty office throughout the semester to discuss how the class was going and talk about whatever upcoming paper they