This chapter could again be seen as a callback to similar stories in A Reputation and Sylvan Courtyard. Forgive me, but I love this particular trope, and needed to get Alistaire's take on it. It is strange that I like this theme so much, given that I never had a hot professor of any description in college. Maybe I just feel like I missed out there. Regardless, let's not get hung up on whether this would actually happen, especially this way. I like to keep things just ridiculously plausible, remember?
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The One With The Academic Difficulties
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My sophomore year began placidly, if any of my life can be described as placid. Let's just say, I continued to crush classes, even though I once again had squeezed in an extra class I just could not resist.
What?
Yes, I have time for extra classes. I have time to do well in extra classes.
Usually.
No, my sex life had not taken some kind of hit. All was going well there too, though I'd hardly describe my activities in that arena as placid...
I just found that I was... prep school had almost over-prepared me for college, okay? This was a good thing because I don't know what I'd have done if I'd had to spend a lot more time on homework.
I even had time to keep up my workout regimen.
Saturday morning, after a run and a brief arm day in the gym, I was walking across campus back toward my dorm. I should have been running that stretch as a cooldown, but I was granting myself a lazy. I had pushed the arms harder than I had planned anyway.
My phone rang. Not a notification, but the voice call app actually rang. I hauled it out of my pocket and answered, "Hi, Mom!"
"Hello, Darling!"
I had not even looked at the caller ID screen. In all the time I had had a phone, I had pretty much never received a voice call from anyone other than my mother. Except for the one call about Alumni Day, and that critical call I got back in high school from Bridget, when we were both so unbearably sad because we were fighting and I had not shown up to go running with her because of said fighting. That call had ended up making me the happiest I'd ever been, so overall I was in favor of phone calls. But no one makes them anymore. Even my father doesn't call me. He texts me and tells me to call him, when I get the chance.
"What's up, Mom?" I asked.
Mostly, what was up seemed to be nothing, which was a little odd. Mom is, well, a mom and all, but she isn't the kind to call out of the blue, just to hear her baby boy's voice. She doesn't make extraneous phone calls to anyone, really. Our conversations do often become unnecessarily long once we actually do get on the phone, but I enjoy that as much as she.
As far as I could make out, Mom was enduring one of her continuing frets about my break-up with Liz, now almost a year gone by. I had sensed for a while now that she had never approved of the relationship to begin with, but always tried to hide it well. By this point, Mom was being an awesome mom and resisting the urge to say, 'I told you so.'
Back when I had first told them about it, Dad had basically just said, "See? This is what I was talking about." He was referring to his discussion of being a serial monogamist and not liking himself for it until he met Mom and got rid of the serial part.
But the initial Liz discussion had spread out over a few days until I made the mistake of mentioning Ronnie and Hannah to my mom one time too many. My dad would have caught on about them much earlier, but while my mom is sharp as a tack, she is not the skilled interrogator my dad is. But she did suddenly figure out where my thoughts were in the weeks after Liz and I parted.
"Oh! I think I see," Mom said with a terrifyingly delighted tone. "I guess you have decided to go back to your normal kind of friendships then?"
"Normal?" I asked. I am not normal. I mean, I feel pretty normal. But the evidence is pretty strong that I am not normal.
"Normal for you," Mom snorted, "or for me, way back when."
Oh, God...
But she had mostly dropped the Liz issue by now, and just as I thought that was what the call was about, she dropped it again as essentially unimportant. In fact, her focus included a minimum of her asking about my current sexual partners, meaning I had to do a minimum of horrified evasion. Minimum, not none, but still... When my mom makes things easy, I get suspicious.
"Speaking of friends," Mom said, shifting gears quickly away from a subject that was absolutely embarrassing me, "I've managed to make a new one myself."
I was wary.
Why was she changing the subject to herself? Mom could have spent ten minutes torturing me with stories of some guy or other from back in college whom I had never met, or worse, whom I
had
met. She might have talked about how they had had a similar situation to me and Hannah or Ronnie... or Gina. She might have played the Becca card, God forbid. But when she let go of all those layup opportunities, my radar went to, if anything, higher alert.
But no, turns out she just wanted to talk about this lady about her age who went to the same spin class with her. I kept worrying that Mom was about to humiliate me by saying something like this woman looked the same as Sloane. Or worse, she was going to suggest that I should freaking meet this woman next time I came home on break...
Again, no. She just kept going on about the two of them and how they met, being the oldest two in the spin class, bonding over rom-coms, etc.
Eventually, I got impatient with this meandering conversation. I love talking to Mom, but there was something off. I mean, at least she didn't seem to be trying to set me up with her friend after all, but waiting for the other shoe to drop was wearing on me. "Well, I am glad you are making new friends, little girl," I said, taking the extreme risk of teasing my mother, "but you are telling me an awful lot about a woman that I'll never meet."
"Give me this, kiddo," Mom said in a suddenly gruff voice. "You will learn eventually that you don't make actual new friends very easily when you get older. I haven't met anyone new that I genuinely like outside of work in the last five years. I used to be really good at it, to be honest, but that same skill makes it seem even harder for me now."
"Why?" I asked disastrously.
"Well, I'm not interested in sleeping with anybody new now, am I?"
"Mom!" I yelped, almost dropping my phone.
"Make all the friends you can now, Alistaire," Mom said seriously. "Of whatever sort. The friends of your youth are a fossil resource. They will last forever if you conserve them, but they are finite."
I could not tell she was giving me sage life advice, or if my mother,
my mother
, was just gaily suggesting that I go forth and fuck as many cool girls as I could find. The hell of it was, I suspected that the answer was both.
"So anyway," Mom went on as if I had not interrupted her tale. "Just this last Thursday, we went out for wine after our workout. She is divorced and your father was doing some judicial conference in Jackson that I did not have the time to follow along on, so my friend and I had time to go drink too many Sauvignon Blancs."
That was also unlike Mom. She likes good wine, why I don't know, but I got my absence of love for drunken binging from her.
"So we finally got around to talking about our kids for the first time," Mom blathered on. "She has daughters, Alistaire..." Oh shit. Here it comes. I did not need my mom pimping me out to random girls back home.
On the other hand, maybe these random girls were hot...
"In fact," Mom went on, far too merrily all of a sudden, "she has
twin
daughters. And they are your age!"
Oh.
Shit.
