SABBATICAL: Chapter One
Spring
“We don’t need another poorly attended conference,” Leonard Hsu said, trying to hide his aggravation. “Sorry, symposium,” he added sarcastically, effectively sidestepping Susan Beard’s only real contribution to this committee.
Toni glanced at the other woman, her index finger in the air, a triumphant smile dying on her lips. Susan never missed an opportunity to suggest a symposium at their meetings. She’d been at the university for almost a decade and was still searching for a way to create a “signature annual event” — one that would look good in her merit file but require very little work for most of the year. Leonard had caught onto her very quickly, and every meeting, his ability to hide his disgust at her self-serving search for one more event frayed ever thinner.
As a person, Toni found the drama between Leonard and Sue riveting, some of the best entertainment of the month. She also happened to agree with Leonard. The last thing her calendar needed was one more conference or symposium clogging up the last few weeks of spring semester. But as chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Belonging and Inclusion, she had to pretend to be diplomatic or, at the very least, stop the argument that had been brewing all academic year.
Preston Marks beat her to it. “What about an essay contest?”
Margery Pham sighed, and internally, Toni sighed right along with her. Externally, Toni smiled in Preston’s direction. “Preston, this is the end of your first year at the university, right?” Toni hated asking questions she already knew the answers to, but sometimes she had to walk people — students and colleagues alike — through a lesson from A to Z.
“Yes,” he said, sitting up straight in his chair, beaming at her.
She smiled, feeling a sense of warmth that was only tainted at the edges by a deep exhaustion she hoped he never felt but knew he probably would. Preston reminded Toni of Deja during her first year. The ones who came straight out of grad school always had a certain naïve optimism that was as inspiring as it was heartbreaking. They always thought they were on the verge of changing the world. It was devastating watching reality hit them hard and change them. Whether it beat them down or taught them that selling out was much better than sticking to your morals, at least in the short term — no matter which road they chose — it was painful to witness.
Toni couldn’t remember being so green. She didn’t think she’d ever been naively optimistic. She’d walked out of grad school with a prestigious two-year post-doctoral fellowship, but when it had nearly killed her with microaggressions and overwork, she’d expected it. And when she’d left her last institution because her old department wouldn’t grant her tenure, a part of her had expected that as well. What other outcome could she imagine after reporting the chair of the department for sexual harassment and racial discrimination? Especially when the College had brushed her complaint under the rug? If there had ever been a time when Toni hadn’t felt rubbed raw by her job, she couldn’t remember it.
“Do you assign a lot of writing in your classes?” she asked Preston.
“Oh, yes,” he said, beaming at her across the table. “It’s so important that students get to practice writing and get ample feedback and guidance at the same time.”
Someone in the room groaned. A few of the senior faculty shifted uncomfortably in their seats. She couldn’t help but wonder where all this enthusiasm went. Did it start to fade after day one or the first year? In her official and unofficial roles as a mentor to junior faculty, Toni spent an uncomfortable amount of time fighting bitterness as she watched the university sap the energy from her younger colleagues. She tried to sit as a bulwark against it, but even she knew that most of her efforts were only a temporary solution to systemic problems — systemic problems no one with any real power seemed willing to address. Thankfully, Toni had learned early in her career how to push her own emotions aside to get the work done; because the work was what mattered.
“I agree,” Toni said, smiling patiently at Preston. “But if you can, imagine the students you’ve had this year writing an essay on the importance of diversity on this campus.” She took a breath and consulted her notes. “Let’s be generous and imagine that they have a one-month turnaround from our prompt going out and submission. Imagine the state of those drafts. Imagine the time it will take to give them the feedback and guidance they need before presenting at a symposium of some sort. Imagine doing that right in the middle of spring semester.”
On the other side of the table, Susan had started at her favorite word and then shrunk back as Toni kept speaking.
“How much time would it take them to write it?” she asked Preston. “How much time would it take us to review them, deliberate, and decide on a winner?”
Even though there were people in the room who believed otherwise, Toni derived no pleasure from watching Preston deflate as she spoke. Unlike some of her colleagues, she didn’t find it entertaining to watch people she respected shrink in on themselves. But she did think it was her job to be honest and set boundaries younger colleagues could not, would not, or didn’t even know were possible. Even when she was not mentoring, she modeled what she hoped was good behavior. And taking on more needless busywork was not good behavior.
“I see,” Preston muttered, sitting back in his chair with a frown. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said, still smiling warmly at him. He gave her a half-hearted smile, and then Toni turned to look around the small conference table. “Look, we don’t have to make any decisions today. In fact, it would be foolish if we did.”
She made meaningful eye contact with the members of a committee she’d been conned into chairing for the last two years. These weren’t her people, per se, but one of the problems with Toni’s personality was that everyone, after a while, became one of her people. It was a trait she’d inherited from her grandmother; they both had big, soft hearts and sharp tongues. Toni had loved this trait in her grandmother, but over the years, she’d come to believe that, for her, it was a liability.
“Anyway, it’s the end of finals week. Spring semester is almost over,” Toni said, thrusting her fists into the air in victory. “We’re almost free.”
Leonard made a tiny fist bump motion that made Toni smile.
“I suggest,” Toni said sagely, “that you all take the summer and forget all this nonsense. Rest. Take a vacation. Binge-watch a Swedish crime drama. Plant a garden. Do literally anything else. Don’t worry about this event. Chances are we’ll come back in the fall, and the provost will have changed direction on Student Belonging Week anyway. Why don’t we just wait and worry about it then?”
“Not we,” Leonard interjected.
“What?”
He grinned at her across the length of the conference table. “We’ll come back in the fall, but you will be on sabbatical.”
At that last word, the table erupted into something that couldn’t be described as anything other than a titter. The only word that inspired more interest at a university than ‘tenure’ was ‘sabbatical.’ If tenure was the thing that convinced you to buy into the system, then the sabbatical was the thing that made you stay even when you wanted to leave.
Usually, sabbatical came right after tenure, but when Toni received tenure, she hadn’t been at the university long enough to apply. But now, her time had finally come. For so many semesters over the last five years, Toni had worried she’d never see this day. She was so happy that she beamed as she looked around the room one more time. “I forgot,” she admitted in an uncharacteristically gentle voice.
“How could you forget?” Leonard asked bombastically. “Your sabbatical is the best part of all this.” He gestured around the nondescript conference room they’d been meeting in for months. Most of the people in the room had been at the university longer than Preston, so they knew that Leonard’s enthusiasm had little to do with Toni’s sabbatical and more to do with his.
Leonard had been the chair of the Classics Department four years ago. He’d left for his sabbatical a tired, stooped, and angry man. A few graduate students had placed a bet on the likelihood Leonard would return from his sabbatical or just say fuck it and email his resignation. Toni had seriously considered getting in on that action. She could have made an easy hundred dollars because everyone knew Leonard hated his department, the university, and their small town with the fire of a thousand suns. In fact, the only thing that had stopped him from quitting was that sabbatical; he’d earned it and a prestigious grant to co-lead an archeological dig in Ethiopia. He returned a year later, tanned, smiling, and married to an Ethiopian scholar with an application for a spousal hire locked and loaded for submission. He’d returned from his sabbatical a changed man.
Leonard and Desta Hsu were the fairy tale overworked academics told themselves as they revised their sabbatical applications. The Hsus were the promise of what a sabbatical could be. Toni wasn’t among the cohort of colleagues who needed that kind of inspiration, but she appreciated Leonard’s enthusiasm all the same.
“It’s been a long semester,” she reminded him. “But in any case, you’re right. I won’t be here in the fall, so whatever the Dean has in store for you, Margery will guide you to success.”
Toni nodded in Margery’s direction. The other woman beamed at the table. Of all the junior scholars who’d flocked to Toni over the years, Margery was the most self-assured. She’d come to the university much like Toni, with a few bad years at another university under her belt and a healthy dose of cynicism dripping from her words like sarcasm burned to ash. But, also like Toni, Margery had a fire burning under her to do what needed to be done. As soon as Toni’s application for sabbatical had been approved, she’d invited Margery for coffee, ready to convince her to take over this committee Toni had never wanted, but of which she was protective. And then she’d found that Margery had been waiting for the opportunity. Passing the baton to Margery now gave Toni that elusive feeling of a weight being lifted from her shoulders. And apparently, she wasn’t the only one who approved of the committee’s new chair.
“Excellent,” Leonard said with a bright smile and an eager nod. The only person on the committee more opposed to Susan’s symposia ideas than him was Margery.
“I’m happy to leave you in very capable hands,” Toni said with genuine excitement. “But before I go, I would like to remind you all of one simple fact.” Most of the people around the table leaned in, but none more so than Margery. “In your contracts, service is no more than twenty percent of your allocation of effort. Do not give any of your committee work more time than that. Please.”
Toni watched as Preston, in particular, took this in. She gave this simple bit of advice every semester, more times than she could count. She kept hoping for the day when her audience would nod sagely, even dismissively, because they knew this already, but each time she said it, she watched as people seemed to learn it all over again, and it made her chest clench. But no one knew more than Toni that she couldn’t save everyone, and she couldn’t make her colleagues prioritize their well-being before they were ready.
“I think we’re done for the semester,” she said. “Happy grading and enjoy your summer.”
Her colleagues murmured their goodbyes and stood, rushing from the room.
Toni remained in her seat until they were all gone, one step closer to the start of her sabbatical.
It didn’t feel real just yet.
***
Every semester, someone teaching an intro class assigned their students to find a professor in their major for an interview, and every semester, Toni set a hard cap of no more than three. And at every interview, the student asked why she’d chosen this job.
It was such an expected question that Toni had a small coterie of answers that ranged from joking to very professional and serious, depending on how well she knew the student and the tone of the interview thus far. All of the answers were true, but none of them were completely honest. Because if someone were to ask Toni right now why she’d decided to become a professor, she would have said it was for the physical environment.
Toni loved being on university campuses; she’d never met one she didn’t like. As she left her final committee meeting of the academic year, she heaved her leather satchel bag onto her shoulder and began to stroll across campus to her office, enjoying all the sights and sounds, and even smells, she normally missed as she rushed to her various classes and back.
She was always rushing, if not downright running, to get where she needed to be during the semester. If she wasn’t late for class, she was late for a meeting. If she wasn’t power-walking across campus to pick up a book at the library, she was sprinting in the opposite direction for a student presentation. Always, always, always in a hurry.
But that rush cost her the beauty of a leisurely stroll through the university oval in spring. She missed sitting on a bench in the East Campus, watching the leaves turn yellow. She didn’t have the privilege to bundle up in her warmest coat and watch the first snowfall from the observation deck in the science building. Toni loved the wonder of campus, but she so rarely got to enjoy it because if her students spotted her out on a walk or sitting on a bench, they assumed she was holding impromptu office hours. If they spotted her sitting still, they — like her mother — considered her calendar open for more work. And god forbid some administrator spotted her gazing at the sky before her evening class or reading a novel by the lake near the commuter parking lot because they, too, would stop to discuss her committee assignments, mentorship programs she was a part of, mentorships programs they wanted her to join, or her potential future as an associate dean. Which is all to say that during the semester, Toni never got to enjoy the campus.
To be Black, female, and tenured was to be forever visible, always in service, never at peace.
But there were moments like today, usually right at the end of spring semester, when Toni got the chance to enjoy campus. When her classes were done and students were elsewhere, celebrating the end of the semester in the most irresponsible way possible, Toni often strolled through the south oval. She tilted her head back and let the sun warm her face. She took in a deep breath and, for once, enjoyed the smell of the willow trees framing the campus pond. Without the stench of cigarette smoke, vape pens, or exhaust fumes from people desperately searching for parking, Toni could finally detect the smell of moss and hydrangeas. Without the crowd, Toni could hear the ducks honking quietly to one another and birds chirping in the trees. Moments like this almost made all the hassle of the academic year feel worth it. Almost.
“You look happy.”
Toni startled at the sound of Mike’s voice as he fell into step by her side. Her eyes darted around, wondering where he’d come from, but Mike had a way of just popping up when Toni least expected him. For the past year, at least, Mike seemed inescapable. She turned around in the faculty dining area to find him paying for her lunch. She looked across the auditorium during the Arts & Sciences Council, and there was Mike, waving his hand and gesturing toward the empty seat next to him. And that didn’t even count all the dinners at Alejandro’s house, where it always seemed to be Mike who opened the door for her.
At some point, she’d gotten used to his presence.
“As it happens, I am,” she said with a shrug.
“Last final?”
“Nope.”
“Done grading?”
She smiled. “Lord, I wish.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Toni saw Mike turn to her. She watched him watch her — with a little more intent than was necessary, she thought — and waited for his next question.
She nodded her head at the path through the south lawn.
They walked in a companionable silence that surprised her. Normally, Mike was so damn chatty that Toni had started tuning out his words, especially when he started talking about equations and experiments. But she didn’t stop listening to him completely because somewhere along the way, Toni had decided that she liked the tone of Mike’s voice. It wasn’t too deep or rumbly or too high. Once, Toni had even thought Mike had the kind of voice she wouldn’t mind falling asleep to, but she wouldn’t volunteer that information to anyone, especially not him.
Still, silence was nice as well.
Although, it was only quiet between them. As they headed toward main campus, the sounds of student life returned. The hackeysack club was practicing barefoot in the grass, and Mike waved at the group as they passed. A few feet away, one of the fraternities had set up turntables for a last-minute raffle to raise money for…something. The sign was too small for Toni to see, and there was no need to strain her eyesight when she still had fifty final reflections to read.
As they passed the queer student theater group practicing monologues from a play Toni couldn’t recognize, she thought this was part of the job she also loved. It was all part of the ritual of saying goodbye to her students; some for the summer, some for good.
“You just had your last committee meeting,” Mike said out of the blue. He clapped his hands together and smiled triumphantly in her direction. He looked so happy it was infectious.
Finally, she turned to him, the smile on her face so big and wide. “As of five minutes ago, I am no longer the chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Bullshit and Incoherence.”
Mike laughed. “I thought it was called the President’s Acting Committee for Tokens and Future Administrators.”
Toni shook her head and laughed with him. “That was the committee before this one.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I have no fucking idea,” Toni said. “Something about the Board of Regents mandate or whatever. All that matters is that for the next year, it’s not my job to care.”
“Because you’re officially on sabbatical,” Mike said happily.
Toni stopped walking and turned in his direction.
He mirrored her stance, his smile faltering at the edges as they came face-to-face. He ran his fingers through his hair and ducked his head.
She peered up at him. Something about the way he looked right now made her brain stumble in confusion. In this moment, Mike’s happiness about her sabbatical far exceeded her own. Toni was too tired to be happy. Too tired to be excited about the future. Too tired to figure out a nice way to ask him what the hell had gotten into him.
But her brain was not too tired to notice that something was different about him. Was the beard new? Thicker? Was his jaw sharper? Was he taller? The semester brain fog clouded Toni’s ability to think but not, apparently, her body’s ability to react — hardening nipples, wet warmth between her legs — which made her wonder what had gotten into her.
Had she eaten lunch? When was her last sip of water? Clearly, she was delirious.
She turned away and wiped at her sweaty upper lip. It was a hot day, of course.
“Technically, my sabbatical doesn’t start until August,” she said, stepping from the gravel path through the lawn onto the concrete. Mike easily kept pace with his much longer legs. “And I still have final exams from my intro class to go over and grades to submit, but if this university burns down in the next fifteen months, that is none of my business.”
“It’s not,” Mike replied seriously.
Toni glanced at him quickly. “Where are you coming from?”
He rolled his eyes. “Final presentations. Every semester, I sit through a week of some of the worst group presentations I’ve ever seen, just waiting for a sinkhole to swallow me up. I tell myself I’m never going to assign them again, and then I do. It’s like I love pain. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Toni chuckled. “Nothing’s wrong with you. You just hate reading student papers.”
He groaned. “I sure as fuck do. The way science majors write gives me a headache. I have a stack of quizzes from my intro course, and then I am completely free.”
“I’m jealous,” Toni deadpanned.
“Bullshit.”
She giggled. Actually giggled. And then her steps slowed as they neared the southwest corner of the Student Union. Mike’s office was in Schlessinger Hall in the opposite direction to Toni’s building.
Mike pulled ahead of her and then turned when he realized she was no longer by his side. He lifted an eyebrow at her and frowned.
“Isn’t your office that way?” Toni asked, pointing to her left.
“It is.”
She frowned at him, refusing to ask another question. Probably because she knew the answer.
Mike waited for a few seconds before smiling and playfully rolling his eyes. “I’m walking you to your office,” he said.
“Are you?”
“Obviously.”
“Obvious to whom?”
“Me. Let’s go. You’ve still got so much grading to do.” He turned halfway toward her building and blinked at her.
Okay, dehydration or no, Toni thought there was definitely something going on with him and her. Her first step toward him was shaky, and Mike moved quickly, his hands reaching out as if he’d catch her if she fell. But she didn’t. They resumed their walk, but this time, Toni couldn’t stand the companionable silence for some reason.
“Summer plans?” she asked in a tight, high voice.
“Rest. Research. Running?”
“Sounds boring. I approve.”
“Good,” Mike said. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something else. Toni found herself ready to lean in his direction, but she kept it together, and in the end, he seemed to reconsider whatever he’d been about to say anyway. “What about you?” he asked, glancing away. “Are you starting your sabbatical work this summer?”
“Fuck no. I’m not cracking open a single book or downloading any articles. As soon as grades are in, I’m going to sleep too much, hang out with my cat, and start tackling all the home renovation projects I’ve been putting off for the last two years.”
“Sounds fun,” Mike deadpanned.
“Sounds boring,” she corrected. “And that’s exactly what I want.”
She could see him looking at her from the corner of her eye, but she didn’t look at him this time.
“You deserve that,” Mike said softly.
“I know,” Toni replied triumphantly.
Mike laughed before looking forward again. “Are you coming to the Multicultural Graduation tonight?”
“Of course, I am.” Now Toni did shift in his direction, but it was his turn to ignore her attention. Well, he tried to. As Toni glared at him, she watched his neck and cheek turn red while the corner of his smile lifted, exposing a shallow dent of a dimple she’d never seen before.
Never seen before but liked immediately.
“Of course, I’m going,” she said again.
He turned to her. “Just checking. Some of us are getting together for drinks after at that new indie brewery.”
“What new brewery?”
Mike squinted down at her. “How do you not know about this? It’s right by your house.”
“It is?!”
They arrived at the base of the steps of Mark Hall. Toni stopped and watched as Mike climbed a few steps up, stopped, and turned, frowning down at her. He shrugged. “You need to get out more.”
Toni hated when people said that. She couldn’t even count how many times someone had lobbed the accusation that she studied too hard or worked too much at her. But it stung that much more in this moment, and she didn’t know why. “Who has time to get out?” she spat back.
He shook his head mournfully. “Great point.” Toni was shocked at Mike’s easy acquiescence. “That’s why you should come out with us.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You always say that.”
“I don’t.”
Mike scoffed. “Okay.” He turned away and continued up the steps.
Toni started after him, feeling uncomfortable about it even as she endeavored to move faster, trying to catch up with his long stride.
“Deja and Alejandro are going,” he said nonchalantly once she’d caught up with him.
“I said I’ll think about it.” Toni didn’t want to give him the impression that she was running after him — even though she was — so she breezed past him up the steps. She’d planned to waltz right into the building and leave him behind, but Mike jogged up and reached around her to pull the door open.
Toni took a deep sigh as she walked into Mark Hall with a little less pep in her step. In the main floor vestibule, she stomped across the rotunda, Mike hovering at her heels, to the stairs. She stopped at the bottom step and turned to find Mike standing close. Too close?
“Marie will be there too,” he said as if there was no break in their conversation. “Maybe. She’s hard to pin down sometimes.”
“I’ll think about it,” Toni said for the third time.
Mike nodded, and his eyes dipped to her collarbone, no lower. “Think about it for real,” he said in a husky voice. “Don’t just like say you’ll think about it while planning what sweatpants you want to change into as soon as you get home.”
Toni’s mouth fell open, and her face started to heat in shock. “I would never,” she lied with a straight face.
Mike licked his lips. “I know you,” he said, his eyes lingering on her mouth as his gaze moved up her face to finally make eye contact. A heated eye contact that made her heart race.
Her breaths shortened. Her entire body was warm, excited, aroused.
Over the last two years, she and Mike had shared so many seemingly inconsequential conversations. Ever since Deja had started dating Alejandro, they’d been thrown together at meetings and dinner dates and drinks. And even before that, Mike had been familiar to her as one of the few faculty of color at the university, but he was simply someone who existed at her periphery, never quite real.
Except now he was real, and something about this moment was different. She and Mike stared at one another, and Toni felt like there was static building at the back of her head. She just didn’t know what it all meant.
Mike cleared his throat but didn’t look away. “Your first drink is on me.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know,” he said. “Your first drink is on me.”
Air rushed from Toni’s mouth, and she nodded. “Okay.”
He nodded in return, trying to keep the grin on his lips from bursting into a full-fledged smile. “I’m going to head out. See you at the graduation?”
Some tiny part of Toni hated the fact that he had to frame that as a question. That somewhere along the way, Mike had decided that Toni was so unreliable that her attendance at an event she had singlehandedly led for three years was up in the air. “I’ll be there.”
The smile erupted on his mouth for a quick second before he reined it in. “Great. Sure. See you then.” He stepped away, backing into the rotunda, his eyes still trained on her.
“Okay,” she breathed because she felt the need to say something, anything.
“Okay,” he said, a deep smile on his face.
For whatever reason, that one word brought Toni up short. She nodded and watched as Mike turned away, covering his smile with his right hand. “Okay,” he said again, although this time, Toni thought he was speaking to himself. Reassuring himself.
And somehow, that reassured her as well.