Page 15 of Katabasis
“Well. Can’t disappoint Professor Grimes.”
For a moment they chewed and swallowed in silence. Lembas Bread had a terrible way of sticking in your mouth. It got up in your gums and under your tongue and made you feel for hours like you’d dragged your open mouth through a sand bank. The only way to get it all out was to swish with liquor, for Lembas Bread dissolved in alcohol, but they had none. Alice wished she could dig a pinkie around her molars—but alas, not in front of Peter. To some fool part of her brain it still mattered that she didn’t look childish in front of Peter.
“It’s strange, you know.” Peter tilted his head back, eyes half-lidded. “Hearing you talk about him.”
“Who, the professor?”
It was always Professor Grimes with them. The full word and surname. Not “Grimes,” not even “Prof Grimes.” Most faculty encouraged their graduate students to address them by their first names—they were colleagues now, their relationship was different, more equal—but Professor Grimes would have recoiled in disgust if they were ever to try calling him Jacob.
“Yeah,” said Peter. “I thought you didn’t like him all that much.”
Alice prickled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I—well, nothing in particular. I just thought—I don’t know, you always seemed a bit on edge around him. Recently, I mean.”
“He’s the greatest magician alive. You’d be stupid not to be on edge.”
Peter considered this, then nodded. “I didn’t mean to imply that your—your relationship was bad. I just thought you weren’t too fond of each other. I mean—just in the last term—I suppose it wasn’t hard to notice...” He trailed off.
Alice blinked down at her hands.
Yes, things had been decidedly chilly between her and Professor Grimes in the weeks leading up to his death. Yes, he had yelled at her once or twice and she had yelled back and the rest of the department had probably noticed. Had probably talked about it when she wasn’t there. The thought of their whispers made her insides curdle with shame—and so too did Peter’s inquisitive, purportedly concerned face.
“Any private issues aside,” she said flatly, “Professor Grimes is my best shot at getting a job.”
“No, of course,” Peter said quickly. “I mean, same here.”
“Oh, please.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You’re Peter Murdoch! Aren’t they falling over themselves to hire you?”
Peter hesitated. His mouth opened slightly. Something, clearly, was on the tip of his tongue—but he wouldn’t say it, at least not to her.
Alice almost asked him what he’d meant earlier, when he said Professor Grimes was his last chance at this profession. She wished she knew what had happened. Every department in the field had a raging boner for Peter Murdoch. It was open knowledge that second-rate departments had been sniffing around trying to extend an early hire offer ever since he passed his qualifying exams. But she couldn’t think of a way to ask this that wasn’t nosy, or downright rude.
Perhaps once she might have. But that intimacy had long disappeared. And if she pressed, she knew, he would only vanish.
“Well,” he said at last, “I suppose I would have found a new advisor after the Cooke.”
Alice’s heart stuttered. “You won the Cooke?”
“I only found out last week,” he said. “They were delayed in their admissions cycle this year on account of—well, you know. The accident.”
Alice found it a bit difficult to breathe just then. Her cheeks burned, and her head felt uncomfortably light. She’d hoped, as an undergraduate, that this intense physiological reaction to jealousy might eventually go away, but as she progressed through graduate school it only grew worse. Every published paper, every conference invitation, elicited a panicked, fight-or-flight response, one that she’d never gotten good at concealing.
So it wasn’t her after all; so she’d been wrong to hope.
“Congratulations,” she said, ever so lightly, so her voice wouldn’t break. “That’s marvelous.”
“Thank you,” said Peter. “I really wasn’t sure I’d get it, but I suppose they liked my proposal after all.”
“Of course they liked it,” she said flatly.
“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to brag.”
“Of course not.”
