A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger

only to her most inner self, that it made her happy just to see him. He smiled and motioned for her to wait.
    “No one applauded my first lecture,” she said as he came up the aisle. “You’re surprisingly good.”
    “No, I’m not,” he said, tugging on his tie. “Wait a minute. Why ‘surprisingly’?”
    “Because you’re what, twenty-nine, thirty? Most people need a few years to get the hang of it. You looked like an old pro up there,” Lucy said.
    “I had a tree stump in my backyard growing up. I practiced by lecturing to squirrels.”
    “Which have notoriously short attention spans,” Lucy said.
    “Not if you talk about acorns… I’m almost thirty-two, by the way.”
    She smiled and shouldered her book bag. Louis stepped aside to let her pass in front of him, and they both walked out through the doors of the lecture hall.
    “I’m so sorry I was late,” she said. “This week turned out to be insane, and then I completely forgot until…”
    A student came up to Louis and stood nearby, waiting for her to finish. She was about twenty, evenly browned as though just back from a week in Cancún, with buoyant breasts that couldn’t be ignored. Lucy stopped talking and pretended to look for something in her book bag.
    “Professor Beauchamp?” the student said, with a distinctly Maryland accent that flattened the long “o” sound. “I just wanted to ask a quick question.”
    “I’m not really a professor yet, so it’s just Louis. What can I do for you?” Louis said, his voice rising slightly.
    Lucy waved and slipped out the front door of Wyman Hall. She started back across the quad, deciding to pick up a sandwich in the faculty cafeteria and eat it at her desk. But a minute into her walk, Louis came running up behind her.
    “I thought…” he said, panting slightly. “Maybe lunch?”
    “What did she want?”
    “Who?”
    “You know who.”
    “Oh,” Louis said, flushing. “She just wanted to know if I taught any courses she could take.”
    “Your first devoted follower.”
    “Right,” he said. “Hey, let’s go to the grill. I’m starving. I was too nervous to eat breakfast.”
    “Sorry, I can’t,” she said, running ahead, her book bag hitting her thighs for the second time that day. “I’ve got too much work. And Mat’s wallpaper is coming in today.”
    “Okay,” he yelled toward her. “Maybe some other—”
    She looked back as a student trying to catch a Frisbee ran between the two of them and hit Louis in the shoulder. But she turned away again. She didn’t want to see Louis’s face because it might confirm that she, Lucy McVie—scholar of useless information, unmarried thirty-something, failed vegetarian, pseudo-Catholic—embodied the standard by which disappointment was measured.

    HARLAN OPENS his second beer and drains half of it. He doesn’t usually drink much. He told her once that alcohol makes him feel disoriented, bringing back memories of a childhood bout with vertigo. Her worry multiplies.
    “I still need to ask you a question.”
    She nods, but he remains silent. She tries to wait as he finishes the beer, but she’s compelled to fill the void.
    “I fainted once. In high school. I was giving blood for the first time. When they brought me over to the cookie table, I slipped out of the chair and slid right underneath the feet of my trigonometry teacher.”
    She smiles at the memory, though she suddenly wonders if it ever happened. It sounds like the story of a friend or something she saw on an after-school TV special. She doesn’t like to doubt her own recollections. It makes her feel old and unsafe.
    For unknown reasons, her story brings Harlan back to the planes.
    “Have you noticed, with the planes,” he says, “how quickly the disbelief evaporates? Just a few weeks later, and now it seems ridiculous that we never anticipated this—”
    “I know,” she says, nodding.
    “Because we should have seen it coming. Why didn’t we understand the