Let Down Your Hair (9 page)

In the days that followed I avoided Andrea as much as possible. I left the house early and filled my time in the library or with Ryan, going into college only when I had supervision meetings with Fran. My path crossed Andrea’s only in the evenings, when we exchanged stilted questions about work. Neither of us mentioned Emmeline.

A week later, Ryan and I went back to the mall to pick up my new glasses. They sat lightly on my nose, like a friendly butterfly. Ryan loved them, and his compliments buoyed me up as I made my way back to college.

Only when I stepped into the Humanities building did the buoyancy start to fade. As the elevator rose, the butterfly grew heavier and heavier, turning into a target for Andrea’s scorn. Walking down the top floor corridor, I was tempted to swap the glasses for my old pair, but I reminded myself of the lies and the letters and made myself open the door.

Andrea was sitting at her desk, looking through a folder.

“Hi, Andrea,” I said, walking to my desk with a forced, jerky nonchalance. “What are you working on?”

“Organising next month’s conference on ‘Women In Fiction’.” I could feel her eyes raking my face. “You’ve been busy too, I see.”

“Yes,” I said. Calm, matter-of-fact. “I picked up the new glasses I bought last week. With the gift card my mother gave me for my birthday.” I put a slight emphasis on the word “mother”, and was pleased to see Andrea twitch.

“And that took all morning, did it?”

Her sarcasm pinched well-worn nerves, but I shook it off. “Yes. It did.”

“I expect you’ll be working late tonight on your proposal, then.”

Fran was expecting a revised proposal and preliminary overview of the field by next Thursday, neither of which I’d started. My shoulders wilted, and I was about to mumble assent when the second voice,
my
voice, took over.
Why are you submitting to this woman? She hid your mother
’
s mail. She lied to you and tried to control everything you saw and read! You
’
re not in high school any more, Sage.

I lifted my chin. “I think I’ll … I can decide for myself what I’m doing tonight. Thanks.” The words sounded rushed rather than cool and assertive, but at least I managed to get them out.

“I see,” said Andrea in a dry voice. “So what’s brought on this sudden rudeness?”

Several replies competed in my head, but I picked the most inflammatory one and threw it at her. “I’m tired of being oppressed.”

A flash of outrage lit Andrea’s face. “
Oppressed?
By
me
, you mean?”

I quaked, but stood my ground.

“Don’t make me laugh.” Her tone was withering. “You’re educated, Western and white, and you grew up in a comfortable, middle-class home free of sexism. You’re one of the most privileged women on this earth, thanks to me. That you have the gall to suggest that I was
oppressing
you is one of the most naïve and hurtful things I’ve ever heard.”

The assertive new Sage crumpled as her own bomb blew up in her face. I felt like a petulant child, pouting at the hand that fed her.

Is that what I am?
Shaky and depleted, I tried to regroup. “I have a mother who wants to be in touch with me, and you hid her from me.”

“You think you’d have been better off with a single teenage fashion model?
She
left
you
.” Andrea slammed her folder on the desk, marched over to me and stood, arms folded. “You never answered my earlier question, Sage. Where’s all this coming from?”

I bowed my head, refusing to look at her.

“Something you learned at the
library
, is it?”

My head jerked up as if she’d yanked my hair. “The library?”

Andrea’s expression was knowing, icy. “The place where you spend most of your time, despite getting no work done on your thesis. The place which seems to leave a nasty rash around your mouth.”

My bones turned to water. She knew. She
knew
.

“So where did you meet this man, Sage?”

“I … He … he was the model at my life drawing class.”

She looked appalled. “The one
exposing himself
under the skylight?”

“He wasn’t exposing himself!” I shouted, hot and cold with shame. “He didn’t know anyone outside the class could see him, he was—”

“And is he, by any chance, the person who said I’ve been oppressing you?”

I wanted to deny this, to hurl Andrea’s assumptions back in her face, but my voice failed. Because it
was
Ryan who’d said it first.

Andrea’s lips curled. “I see. So as well as trying to sabotage your PhD, he’s—”

“
Sabotage my PhD?
” This was beyond outrageous. “Ryan’s never tried to sabotage my PhD. He supports me.”

“Oh, so monopolising your time when you’re being paid to work on your doctoral research is
supporting
you, is it? Does he know it’s in Women’s Studies?”

“
Yes
. And it doesn’t bother him. He respects feminism.”

“He does, does he?” Her scorn would have melted steel. “That would explain why he took you to get a makeover.”

“
M
akeover?”
The idea was laughable. “We went shopping.
Once.
To spend the gift card from my mother that
you
didn’t pass on to me. It was
me
who chose to spend it on new glasses, not him.”

“So did he choose the frames, or you?” Andrea said with a wintry smile.

I hesitated. “Well, he did, but—”

She made a sound between a laugh and a snort, as if to rest her case. I shoved my chair back and stood, fists clenched with frustration. “You haven’t even met him!”

She ambled back to her desk and picked up her folder. “No,” she said, “because you’ve never mentioned him before. Telling, that.”

“What do you mean,
telling?
”

Andrea took out an itinerary and studied it, her chilly calm restored. “So far, I know that Ryan is an exhibitionist who’s threatened by your PhD in Women’s Studies, grooming you as eye candy and accusing
me
of oppressing
you
.”

“
Exhibitionist?
”

“If I were you,” continued Andrea as if I hadn’t spoken, “I wouldn’t mention him to my feminist grandmother either. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, replacing the itinerary and picking up her keys, “I have a lecture to give on Gender Politics.”

The door closed behind her. I wanted to kick her laptop through the window and take to her filing cabinets with an axe, but I made myself sit at my desk and breathe deeply. The angry fog receded, leaving Andrea’s accusations in plain sight.

I tackled them one by one. Ryan hadn’t been “exposing himself”, that was just ridiculous. And I was pretty sure Women’s Studies didn’t faze him. But he
had
picked out my glasses. And accused me of pursuing a career for which I had no passion. Maybe he was ashamed of how I looked, and intimidated by my PhD. Maybe he was plotting to make me quit my course and remake me as a vapid bimbo.

Was that likely? I sifted through the memories from my month of knowing Ryan. The kind, thoughtful way he’d listened to my story. His clever, quirky T-shirts and hatred of the mainstream. How he’d missed two lectures to comfort me, and promised to help me find my mother. Ryan wasn’t the person trying to crush and control me. It was Andrea, undermining my trust in my boyfriend because she sensed he was helping me outgrow her.

The angry fog returned. I stomped over to Andrea’s desk and punched Ryan’s number into her phone.

“Hey, sagacious girl. What’s up?”

“Andrea’s on a conference over the semester break.” I consulted the detailed schedule on her wall and stabbed my finger at the block labeled
Mid-Semester
Conference
. “Remember how you said you could hack her computer and break into her filing cabinet?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Her flight leaves at five on the 30th. I’m booking you in.”

The ground floor of the Humanities building was shiny with wet footprints. Outside, the sky was so dark it looked like dusk instead of late afternoon. A skewer of lightning pierced the foyer, splashing silver over me and the squashy vinyl couch where I sat.

The clock above the elevators read 4:56. Andrea’s flight was leaving in four minutes, and she wouldn’t be back until the middle of next week. Ryan and I would have five clear days to ransack the office and house for information on Emmeline. Since the day I got my glasses, sharing Andrea’s house and office had felt like living in a war zone. I’d expected relief when she left for her conference, but I still felt shivery and sick.

A second skewer of lightning lit up Ryan, climbing the steps under a giant umbrella printed with koi fish. I leapt up to open the door as he closed his umbrella. He was dressed all in black and his lips tasted of rain.

“Who is it today?” I said, looking down at his T-shirt. A cloaked man with lank hair and a sullen, hook-nosed face was printed on the front.

“Severus Snape. Anti-hero of the Harry Potter series.”

I let this pass, too jittery to ask him to explain the connection to princes.

Ryan stabbed the button for the elevator with the point of his umbrella. The silver doors slid open and we stepped inside. Heart pounding with guilt, I pressed the button for the top floor.

The offices were silent behind their gold nameplates. On the Friday before semester break, even senior academics left early to sip wine at the Staff Club. I unlocked Andrea’s office door and Ryan walked in.

“Check out the
view!
” He grabbed the ledge and stared spellbound through the rain-spattered window. “Hey, is that the skylight where you saw me?”

I nodded, struck silent by the enormity of what I was doing. Bringing Ryan here was worse than a betrayal of Andrea, it was a violation. And I was about to violate her further.

“So where do you want to start?” he said, plonking himself on Andrea’s leather chair with an irreverence that made me wince.

For a moment I wanted to drop the whole thing, go back to his place, spend the next five nights in his arms. But then what? Could I go on with my PhD, and forget about the mother Andrea had kept away from me? Let Emmeline keep writing letters I’d never get to see?
I know why you never answer,
she’d written,
and I know that it
’
s totally my fault, but it still hurts
.

My jaw turned to granite. “Start with the filing cabinet,” I said.

Ryan trundled Andrea’s chair over to the filing cabinet and laid out a selection of paperclips, small keys, bent nails and other implements, like a surgeon about to perform a cesarean section—breaking open my grandmother to pull my mother out.

“Have you done a search online for Emmeline Rampion?” he said, picking up a paperclip.

“Lots of times.” 

“No luck?”

“None,” I said, turning on my computer. “But I haven’t tried ‘Emmeline Virtanen’. Or ‘Emmeline fashion model’.”

“Excellent. Try those. You track, I’ll crack. And then hack.”

“Virtanen” turned out to be the Finnish equivalent of “Smith”, and there were no Virtanens called Emmeline. There were models called Emmeline, but none of their photos looked like the slender teenage girl in the photo. Maybe she’d modeled under a psuedonym. Or had stopped modeling so long ago she didn’t have a profile online.

Ryan was working his way through his lock-picking tools, with a series of clunks and curses. After a particularly sharp clunk, I glanced over and saw him sucking his knuckles. “Are you OK?”

“Cut myself,” he said with a grimace.

His bent nail had left a crescent-shaped scar in the lock, bright gold against the dull gold of the brass. I imagined Andrea’s eyes on it and winced. “No luck, then?”

“None.” He laid the bent nail next to the other implements. “Do they have master keys at reception?”

“Not for filing cabinets. I asked.”

He pinched his chin thoughtfully. “How about a locksmith? Could you say you need to access it and Andrea forgot to leave you a key?”

I shook my head. “Not without her authorisation.”

“Bugger.” He sat in Andrea’s desk chair, clutching at his springy hair. “Find anything on your mother?”

“Nothing.”

“OK then, epic fail on the cracking and tracking. That leaves the hacking.”

He took out his cell phone and pressed the power button on Andrea’s computer. The sound of it booting up sent a quiver down my spine.
No one
 touched Andrea’s computer. Even the IT manager signed a privacy agreement before he laid a finger on her mouse. And here was Ryan, turning it on like it was a desk lanp.

“Did you install the keylogger program?” he said, consulting something on his phone. 

I nodded. The very mention of the keylogger program made me queasy. The USB Ryan had given me spent the first ten days in a sock in my bedroom before I’d dared to bring it into the office, and three days in a drawer wrapped up like a drug stash, before I mustered the courage to stick it in a port under the desk at the back of Andrea’s computer. Apparently what it did was record everything she typed, including the passwords to her email accounts. 

“You’re
sure
she won’t be able to tell?”

“Positive.” A few minutes later, Ryan announced “I’m in!”

My heart leaped into my mouth. He did a search for “Emmeline”, and results flooded onto the screen.

He clicked on a random document. “Emmeline Pankhurst! Might your mother have married a Mr. Pankhurst?”

I shook my head. “Emmeline Pankhurst was the first suffragette. Andrea named my mother after her. Try Emmeline Rampion.”

No search results returned
. 

“Damn.” He thumped the mouse pad. “Before we look for hidden files, let’s crack her email.” He went back to work.

 Unable to watch, I looked at Ryan instead. His brow was furrowed and his springy hair quivered as he tinkered and clicked, doing his illegal best to find out what he could about my mother.

Sensing my gaze, he looked up at me, and emotion swelled my throat. I took off my glasses, climbed into his lap and kissed him. A long moment later, I withdrew my lips and laid my forehead against his, our lashes touching as we blinked.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

He smiled. “You’re welcome.”

I leaned in to kiss him again and knocked something heavy to the floor with a
clunk
that made us both jump. A heavy book called
The Phallocentric Imperative
lay open on the floor. Ryan and I looked at each other and started to laugh.

“Mood killer,” said Ryan, pointing at the book with an accusing finger.

The open page had angry black notes on it in Andrea’s writing. I imagined her seeing what was going on in her office, but instead of my usual clench of fear I felt a raw and almost sacrilegious glee.

“What are you grinning about?” asked Ryan, looking amused.

My grin widened. “How Andrea would feel if she knew what was going on in her office.”

He chuckled. “It does look like it could do with a man’s touch.”

I slid into his lap until my body was pressed against the unyielding pillar of the patriarchy. “Definitely.”

My hands slid up his T-shirt. Underneath Severus Snape’s sullen face, Ryan’s heartbeat was starting to accelerate. I pulled the T-shirt off and pressed my face into his chest, breathing him in and feeling his muscles flex and shift as he unbuttoned my shirt.

“Is this authorized?” he said, reaching around to unhook my bra.

I shrugged off my shirt. “Is what authorized?”

“This!” He brandished the bra at me. “Why hasn’t Andrea burnt it yet?”

“Feminists,” I said, unbuckling his belt and pulling it, “did not actually go around burning bras.” The belt slithered through the loops on his jeans like a flat leather snake.

“
What?”
He undid the button on my pants. “My boyhood fantasies, in tatters!” He tossed the bra onto Andrea’s keyboard and lifted me to the floor, yanking off my pants with a jerk that took my shoes and socks off with them.

“There
was
one bra,” I said in soothing tones, undoing the button of his jeans. “At a protest against the Miss America pageant.” I unzipped his fly, so slowly that he shoved my hand aside and wrenched off his jeans himself.

He pulled me to him. “So,” he said, “what did they do to it? Were there flamethrowers?” His lips were half an inch from mine, and his voice was heavy and breathless.

I shook my head sadly. “They threw it in a trash can.”

“A
trash can?
” he said, sounding so outraged that I started to shake with laughter. He scooped me from the floor and plonked my naked body on the end of Andrea’s desk.

“What were you hoping for?” I said, trying to straighten my face. “Bra-less feminists, dancing around a—”

He silenced me with his tongue. The rest of my sentence dissolved in a wave of heat. On some distant plane, I heard the flutter of papers falling, but I didn’t realize it was my twisting limbs that had knocked them off the desk, until the wave of heat juddered and broke. Ryan was standing at the end of the desk, the curls on his chest shivering as he breathed heavily in and out.

Thunder rattled the window panes. I hooked my leg around Ryan’s hips to pull him in, but he resisted, looking down at me with a soft expression.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“How beautiful you are.” He ran a gentle finger along my hairline. An ache rose in the back of my throat. “What about you?”

A voice inside my head said
How much I love you
, but my lips wouldn’t say it. I made them smile, swallowing the ache, pretending to be lighthearted. “How we’ll never, ever manage to put Andrea’s desk back the way we found it.”

His smile lit the room. “And how do you feel about that?”

“Liberated.”

This time he didn’t resist when I pulled him in. The wave gathered force again, swelling and swelling until a
ding
from the elevator made it crash.

My body went rigid, but Ryan was too close to orgasm to notice. Footsteps were approaching down the corridor, accompanied by the trundle of a suitcase on wheels.

“Ryan,” I said urgently, but he was tense and panting on the brink. When keys jangled right outside the door I screamed his name again as the key plunged into the door at the same time as his final, shuddering thrust.

His limp, gasping weight pinned me to the desk. I struggled in terror, begging him to get off, get
off
, but it was too late. Andrea charged in, tore his body away from mine and blasted him in the eyes with a handbag-sized can of Mace.