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  I stepped carefully down to meet my professor. The room had cleared out, mostly. He was still there.

  “Maura, you may have noticed that we have a new student. Iván.” She glanced up at the corsair, so I did too. He was smiling at us with perfectly white, straight teeth. “He’s getting a late start this semester.” I nodded. This was true—I’d never known that anyone would be allowed to jump into a class like he apparently was, well after the add/drop period was over. Dr. Rooney and I both managed to tear our gazes away from him. “I know last year you were doing some tutoring. Are you still looking for clients?”

  I was always looking for money. “Sure. Yes.”

  Dr. Rooney smiled too. “Great. You can help Iván catch up.” She leaned closer to me. “This is a special situation, and I appreciate your help.”

  That made it sound like I was doing it for free. “I need to, um, I would still be able…the fee,” I finished lamely.

  “Oh, he’ll be able to pay you!” she said in a low tone, and laughed a little. She raised her voice. “Iván, this is Maura Sutherland. She’s an excellent student and I highly recommend her as a tutor. I’ll leave you two to work it out.” She picked up her briefcase and hurried up the steps, leaving me alone with the corsair in the big lecture hall. I meant, leaving me with Iván.

  He stood up, unfolding himself from the small chair, and came down to meet me. I was standing on the dais, but he was still much bigger. And when he put out his hand to shake, it dwarfed my fingers. I watched his hand wrapped together with mine and probably held it a bit too long.

  “Iván Marrero,” he told me, rolling the Rs of his last name. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Maura.”

  I could hear his lovely accent for the first time. He said my name like it had three syllables, Ma-u-ra, the R a soft sound. I liked it.

  I nodded at him. “What do you need help with?”

  “Can we go somewhere to discuss?” He was watching me, head tilted.

  “No, sorry, right now I have to go to work. Do you want to just set up a time to meet?” He shrugged, then nodded. “Ok, the best time for me is the weekend. What about Saturday morning, nine? Eight? Or I can do earlier if you’re available.”

  He laughed, throwing back his head. It startled me in the stillness. “Eight in the morning on a Saturday, or earlier? No, I’m not available. How about ten or eleven?”

  “Ten is good.” I gave him the name of the library that had the best study spots. “Fourth floor. I’ll meet you at the elevator.” I saw the time on the clock on the wall. “I need to go. I’ll see you then.” I ran up the stairs and grabbed my bag, glancing only once over my shoulder. He was still looking up at me, and I caught my toe and almost fell on my face. Damn it!

  I got to the bus stop just in time to see it pulling away from the green light at the corner. Damn it again! I put both straps of my bag over my shoulders and started jogging after the bus, holding my arms crossed over my chest so my breasts wouldn’t bounce.

  This was the day that the bus made every green light. I watched it get farther and farther away from me. I rubbed my forehead. I was going to have to get a car or a cab to make it on time, now. I thought about my bank account balance and if I could—

  “Hello.” A car stopped next to me, a big, shiny car. With the corsair at the driver’s seat. “I saw you…running.” He smiled. “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

  I hesitated, panting a little still, remembering all the lectures in my various elementary schools about getting into a car with a stranger. I worried my lip with my teeth.

  Iván watched me. The car behind him honked but he ignored it. “I have nothing to do now, so it’s easy for me to drive,” he told me.

  “Ok.” I could always jump out or nail him with the stun gun in my bag. “Thank you.” I got in and inhaled. The car smelled brand new. “Do you know your way around here?”

  “Not very well, except I think the ocean is that way.” He pointed in the general direction of his right and laughed.

  I looked at the fancy screen on the console of the car. “Does this have navigation?” When he nodded, I messed with it a bit, and punched in Benji’s address. The directions started in that disembodied voice and he finally pulled away. The driver of the car behind us looked to be having a stroke from his fury and I waved apologetically. “Thank you again for driving me. I was going to be late to work.”

  “You’re going to tutor?”

  “I tutor on the side, college students. Mostly I’m a nanny, and I also work at a dance studio a few hours a week.”

  “Busy.” He braked hard for a red light and I stiffened my legs so I wouldn’t fall forward. He drove pretty fast.

  I shrugged. “I only go to school part-time. I like being busy.”

  “To each her own.” He nodded, as if satisfied. “To speak a language well, you have to have the sayings.”

  A convertible pulled up next to us and the two women glanced over. “Iván?” the driver screeched. Iván waved. “Oh my God!” she said, and her companion in the passenger seat held up her phone.

  Iván put up his window and pulled away quickly when the light turned green. I gripped the handle on the door as the tires squealed.

  “Do you know them? Those women?” I asked.

  He turned to look at me, surprised. “No, I don’t know them.” He hung a left turn directly in front of a truck, and the driver laid on the horn. I gasped and closed my eyes.

  “Then how did they know your name?” I asked when I got my breath back. “She called you Iván, didn’t she?” With his looks, he probably knew thousands of women.

  He shrugged, then executed a violent swerve around a car backing out of a driveway, slammed on the brakes to avoid a car coming toward us, and said something angrily under his breath. I was now holding onto the dashboard with my other hand to brace myself. “Are you nervous in cars?” he asked curiously.

  “Not usually,” I said.

  Iván laughed. “I can’t get used to the way people drive here! I’ll try to drive more like an American. Ready?” He slowed way, way down, until the car behind us was fully tailgating and someone honked. He ignored it blithely.

  “Where are you from?” I asked him.

  He glanced over, an odd look on his face. “Spain.” He started to say something, stopped. “Are you from here?”

  I nodded. “I grew up in southern California. Around the LA area.”

  “You came up here for school?”

  “My boyfriend is in a graduate program so I came with him.”

  “Boyfriend?” he asked.

  “We live together,” I said, and he shrugged.

  “Ah, well.”

  What did that mean? I pointed at the imposing Victorian mansion that was Benji’s house. “That’s me. That’s where I work.”

  Iván stopped in the middle of the street to let me out. A car heading toward us also stopped, unable to get around. The woman angrily honked and gestured. He didn’t appear to notice. “Maybe you should move over,” I suggested. I pointed to the curb, and he pulled the car well on top of it. I had never driven in Europe, but I had serious doubts that any of this was allowed there either. A man walking a dog on the sidewalk where we were now wedged gave us a dirty look and edged past between a tree and Iván’s giant car. “Um, we haven’t discussed my rate, for tutoring,” I said, unclenching the fists I had made in fear during the car ride, and stretching out my fingers. “I mean, for bringing you up to speed in Dr. Rooney’s class.”

  Iván held up his hands. “It’s fine. I’ll pay you what you charge.”

  “Uh, ok.” I wasn’t great with talking about money. I saw Benji’s school bus coming around the corner. We had gotten to his house much faster than when I took public transit. “Thank you for the ride.” I turned to look one more time at Iván. I would still think of him as a corsair, even now that I knew his name. He was just…something else.

  “Goodbye, Maura.” He put up his hand and waved, and I shut the door.
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  The bus put out its stop sign and turned on the flashing lights and I walked down the street toward it. I hoped that Iván knew not to run into the bus. A few kids got out, then there was a pause, then Benji followed. He looked so sad, it looked like his head was down in defeat. Without thinking I picked up the pace to reach him. The stop sign retracted and the bus slowly pulled away. As it did, one of the boys who had gotten off before him turned and shoved Benji. He flew back, his arms pinwheeling, and he sat down, hard.

  I started to run. “Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, you little shit!” The group of kids saw me and took off running in the other direction. I pounded up to where Benji still sat on the sidewalk, torn between pursuing the kids and beating them down hard, and picking him up and running home.

  I stopped and squatted down. “Benji, you ok?” I reached for him, but he swatted my hands away. I could hear his labored breathing. “Do you have your inhaler? Get it out.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, and I realized it wasn’t asthma, it was tears. I tried to help him again, but he got onto his knees and stood up. “Leave me alone!”

  “Ok.” I stood up too. We walked slowly back toward the house together.

  “The kids at my school are idiots,” Benji burst out, sniffing.

  “Have you been having problems with that guy? Why did he do that?”

  “Because they’re idiots!” he repeated. “All of them.”

  I sighed. “Ok. Let’s see what Joana has to eat.” I pushed open the kitchen door.

  “I’m not hungry.” He pounded up the stairs to his room, and Joana and I heard the door slam, hard.

  Chapter 2

  Madame Anouk looked like an old hippie lady, with multiple scarves and dangling jewelry and long, grey-streaked brown hair in a big bun on the top of her head. Totally a Berkeley cliché. She looked like the type of person who might drink tea made from herbs she grew in her own garden while donating to animal rescue charities and protesting something. And making macramé. She made a lot of sweeping arm movements to illustrate her speech, using the words “serenity” and “sustainable” and “centered” a lot. Sometimes it was a little hard to understand her due to her thick French accent.

  Looks could be deceiving. I knew that every moment she spent away from her dance studio was at the poker tables at one casino or another in the Central Valley. No time for growing herbal teas or the macramé. By mistake, she had let me see her passport, too, so I also knew that 1. Her name was really Agnes and 2. She wasn’t really French, either. Her birthplace was listed as Newark, New Jersey, the big faker.

  Nevertheless, she was a great boss. First, she gave me no oversight whatsoever. I came in to her studio, Dance by Anouk, a for a few hours during the week and every Friday for most of the day. My job was to straighten out the business as best I could, and I was free to do this in any way I chose. Today I was going through a pile of receipts that she had found under her bed that dated from five years ago to the present and were covered in cat hair. She trusted me to manage all her financials and I did my best to keep her in line. I generally felt like she was about a half-step ahead of an audit, and if that happened she would probably go to jail. By mistake I had also seen her tax return, and a bigger pack of lies had never been concocted.

  But despite her phony accent and fast and loose finances, Anouk really could dance, and she really could teach it, too. After I worked for a few hours in her cramped and dirty office on Fridays, we would go into the studio and she would give me a lesson, and it was a serious workout. This was the best reason to work at Dance by Anouk. My lesson was the absolute highlight of my week. The highlight of my life.

  “Anouk, you can’t possibly count this as a business expense.” I held up a receipt for cigarettes with “STUDIO” written in red on the top.

  “I smoked them here,” she explained. She inhaled and blew a grey ring over her head, to illustrate.

  “Just, no. This is a children’s dance studio.” I turned on the desk fan and pointed it in her direction to propel away the smoke. “Go outside with that thing!”

  Anouk shrugged and threw up her hands. “And me, how am I to know about the business expenses you talk of?” She put the still burning cigarette in an old tuna can and I stubbed it out. Yuck. “Come, enough of your complaints about these things. Have you been practicing at home?” she asked me.

  I had not. “I’m busy.”

  “How do you expect to improve? Come, come.” She took my hands and pulled me into the studio. After about an hour of being alone together, she dropped the bogus accent and yelled at me in a perfectly standard American voice. “Arms up! Weak! No, total shit. God damn it, Maura, your core!” She sure swore a lot more when she wasn’t French. “No, again. From the soubresaut.” It was wonderful and I loved every moment of it.

  I was a sweaty mess when we were done and her youngest students were starting to come in for their introduction to ballet class. “Very good!” Anouk said to me, and clapped her hands twice. The accent was firmly in place again.

  “I’ll see you next week,” I told her, and she kissed both my cheeks.

  I had just enough time to clean myself up at the studio then run over to the bank for her before I went to my next job. I had decided to mix things up with Benji. Instead of him taking the bus, I thought I would meet him after school and we would walk home and get our exercise that way. It would also get him away from the little maggot who had pushed him down.

  Both Joana and I had prodded a little the day before to try to figure out what had happened but he had clammed right up. Everything at school was “fine” except they were all “jerks.” I asked if he wanted me to speak to his teacher.

  “No!” he had exclaimed, utterly horrified. Before I left that night, I mentioned to Joana that I should probably tell his parents.

  She had snorted. “Why? What will that do?”

  She was right. Maybe I could deal with it on my own, teach Benji some strategies. I thought of the ways I had dealt with bullies in elementary school: running, hiding, crying. No, those were not good solutions.

  “Hey, buddy,” I greeted Benji as he emerged from his school, the last among a huge crowd of happy, skipping kids. It was Friday, after all.

  “Hi, Maura. Are you really making me walk?”

  “Yep. I thought we could stop for ice cream on the way home. It’s pretty hot. What do you think?”

  If someone had offered me ice cream when I was 10, I would have been all over it. Benji shrugged. “Maybe.” We plodded along together. It was hot for the East Bay, but nothing like when I had lived in the San Fernando Valley. The summers there had been a furnace. Right up my alley.

  “How is fifth grade treating you?” I asked, nudging him.

  “It’s alarmingly undemanding.”

  I tried not to smile. “Why would that alarm you?”

  “I just have to wonder, is this really all adults expect from us?” He looked at me plaintively. “It makes me very anxious about our future. Our future as a nation.”

  “I think it will all work out.” I put my arm around his shoulders and he let me hug him. He had pulled away from me the day before. “How were all those jerks from yesterday?”

  “Still jerks.” Benji kicked at a rock on the sidewalk and got out from under my arm.

  “Is there something specific—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” he exploded.

  “Ok, buddy, ok! Got it. There’s the ice cream place. What are you going to get? I’m planning on chocolate chip.”

  “This isn’t that kind of ice cream store,” he told me. “It’s all organic and they don’t have normal flavors. Maybe you could get Mexican chocolate, if they have it.” He considered. “I’m going to have goat cheese.”

  “Goat cheese ice cream? I’m going to gag.” At least he was planning to eat something. I paid with a bill that I had grabbed the night before from the stash of ready cash the Dorsets left, and as always, I was shocked at how much things cost in this ne
ighborhood. Benji’s parents stuck money for Joana and me to use in a drawer whenever they thought about their son—which meant, it didn’t happen too often. The ready cash supply was getting low and that signified communication with his parents. Now I had two topics to bring up, money and the bully. I would have to do it.

  Because it was Friday, I let Benji play Blazer on his computer for extra time. He also spent a while messaging with a boy he had met at camp the summer before, which I tried to encourage as much as I could. Unfortunately, the camp was in Maine (the Dorsets liked him far away) so this other kid lived on the east coast. Not really “play date” material, but hey, a friend was a friend no matter where he was. I hurried out when I heard Benji’s dad, Mr. Dorset, pull up in the driveway. Yes, I needed to talk to him, but I couldn’t do it tonight.

  Robin was having a bunch of his poly-sci cohorts over for a late dinner. That meant that they would eat every bit of food we had then smoke pot until I was about to lose my mind. I pulled my long hair into a ponytail high on my head and started cooking when I got back to our apartment. Robin always wanted to impress them when they came over, even though most of them were so high they didn’t care what they were shoveling into their mouths for sustenance (which was probably lucky, because I wasn’t what you’d call a gourmet chef). All Robin’s friends were just like he was: doctoral candidates or going for their master’s degrees and having a little bit of trouble wrapping things up, living with the support of their generous (and wealthy) families. They were enjoying not going to class, enjoying not working, enjoying what they considered to be the academia lifestyle.

  To be totally honest, I was also living with the support of Robin’s generous family. We paid our rent out of a check his mom sent each month. I felt like I was stealing from them every time I gave our landlord the money, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t grateful.

  Robin walked up behind me in the kitchen and ran his hands over my butt. “They won’t be here for another ten minutes. You want to go?”

  I looked at the stove. “I have to keep cooking. Later, ok?” I made myself stay still and not pull away from his groping hands.