Love in the Time of Climate Change (32 page)

It was a sledgehammer to the cranium. A shattering of the skull with the contents of my pathetic brain spewed grotesquely on the classroom floor and no one, no one, could ever mop it up. All thoughts of a future with her annihilated, blown away,
POOF
, vaporized in an instant.

It all became crystal clear to me. I mean, what had I been thinking? That in any way, shape, or form she had ever been even remotely attracted to me? That she wanted any kind of relationship outside of the classroom? That I meant anything more to her other than a quirky, climate-obsessed, pitiful professor?

Earth to Casey: WAKE UP! Who was I fooling? This had been one cosmically cruel delusional joke at my expense. To have misinterpreted her flirtations as anything other than idle banter had been clinical insanity. What a vain, narcissistic ass I had been. I had been viewing this relationship from an absurd angle that was nothing short of madness.

What had I been thinking?
What had I been thinking?!

“I gotta run,” I whispered, barely keeping my urine in. “I've got a meeting with a student. I mean a colleague. Whatever. I'll see you next week.”

I turned my back on her and fled.

—

I came home to find Sarah and Jesse in the kitchen, cuddling
and cooking. I flung my students' lab work to the floor and crumpled along with it in a heap.

They exchanged glances.

“Let me guess,” Jesse said. “Bad day?”

“Bad? Bad? This is way beyond bad. This day made bad look good. This day was catastrophic, monumentally horrific, one for the record books. Google disaster and there'll be a picture of me in my classroom an hour and a half ago.”

“Dean on your case again?”

“God, I wish. Worse. Way worse.”

“Let me guess,” Sarah chimed in. “Something to do with her?”

“Bingo!”

“Oh no. She has a boyfriend?” Sarah asked.

“God no.”

“A girlfriend?” Jesse asked.

I ignored him. “She told me she registered for a class next semester. She's going to be a student again! At PVCC!”

“In another one of your classes?” Sarah asked.

“No. Adolescent Psychology or some shit like that. It doesn't matter. A student's a student. Christ Almighty, I'm doomed. I finally find the woman of my dreams and she doesn't even know I exist.”

“Don't be melodramatic,” Jesse said. “She knows you exist.”

“Not in the way that I want her to! To her I'm just a professor. A professor! To think, even for a moment, I ever actually thought there was anything more to it than that is absurd. I'm totally fucked. I'm destined to walk the planet, sad and lonely and forlorn for the rest of my days. Maybe the nihilists are right, maybe life has no purpose, no meaning, no nothing. This is my wake-up call, the nail in my coffin. God, maybe I'll just end it all. Jump off the French King Bridge or something.”

“You can't,” Jesse replied.

“Why the hell not?” I asked.

“You're afraid of heights.”

“All right. Then I'll stab myself with one of these knives.”

“Good luck with that,” Sarah said. “I can't even find a blade in this house sharp enough to slice this tomato.”

“God, why me? Why me? I just want a woman, like Sarah, to occasionally cook me dinner. Is that too much to ask?”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, buster,” Sarah said. “I'm pulling an evening shift tonight. I'm cooking my own damn dinner. You two fools are on your own.”

Jesse had scooted up to her and they were doing that snuggling thing again.

“There!” I cried. “That's what I want! To put my hand on the rear of the woman I love!”

“Don't go insulting my lady!” Jesse shot back. “That's an ass, not a rear!”

Sarah playfully slapped his hand away.

I put on the best pouting look I could muster. “I appreciate the support. The empathy. The kindness and open hearts and soothing words. I really do! The absolute worst day of my life, and you treat it like some silly sitcom.”

“Casey, sweetheart.” Sarah stopping scrambling eggs and came and sat down beside me, gently massaging my neck. She had taken to calling me “sweetheart” in the last week. While up until now I had found it soothing and comforting, at this moment I had the horrible sensation that she might be the only one to ever call me that.

“You are a wonderful man. We all know it. I am absolutely convinced that Samantha feels the same way. I saw how she looked at you at the march on the coal plant. We've heard your stories about what she's said to you.”

“Then why is she taking another class? Why?”

“She probably doesn't know the rules. She probably thinks that if she's not your student then it's okay to date.”

“But it isn't. I can get screwed!”

“I thought that's what you wanted?” Jesse asked.

“Stop it, Jesse!” Sarah glowered at him, making threatening gestures with a spatula. “Stir the eggs. Look, why not just take the leap and ask her out. I know she'll say yes. I know it! You'll just have to keep the whole thing a little under wraps for a few months. No one needs to know. It wouldn't be that hard to do.”

“I don't want to keep it under wraps!” I said, my voice rising an octave or two and crackling like a thirteen-year-old's. “I don't want to be scared walking down the streets of Glenfield for fear of being seen with her! I just want a normal relationship!”

Sarah turned and faced me. “I'm scared every day to walk down the streets for fear of being seen with him,” she pointed to Jesse. “And our relationship is far from normal.”

“Thank God for that!” Jesse replied, placing his hand back on her rear end and giving it a pinch. “Anyway, there's always the end of next semester. May is not that far away.”

“May? Are you kidding me?
May?
I'm not going to make it to the weekend let alone May. I'm fucked. That's it in a nutshell. I'm totally fucked.”

I turned and shuffled to my room.

“Wake me up in six months,” I called back to the two of them, collapsing onto my bed.

“W
E'RE FIRED UP
!

“We can't take it no more!

“We're fired up!

“We can't take it no more!”

The Climate Changers were totally psyched. They were huddled together out in the middle of Parking Lot B, chanting and stomping and pumping themselves up. No cold/sleet/freezing rain weather crap was going to dampen their spirits. No way, no how! We were carpooling over to the Downtown Center where the PVCC Foundation's finance committee was ready to meet with us on the Divestment from Fossil Fuel campaign.

My spirits, on the other hand, couldn't have been any damper. It had been less than a day since Samantha had dropped the “by the way I'm taking another class so DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT ASKING ME OUT EVER!” bombshell, and I was wallowing in depression.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a famous psychiatrist that Samantha was sure to study in her adolescent psychology class. While Kübler-Ross's work focused extensively on
death and dying, she elaborated in an articulate and helpful way five predictable stages of grief that people routinely go through following traumatic loss. The acronym she proposed was DABDA: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Since yesterday, I had zipped through the first three stages and was now completely immersed in the fourth. I was pretty pleased with myself; some people took years and never made it past stage one.

Denial for me had lasted all of about thirty seconds. I'm way too insecure to think that something terrible isn't actually happening to me.

The anger stage was also brief and fleeting; I mean, who was I going to get angry with? Her? She was way too perfect for that. Me? Pity maybe, but I just couldn't seem to get to anger. Try as I might to blame the Roommate, even that was a no-go.

I had spent most of the night tossing and turning over the bargaining stage, but that too simply wasn't cutting it. While I wasted a good part of an hour wrestling with the decision to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior if only she'd drop the goddamn class, that was really quite a stretch.

So I cut to the quick and moved right into stage four: depression. I was really much more comfortable there. I figured I could take that one and run with it for years—Christ, maybe for the rest of my life.

I'm not one to think that there's only one soul mate out there, a predetermined chosen one waiting just for his counterpart—but in my case I wasn't so sure. As previously noted, my track record around women was far from stellar. What were the chances of someone like Samantha popping into my life again? Plus I was thirty-two, for Christ sake. I was beginning to think like my mother. My days were already numbered.

Acceptance be damned! Depression it was going to be.

Thankfully, OCD carries with it a few perks. One was that I could shed my OSD (Obsessive Samantha Disorder), at least momentarily, adequately mask stage four, and rise to the task at hand if it meant something to do with climate change. With a precise goal in mind I could free my mind of her, sometimes even for entire minutes at a time. And this divestment thing was a big deal.

The Climate Changers had definitely done their homework. Per the norm, Hannah and Trevor had taken the lead and accomplished the lion's share of the work, but everyone had chipped in. If students in my class could accomplish in one semester half of what the Climate Changers had done in a week, I'd be as happy as a pig in shit. Maybe even happier.

The Wednesday previous, Hannah had been like a drill sergeant, barking out orders, assigning tasks, setting priorities and due dates, not taking no for an answer.

“Abbie, I want that list printed of the dirty 200 immediately. And I want ten copies made, collated, two-sided, stapled, one in each of the trustee's folders. We've got to get them out today. Got it?”

Abbie gave a salute and happily went off to do as she was told. Some are leaders, some are followers. Abbie was definitely the latter, perfectly content in her role as a foot soldier in the war on fossil fuels.

Following their “We all want to save the world” meeting, the Climate Changers had jumped onboard 350.org's Divestment Campaign, targeting the top 200 publicly traded companies that held the vast majority of the world's proven oil, gas, and coal reserves. 350.org's campaign was simple, and the Climate Changers were all over it.

Immediately freeze any new investment in fossil-fuel companies.

Divest from those 200 companies within five years.

“Five years?” Hannah had said. “That's baloney. I want them out now!”

“Come on Hannah,” Trevor had cautioned. “Be realistic. You can't just sell off everything on a moment's notice. It takes a while to check out. Don't make demands that you know can't possibly be met.”

“OMG, have you gone over to the dark side? Remember the last battle we had over this issue? Since when are you all about ‘slow the flow, bro'?”

“I'm just saying …”

“Wow! Wow! Who would have thought?” Hannah said. “Mister ‘throw caution to the wind, man the barricades, full speed ahead' now bitching about moving too fast. I didn't see that happening in my lifetime!”

It was, I couldn't help but notice, quite the switch—a role reversal if there ever was one. Just when you think you've got everyone pegged, shit like this happens and screws it all up. Life can be so complicated.

“Look,” Trevor continued. “My point is—”

“Meagan, have you got that information on socially responsible investment strategies summarized? We need it. Today. You're on it!”

Another salute, this time from Meagan, and off she marched.

Hannah turned back to Trevor.

“Darling, make yourself useful. Is the PowerPoint from my laptop loaded on to the flash drive? And check to make sure that last slide has the 350 website.”

“Darling”? “Darling”? Was that a diss or a slip? Was there really something else going on here?

Chagrined, Trevor, like the others before him, dutifully trotted off to save the world.

Fast-forward a week and we're back in Parking Lot B. The weather had taken a turn for the worse and I was anxious about students driving. The Downtown Center where
the finance committee was meeting was only a couple of miles from the main campus, but the roads were getting slick. My worst nightmare: students getting into an accident on my watch.

By this time, everyone had arrived in the parking lot but Trevor. He was only a minute or so late but Hannah was freaking out.

“Where is that boy?” she said, alarm in her voice. “When I left him this morning he was just finishing dishes. He said he was going to do a quick vacuum and he'd be on his way.”

My mouth dropped.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You've got Trevor vacuuming your apartment? And doing your dishes?”