The Space between Atoms 50

 Danielle stood right in front of them.

“That’s her,” Lindsey asked.  “Danielle?”

Terah wanted to run.  He was too close to this young woman, and the look on Danielle’s face revealed what he’d been trying to hide.  “What should I have done?  Stayed there to be questioned, prodded?  Accused?  I didn’t do it!  I panicked.  The terror of life was naked and raw.  I followed my instincts.  What was I supposed to do?  Life doesn’t come with instructions!  God, you’d think an education would give you some answers—it only raises more questions.  Danielle, I—“  He looked up the hill.  She was gone.

Lindsey faced him in the moonlight.  “Terah, I can guess what you’re feelin’.  You know it can’t happen.  We can help each other, though.”

He wanted to ask why she automatically discounted a relationship.  Was it their age difference?  Was she repulsed by him?  She’d only known him as a street person, not a professor.  Some of the coeds described him as “cute” and “adorable” on Rate My Professor.  True, he’d never received the coveted “hot” designation, but other young ladies saw something there.  Why could she not see him as at least a possibility?

“Tell me about Danielle,” she said.

They began to climb the hill and there was some light to the sky over it, toward the west.  “It all happened so fast, in retrospect.  As I told you I was teaching as an adjunct professor and she was in a couple of my classes.”

“I don’t know about colleges.  What’s adjunct?”

“It means you’re hired to teach a course and paid much less to do that course than a regular professor is.  Adjuncts are cheap because universities don’t have to pay benefits—no medical, retirement—they just pay a set fee per course.  They’re under no obligation to keep you beyond one semester.  If a course gets cancelled you lose your income.  It’s criminal but perfectly legal.

“Danielle was studying chemistry, as I said, and I taught courses that counted as gen ed—sorry, general education.  I knew that students sometimes fell for their instructors.  It happens so often that some editors won’t even consider fiction based on it.  Still, it’s true.  Anyway, I always refused to allow it to happen.  Danielle would come see me during office hours.  She was the only one to do so.  It was all above board.  I could tell, though, by the way she lingered after her questions were answered, that something was going on.  We wouldn’t have hooked up had my class for the next semester not been cancelled.

“I had to scramble.  A friend of mine online told me another school, fifty miles away, was looking for an adjunct the next semester.  It was for a course I’d never taught before—and which I never officially studied—but they hired me.  I was desperate.  And so were they.  I really didn’t think about Danielle that much.  You see hundreds of students as an adjunct.   You can’t be an advisor, and you can’t teach advanced-level courses, just those with large enough enrollment to justify your sorry existence.  Danielle and I hadn’t got beyond my answering questions a chemistry major might have about a religion class.

“I ran into her about a year later in a bookstore.  She bought me a coffee.  Since she’d been hired by Johnson and Johnson she had cash flow.  We were no longer in a compromising situation.  She might’ve gone Florence Nightingale or something, but the next thing I knew she’d asked me over.  Eventually, when my lease was up, I moved in.”

Lindsey turned to him.  “This story’s all about you.  Who was she?”

“I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know much about her work.  Pharmaceuticals keep very tight wraps on trade secrets.  Personally, well, she was about twenty years younger than me.  She was twenty-five by the time we hooked up.  She worked long hours.  She was from a Jewish family in Teaneck.  Her parents didn’t approve of her having me there.  I contributed to rent, of course, and did what I could to help out.  When you’re an adjunct all your time is spent looking for work.  You teach your classes, grade your papers, and search for jobs.  It’s a full-time job.”

“You’re talkin’ about you again.”

“Right.  Anyway, if you saw her back there you know what she looked like.  That was her, to a tee.  She liked conversation, but she didn’t say much.  I asked why she studied chemistry, and she told me it was because she read Frankenstein as a kid.  She was into mad scientists, and in all those early stories—Jeckyll and Hyde, Faust—the scientists were chemists.  Well, college didn’t exactly fulfill her expectations.  She once said stoichiometry was the loss of her faith.  Don’t ask—I can’t ever remember what stoichiometry is.  That’s why she took religion classes, to add a touch of mystery to life.”

Terah fell silent as they approached the ridge.  “Funny,” he said, “the more you study something the less you believe in it.  She was in love with something that didn’t exist.”

Lindsey stopped to look at him.  There was a faint light appearing in the sky behind her.  “Were you in love with her?”

He hesitated.  Even now, across a span of years and experiences without her, Wendy came to his mind.  They’d parted by phone after such an intense but chaste weekend full of romance and impossibility.  When he moved to Boston later that summer and found a bit of New England beach on which to stand, he’d stare out over the north Atlantic and think impossible thoughts.  Terah made it through college as a virgin.  Wendy had awakened something and then she’d stolen it away.  His love for her had burned too hot, like a flame that evaporates water before it even makes contact.  She’d felt his fever and had left him thrashing about in bed alone.  The pain of that separation had left a deep scar, a cavern in his very brain.  He hadn’t really been in love again.  Not until now.

He couldn’t answer Lindsey’s question.  Either a yes or a no would make him a cad.  Although it should’ve been hours yet before sunrise, there was light spilling over the top of the hill.