Chapter 11

P R E S E N T

THEA

Thea May Cunning Age: 23

Height: 5’9 ½

Race: African American Undergraduates: Princeton Family:

Mother: Margaret “The Shark” Cunning.

Sister: High School student “What the hell?” I exclaimed, as I walked into class and saw my information written on the board. I could tell by the handwriting that this was Levi’s doing.

I’m going to kill him the moment he walks through the doors. I promised myself.

“He can’t do this, that’s my personal information,” I protested.

“Actually he can,” Atticus said as he leaned in behind me. “Or did you not read the paper he had us all sign our names on, on the first day of class?”

“What?”

“Wow,” he shook his head at me, showing me a photo of the document on his phone. “I always have a copy of everything I sign my name on. The last line says…”

“I hereby allow Professor Black to use any and all information given to him by myself, for teaching purposes,” I finished reading.

I hadn’t been paying attention that day because I was just getting over the shock of finding out I had slept with my professor for an entire week, and now, it seemed that it had come back to bite me in the ass.

“And you want to be a lawyer,” Atticus said disapprovingly. “My guess is that he got that information from your initial application. Good thing you didn’t put your weight down, aye?”

I had written my weight down on the application… fortunately for me, he opted to not include that modicum of information.

Ignoring him, I turned back to the board, wondering how the hell he could possibly use this information, and what lesson he planned to teach us with this.

“Good, you’re all here,” Levi said, making an entrance.

He looked stunning, dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a white button down shirt, and a vest in place of his usual jacket… and to make matters worse, he had those glasses on again.

He’s trying to kill me.

“Thea May Cunning,” he said aloud.

I sat up in my seat, staring at him with all the fury I could muster, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the rest of the students. “As most of you may have already heard, every year I choose one person to personally mold. And right now, Thea May Cunning is at the top of the list.

“So, what does that mean for the rest of you? It means that she is now the new public enemy number one. Everything on that board is what you’ll need to know about her, to kick her off the top of the list. Her name will remain on the board until someone displaces her. And consider yourselves lucky, because the first person who gets their name on my board, never stays up there for long.”

I now understood what it felt like to be a gazelle surrounded by a coalition of cheetahs. I could almost sense their salivary glands awakening.

Levi Black, you are such a fucking sadist.

“Do you hear that? It’s the sounds of people sharpening their knives,” Atticus whispered from behind me and I fought the urge to turn around and slap him with my notebook.

He was so damn annoying.

“Are you alright with this, Ms. Cunning?” El Diablo asked.

“No. But I accept that it must be done,” I said with confidence, even though I felt like a mouse in a snake pit.

What else could I do?

“Professor? When you say Margaret “The Shark” Cunning. Do you mean The Shark?” A guy in the front row asked.

“Off with his head!” Atticus whispered behind me.

“Get out,” Levi said to the guy up in the front row. “And let him be a lesson to you all; I do believe there are such things as stupid questions.”

“I want to defend my seat!” he objected.

I sunk into my chair, bracing myself for the horror show that was about to begin. Levi was going to eat him alive.

“You want to defend the fact that you didn’t understand what quotation marks meant?”

Atticus snorted behind me, trying his best to contain his laughter. The guy, paused, thought about his defense, drew in a deep breath and suddenly deflated. He lingered for a second before grabbing the rest of his things and leaving.

As the door slammed shut, Levi turned to face us. “Fifteen left. Three of you aren’t going to make it. I wonder who you are,” he said with no emotion whatsoever. “Now, let’s get started.”

The moment the words were out his mouth, it was as though someone had rung the bell at a heavy weight fight. Everyone tensed, sitting on the edge of their seats. But for some reason, seeing my mother’s name on the board gave me a sense of security.

“What do you know about Margaret Cunning?” he asked.

This? Her? She was the topic of today’s class?

“She was a total bad ass!” someone yelled, and Levi shot him a look that cut him down a few inches and reduced him to something bite size.

“That she was, but can anyone use big boy words, and explain why?” Levi asked as he looked around the class.

“While at the DA’s office, her first major case was Ayala Petroleum vs. the citizens of Blake. She was able to criminally charge Ayala Petroleum with over a dozen counts of manslaughter charges, resulting from their dumping of toxic waste into the Blake local river, and she won a class action suit, rendering the company bankrupt. She’s my hero.” Ms. Vega, the girl that Professor Black had called in regards to the Archibald case, said.

“After leaving the DA’s office, she started her own firm, where she successfully defended the likes of Nol van der Stoep, the Danish Ambassador, and the novelist Zinachidi Okoli,” Atticus added.

I had been jumping through hoops and bending myself over backwards for him, and all I asked him to do was to never bring up my mother again… And he couldn’t even respect me enough to do that. He couldn’t just let it go. According to our syllabus, we shouldn’t have covered any material that pertained to her until the end of the term. So he was doing this just to get under my fucking skin… and it was working.

Watching him talk, I wanted to storm to the front of the class, and scream all manners of obscenities into his face. Didn’t he get it? There were some lines you just didn’t cross.

“Anything to add, Ms. Cunning?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “I’m biased beyond measure.”

“You cannot be biased with facts,” he stated.

He was deliberately pushing me, and I was about to snap.

“When she was—” I paused, taking a deep breath I continued. I wouldn’t let him win. “She was offered the position of a Supreme Court Justice, but due to her deteriorating health, she was forced to decline.”

I sat up on the edge of my chair, waiting, praying that class would end. My leg bounced with anxiety, but it was nothing compared to the feeling of having you heart crawl up your throat. I could feel my eyes burning, but I refused to cry here. Finally he looked up at the time.

“Alright for next class—”

I was gone before he finished. I ran out of there as fast as I could, trying my best to breathe, but everything hurt.

Breathe, Thea. Breathe.

I leaned against the bathroom wall with my hands on my knees.

“Thea?”

No, please, no.

“This is the girls’ bathroom, get out,” I yelled at him.

“This is the guys’ bathroom,” he replied, and I looked around to find myself standing between two urinals…

“Of course it is,” I remarked bitterly.

“Thea.”

“Stop saying my name!”

His green eyes widened as he took a step back.

“Stop saying my name like you know me. You don’t, Levi. It was over a month ago, and that girl is not me. So stop saying my name.”

“I don’t believe that.” he said, as he leaned against the door.

“I don’t care what you believe!” I shouted at him.

“Talk to me Thea, what’s wrong with you?”

The world was shaking, or maybe it was just me. I didn’t know anymore, and I didn’t care.

“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?!” I shouted hysterically, “What the fuck is wrong with you? I told you that you were never to bring her up again, and what do you go and do? You make her the class’ main discussion and to top it all off, you deliberately antagonized me to provoke a reaction! You’re so busy talking a million words per second, you don’t listen!”

Digging into my bag, I pulled out the napkin and threw it at him. The crumpled paper lay at his feet with the words free rant peeking out.

“Margaret “The Shark” Cunning,” I spat, “the woman everybody always praises, as if she were some sort of saint, was a conniving, manipulative, vengeful and bitter woman. She let my father go to jail for a crime he didn’t commit, while she ran off with her lover, my darling stepfather, who by the way, took great pleasure in molesting me when I was twelve. And when I told The Shark about it, she sent me off to live with my grandmother. I wet the bed for a year before I worked up the courage to tell my grandmother what had happened. By the time we went back for my sister, it was too late, he had already gotten to her and from what my mother told us, he was long gone. I suppose she must have seen it with her own eyes that time.

“My grandmother took us in, and I didn’t have to see her face again, until I got a call from her doctor. All the poison and bitterness she had been bottling up had finally started to kill her. She’d pushed everyone away, and in the end, she had no one left. So against my better judgment, I came back.

“I think I was expecting some sort of an apology, but all she wanted to talk about was the fact that her life’s work had all been in vain, because she had been forced to turn down that seat within the Supreme Court.

“So excuse me Professor Black, for not wanting praise her in front of your goddamn class. She is The Shark to me, because she eats her own young.”

I ended my free rant and grabbed my things. I moved towards the door, and he stepped aside without saying a word. I didn’t think about where I was going, I just ran. I ran from him, I ran from her, and I ran from the law.

I ran all the way home and threw myself into bed, sobbing heavily. I heard a movement next to my bed and I felt Selene crawl into bed to comfort me… she didn't bother asking. She didn’t need to.

LEVI I entered the house and made it to the bathroom sink just in time. My stomach was upturned, and as the reality of the situation hit me, all I could think about were her words. They haunted me.

I spat into the sink as a wave of vertigo swarmed over me. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure how I had made it all the way to my house. Everything from the moment she ran out of the bathroom to now was a blur. I saw her fighting back her tears. Her whole body language changed, like she was being run over by a car each time someone spoke of her mother. The panic, the fear, her pain, I couldn’t just turn away from her. Reason told me not to follow her, it was too risky. I could just swing by her place later. But she was in agony, and the risk meant nothing compared to that.

Now I felt like my soul was being stoned, and the realization that I had victimized her by forcing her to endure that lecture… I retched once more. This time, nothing more than a thin thread of saliva passed my lips.

I stepped away from the sink and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. As my back pressed against the cool tile of the bathroom wall, I allowed myself to slide to the floor.

I lifted up her napkin. Of all the things I thought she would have ranted about, this was nowhere near my list.

As I sat there, lost in the painful memory of our conversation, my phone rang. Without looking at the caller ID, I answered, “This isn’t a good time.”

“Oh? Who’s over—?”

“Bethan. I’m serious.”

“What happened?” her tone changed.

I thought for a moment. “Have you ever seen a nuclear bomb go off?”

“Levi…”

“The people in the center, they don’t feel anything. One minute they’re alive, the next, they’re just ash. It’s the people who are far away that really suffer.”

“Levi, I don’t understand.”

“A bomb went off today, and it was my fault. I saw the Do Not Touch sign, and I knew that if I did, that something bad would happen, but I just wanted to know what that something was, and then the bomb went off. I never expected it to be as bad as it was…”

“I’m coming over,” she said.

“No, I’m fine.”

“No you’re not! Listen to yourself Levi, you’re talking crazy.”

“I just want to go back to that week, everything was better that week,” I said, talking more to myself than to her. “I’ll call you later. I gotta go.”

I hung up, and threw my phone away into the corner.

When you find out that someone you care about was hurt, how do you help them? How do you help them after pouring salt on their wounds?

I could admit it now; I cared about Thea. It had taken me an entire month to come this far, and I had pushed her away… maybe for good.