Faculty of Sin: The Professor (Book 1)

Gigi

The cursor blinks at me impatiently, like it's sentient and judging the fact that I've not written a single word in ten minutes.

I have rewritten the same paragraph four times, and each version is worse than the last, which feels statistically impossible and yet here we are. Outside my window, Handsforth’s quad has gone dark, the kind of November dark that swallows the lamplight before it reaches the ground. Inside, my desk lamp throws a small, stubborn circle of yellow over two hundred pages of a document that no longer looks like English to me.

Silence and Authority in the Female Gothic Novel. It’s a working title. Working, in the sense that it hasn’t worked in three weeks.

My coffee has gone cold enough that a skin has formed on top of it, which is its own kind of achievement. I drink it anyway. It tastes like punishment, which feels appropriate, given what tomorrow is.

Not tomorrow. I check the time and midnight has been and gone. The meeting with Dr Penrose is today at nine.

My phone vibrates on the desk, screen bright against the gloom of my office, if you can call a converted storage cupboard with room for one desk and a filing cabinet an office. It’s Sandy, obviously. Nobody else texts me at this hour except my mother, and my mother has learned the hard way not to.

Sandy: Are you still at your desk?

Sandy: I can see your light from the kitchen window, you know.

I look up. Across the courtyard, the postgrad building’s windows are mostly black, but ours, mine and Sandy’s shared flat two streets over, has a lamp on in the kitchen. I can just make out her silhouette at the window, phone in hand, probably still in her dressing gown.

Me: I have a meeting with Penrose at 9.

Sandy: I know. That’s why I’m awake. Moral support via text is a real thing.

Me: Is it though?

Sandy: It’s the only kind I’m offering before the sun has risen, so yes.

I laugh alone in my broom cupboard of an office, and the sound startles me a little. It has been a while.

Sandy: How bad is section three?

Me: I don’t know anymore. I’ve read it so many times the words have stopped meaning things.

Sandy: That’s called delirium, Gigi. Go to bed.

I think of my meeting with the infamous Dr Penrose and his vicious red pen and I swallow thickly. The man is renowned for tearing apart students with words sharper than any blade. I’ve seen plenty of students running from his office in tears. He is said to be vicious, cruel, and dangerously handsome. Not that the last part matters. I have worked far too hard to get to where I am to consider his looks of any importance. All I need from that man is a signature of approval.

Me: Can’t. He’ll have his red pen out and I want at least a fighting chance.

Sandy: You know he’s going to eviscerate it regardless.

Me: Thanks. Really. Where is this moral support you promised?

Sandy: I’m not being mean. I’m being realistic. There’s a difference.

Me: Is there though?

Sandy: Yes. Mean would be me saying I told you so when he actually does it. Realistic is me saying it now so you’re braced.

Me: I don’t think you can brace for Penrose. He’s like weather.

Sandy: What kind of weather?

Me: The kind that ruins a picnic by electrocuting you.

I haven’t told Sandy the full story about the last set of margin notes, the ones still sitting in my bag because I can’t quite bring myself to look at them again. It’s not the criticism itself; I can take criticism, I’ve built a career out of taking criticism and getting better because of it. It is Dr Penrose’s specific criticism that undoes me. Precise and savage. Written in a hand so controlled it looks typeset. This claim is unsupported. See me. Four words that had kept me up two nights running, wondering what exactly “see me” was going to cost.

Everyone in the department has a Penrose story. Alicia likes to imply she finds him thrilling to work with, which I suspect is mostly for effect. The version that sticks with me, the one nobody told directly but that everybody somehow knew, was about a student a few years above me. Elena. She’d been brilliant, apparently, right up until she wasn’t, right up until three years of work came apart in his office over the course of one meeting, and she left the programme a fortnight later without finishing.

Nobody could tell me what he’d actually said to her. That gets under my skin. Whatever it was, it had been quiet enough that no one else heard it, and devastating enough that she never came back to collect her things from her desk. Someone else had boxed them up for her.

I don’t think he’d do that to me. I tell myself that most nights, usually around this hour, when the doubt gets loud enough to need talking down.

Sandy: You’ve gone quiet. Are you spiralling about Elena?

Me: How do you even know about Elena?

Sandy: Everyone knows about Elena, Gigi. It’s department folklore at this point. She’s basically our Bloody Mary.

Me: That’s deeply unhelpful.

Sandy: Sorry. My point is you’re not her. You actually finish things. It’s borderline pathological.

Me: High praise.

It really is coming from Sandy. She is exceptionally talented, intelligent, and an intensely firm friend. But she has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer striking a gong. Her words are delivered bluntly and with little consideration for how they might land.

I have always found there to be something quite freeing in that. In knowing that I always receive the complete truth from her and can stake my life on the knowledge that I always will.

Sandy: Hey. You still there?

Me: Yeah. Sorry. Thinking.

Sandy: Don’t think. Sleep. You’re allowed 4 hours, you know, it’s not a moral failing.

Me: I’ll sleep when it’s signed off.

Sandy: You’ve been saying that since October.

Me: And I’ll keep saying it until it’s true.

Sandy: Fine. But if you fall asleep on your keyboard again and send him a paragraph of jjjjjjjjjjj, I’m not covering for you.

I smile down at the screen, warm despite the cold coffee and the colder office, and type back a string of jjjjjjjjj just to make her laugh, and then put the phone face down because if I keep talking to her I’m not going to finish picking apart section three, and if I don’t finish section three then I’m going to walk into his office with nothing, and that sounds like a sure fire way to be viscerally annihilated.

I turn back to the paragraph. Read it again. It is, I decide, fine. Not good. Just fine. Fine will have to survive contact with Dr Penrose’s red pen, and something tells me it won’t survive intact, but at least it exists, at least it’s an argument rather than a shrug masquerading as academic language.

I save the file. Back it up. Back up the backup, because I learned that lesson the hard way in my second year. I put my head down on my folded arms for what I tell myself will be five minutes.

When I open my eyes the light through the window has changed, grey and thin instead of black, and my neck has a crick in it that suggests I’ve been asleep for considerably longer than five minutes. I fumble for my phone. Blink at the time twice because the first reading seems impossible.

Twenty to nine.

I’m up and moving before I’ve fully processed the time, shoving my laptop into my bag along with the coat I haven’t taken off all night and the flat white I bought yesterday and never finished, cold and forgotten in its cardboard cup. I get the new and vaguely improved section three printed and gather the rest from the chaos on my desk, grabbing at pages with both hands, not stopping to check they’re in order, because Dr Anthony Penrose does not wait, and Dr Anthony Penrose does not forgive lateness, and I am, as of this exact moment, going to be exactly that.

I run.