I stepped out of the wooden cage and into . . . the office of Professor John Scott, on the UCLA campus.
“Oh Jesus,” I said out loud, and did an abrupt about-face, walking back the way I’d come.
But when I walked through the door, I found myself simply blundering into Scott’s office again. There was no sign of the prison anywhere; it was as though I’d awakened from a dream of it.
Scott was sitting right there at the desk, his ash-dusted ginger head bent, red pen in his hand, scribbling on a stack of paper. He hadn’t yet noticed me.
It was all there: the magic-hour sunlight slanting in horizontal stripes through the blinds on his west-facing windows, the smell of paper and mid-priced cologne, the clutter of his desk, the sleeves of his pastel button-down rolled up to reveal the gilded hair of his forearms. This was not a dream; it was real. It was real.
I tried again to leave the room, only to find that an exact copy of it still lay on the other side of the door. I stood in the doorway, looked back and forth between them. Identical, down to the angle of the sunlight, the soft shhhp! as Scott turned a page.
Feeling dizzy and sick, I stepped through and closed the door behind me.
“This is a dream,” I said out loud. “No matter how real it seems, this is in my mind.”
Scott looked up, his expression vague. It had always been vague. The man was as difficult to read as Caryl had been when I’d met her.
I had a type, to be sure.
“Millie,” he said. His voice was higher pitched than you’d expect from his lanky frame: a reedy tenor. “Is there something you needed?”
“You tell me,” I said. “This is my trial.”
“Right.” He exhaled, looking back at the paper. Circling something, making a note. “The trial. It wasn’t my idea.”
It was exactly what he would have said, exactly the weary, slightly amused tone he’d have used to say it. Did I remember him this clearly? How was that possible? The pitch of his voice had surprised me; I’d forgotten it. Or had I? How else would Dawnrowan know how he sounded?
“Is it really you?” I said. “It’s not, is it? I’m . . . I’m dreaming.”
“Can we get on with whatever this is?” he said. He gestured to the paper on his desk. “Once I finish this, I’ve got three more just like it.”
“I don’t know how to ‘get on with it,’ ” I said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve never done a trial like this before.”
He set down his pen with a resigned, long-suffering sigh and gestured to the chair on the other side of his desk. “If you’re staying, have a seat.”
I moved carefully toward the desk, aware of the imperfections in my stride, wondering if he’d notice. What was it about him that instantly made me desperate to impress him?
“This is a dream,” I said.
“Obviously,” he said. “But is it yours, or mine?”
The idea struck me hard; I felt a wave of vertigo.
“Do I show up in your dreams?” I said. “Did I matter that much to you?”
“You were a student of mine who killed herself. That’s going to leave a mark.”
“I don’t even know where to start with how fucked up that statement is.”
“Just get on with it, Millie, seriously. Pick a place to start and have it out. Obviously neither of us gets to leave until you do.”
“Okay, ‘killed herself’ first of all. You do know I survived, right? Did you . . . I mean you must have followed the news on it. Tell me you had at least that much human decency.”
He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, looked at me challengingly. The way he always had during office hours, the door safely open behind me. I’d desperately wished he would close it, show some sign that he valued that time with me and didn’t want it interrupted, wanted me to himself badly enough to break protocol.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“No. Answer me. Do you know that I’m still alive? Are you being your usual evasive self? Or are you refusing to answer because this isn’t real; I’m not actually in your head somehow, interacting with the real you. This is all a projection inside my own mind and nothing more. And so you can’t answer what I don’t know the answer to.”
He held my eyes for a moment, and then looked away as though in surrender. God, the way that had always felt like a victory, back then. Now it was nothing but a reminder of the many ways I’d misread him.
“I know that you survived,” he said. “I didn’t go seeking out the news, but everyone was talking about it. People asked me about it. Because they knew you’d—been fixated on me. They wanted to know how I was handling it.”
“How you were—” Rage smothered me for a moment. Of course they’d all have been concerned for him. He was the wonderful John Scott. Who the fuck had I been? “You’re a piece of work, Scott. Unbe-fucking-lievable. Playing the victim after what you did to me.”
“I didn’t push you off that goddamned ledge, Millie. And even so, you could have taken my career with you.”
“Oh, right. Like that’s ever how it works.”
“That is very often how it works, Millie. There were people who took your side. Took your side on principle, because you were the student, and female, and I was a man in power. Yes, don’t look so fucking surprised. People did defend you. Just . . . no one who’d ever met you. What does that tell you?”
I sat back in my chair as though he’d fired a cannon at my chest. It took me a moment to find my train of thought again. The other thing that had bothered me about his original answer.
“You called me ‘one of your students.’ As though there was absolutely nothing between us other than that. Does that mean you’re still pretending we didn’t fuck, or does that mean you fucked so many of your students that I don’t even fucking stand out?”
He spread out his hands on the desk, almost as though he intended to push himself to a stand, but he remained seated. “You weren’t the first, Millie, but it wasn’t something I exactly made a habit of.”
“I wasn’t the first? That sounds like a habit to me.”
“It happened once before, just once. But it was a different situation, and she was able to keep her goddamned mouth shut about it, and after my egregious misjudgment of you it won’t happen again.”
The instant gut-wrenching regret I felt was interrupted only by a frisson of alarm.
I hadn’t known about the other student. How could he be telling me something I didn’t know? Was I making an educated guess? Or was I actually talking to some astral projection of him? Was he experiencing this same conversation somehow, in what he thought was a dream? I couldn’t decide if I found this idea comforting or horrifying.
“How did you ‘misjudge’ me?” I said, eyes stinging with unshed tears. “I don’t understand it. You initiated sex—don’t tell me you didn’t. I was there. And I was willing. And then suddenly you avoided me. Wouldn’t even speak to me. Why? That’s all I ever wanted to know, was why.”
“I really don’t think you do. It will not help you.”
“Don’t tell me what will help me.”
He rubbed his forehead, then dropped his hand back onto the desk. “You said you loved me.”
“I—what?” That I didn’t remember.
“In the middle of it all, you said you loved me. That—before that, I thought you were playing a game with me. A thrill seeker. I was a prize. I thought if I gave you what you wanted you’d settle down. But then you said you loved me, and I thought, Shit. I realized this wasn’t going to go away. That it might have ended my career. So I figured the best thing to do was end it cleanly.”
“But you didn’t end it cleanly! You didn’t even tell me it was over!”
“Honey, I’d known you long enough to know how that conversation would go. I was afraid that would send you off a roof. Crazy of me, right? I thought if I avoided you I could forestall a confrontation and you’d just . . . take the hint and move on.”
“It’s bad enough that you just pretended it never happened, in your own head. But to actually say that to other people? Make me out to be a liar? Destroy my reputation?”
“The truth would have destroyed both our reputations, and in my case it would have destroyed my career as well. Was it fair that I’d never get a decent job again because I gave in to you, gave you something you obviously wanted, pursued relentlessly, in fact? The only reason your reputation got destroyed was that you went around telling everyone.”
“I told one person, and only because I didn’t understand why you were avoiding me! I thought I could trust her!”
“You are not exactly the poster child for excellent character judgment. Anyway, we both would have been fine if you’d just kept it to yourself and moved on. If you’d treated us as though we were both adults who were present in the same room and made the same horrendous mistake.”
“Did you even care when you heard that I jumped off a roof?”
“Mostly, to be honest, I was angry.”
“God, what kind of monster are you? How can you be angry at someone who hated herself that much?”
He spread his hands, weary, his expression strained. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Millie. I’m spent. By the time you left that hospital, I’d dealt with it and moved on with my life. It was just one mistake in a life full of them, for me.”
“You destroyed me.”
“You destroyed you, but whatever, Millie. Want revenge? Here.” He pushed a gun across the desk at me. Where had that come from? Dream logic. “There you go,” he said. Against my will, I found my eyes drawn to the veins on the back of his hand; his human frailty made my pulse race.
“John . . .”
“It’s loaded,” he said. His voice was rough, but when I glanced in alarm at his eyes, they were dry. “Blow my brains out. Or shoot out my kneecaps and call it even. Just end this, please. I wish I’d never met you.”
I leaned forward, wrapped my hand around the weapon. A blue steel revolver. I shuddered.
“What you did was wrong,” I said. “It’s not debatable. Even if you didn’t know I was unstable, which I didn’t exactly hide, I was your fucking student. You shouldn’t have invited me to your apartment, no matter how ‘adult’ I was. You shouldn’t have had drinks with me. You shouldn’t have let us even get to that point. That’s on you, and you know it.”
“So shoot me.”
I’d actually never held a gun before. In a dream, it should come naturally, right? It shouldn’t have felt so heavy and awkward in my hand as I pointed it at him. If I pulled the trigger, would I get closure? Would I be allowed to leave this room?
I held the gun, held it, held it . . . then laid it back on the desk.
“The truth is,” I said slowly, “I can’t hurt you, even in a dream. I didn’t mean to, to begin with. What happened was your mistake, but knowing that doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t stop me from wishing we’d met under other circumstances. Wishing we could have . . . connected, without it being a mistake. I shouldn’t feel this way about you, but I don’t know how to stop.”
“We didn’t connect, Millie. Not the way you thought. I never came anywhere close to being in love with you. So I’ll ask what I asked when you came in, what I asked of you every damn time we met, and never got a decent answer. What is it that you want?”
I looked at the gun on the desk, briefly considered turning it on myself. Realized how futile it would be.
“At this point?” I said. “At this point I just want to forget you.”
“As I understand it, you’ve made some friends who could probably arrange that for you,” he said. “Barring that, I imagine time will do the trick.”
I stood, leaving the gun there on the desk. “Good-bye, Professor Scott,” I said. “I hope you meant what you said, about never doing that again.”
I went to the door and opened it, and this time there was something new on the other side.