: THE RULES OF LOVE
Mira’s grad school friends, Max and Ruby, come back as the main characters in my next novel, The Rules of Love (coming in May 2017), which follows the contentious origins of their relationship. Read the first chapter:
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Social functions weren’t really Max Saddler’s thing. In truth, she would have rather spent the next hour in a dentist’s chair, or riding public transportation, or better yet, she’d rather stay in her dorm and watch Netflix. But she promised her best friend, Mira, that she would try to be more social and make a few additional friends in grad school, and so here she was.
Tonight was her first official night of the program, not counting orientation and the day she came to the library just to wander around and familiarize herself with all of the classrooms, and her first class was scheduled to start in an hour and a half. First, though, there was the GLISSO meeting that she swore to Mira she would attend.
GLISSO stood for Granville Library Science Student Organization, for which Mira was the acting president. It was a professional organization meant to help librarians in training begin building a professional network for their career – at least, that’s what GLISSO’s webpage said. Max had read through it many times in the past couple of weeks, trying to convince herself to attend one of its meetings despite the near certainty of socialization occurring there, but what convinced her in the end was Mira’s promise that she could throw her hat into the ring for president when Mira’s term ended at the end of the semester.
In her entire four years of undergrad, and in high school before that, Max had never backed down from an opportunity to excel, to cement her position at the top of her class, or to add another line to her resume. Given that library school appeared to be something that was carried out mainly at night and on weekends and no one hung around the school much outside of classes, there were precious few opportunities for this, so Max was determined to be the best damn president GLISSO ever saw – even if it did include some social function responsibilities.
So about ten minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start, Max left her apartment in the graduate dorms and walked across campus. Granville State University was bustling with activity on a Monday evening in early September – all the underclassmen looked so impossibly young and starry-eyed, coming back from their last classes of the day and heading toward the dining hall in big groups full of budding friendships. Max found it a little more palatable to observe this phenomenon as a grad student than she had when she’d been in their place four years ago. She might have been their age, but she’d never been one of them – no matter how hard she tried to be normal, she could never escape the feeling that she didn’t really fit in.
Now at least she had the luxury of being an aloof graduate student, mildly irritated by the boundless energy of the undergrads rushing past her as she made her way across the quad, like an old dog putting up with the playfulness of a puppy. She didn’t fit in because she really wasn’t one of them anymore, and that was okay.
Max headed straight for the library, a five-story brick cube that loomed taller than all the other academic buildings on campus, dwarfed only by the skyscraping undergraduate dorms. The first three floors were dedicated to the books – which Max had grown quite familiar with in the last four years – as well as the computer labs and reference librarians available to the students. The top two floors would be her focus for the next two years – that’s where the library science department was housed, and where all of her classes would be held.
She walked through the lobby, past a Starbucks kiosk that was heavily trafficked every time midterms and finals hit, and Max waved at one of the librarians sitting at the reference desk. She hadn’t managed to make a single friend except for Mira in her entire four years of undergraduate study, but she knew every librarian in the building by name and favorite book – it was a bit like making friends with the lunch lady, but Max always felt at home in any library she entered.
“First night of classes?” The reference librarian asked, her voice echoing slightly through the tile-floored lobby.
Tonight it was Maureen on duty (favorite book: To Kill a Mockingbird), and when she found out that Max had decided to get her Master’s degree and become a librarian, Maureen had quite possibly been even more excited than Max herself. It made sense – she’d seen Max come to the library almost daily for four years, so it was a logical fit.
“Yep,” Max called back, enjoying the way her voice reverberated off the tiles until Maureen put a finger to her lips and gave Max a warning look. She reduced the volume of her voice by a few decibels and added, “I’m going to the GLISSO meeting first, and then I have Information Theory with McDermott.”
“Have fun,” Maureen said with a smile as Max walked over to the bank of elevators and called one. “Let me know how it goes.”
“Okay, I will,” Max said, stepping onto the elevator.
She went up to the fourth floor, where there was a conference room the department used for things like GLISSO meetings. Checking her watch during the ride up, she saw that there were only four minutes left before the meeting was supposed to begin – she’d timed her walk across campus perfectly to avoid the need to stand around awkwardly with her fellow grad students and attempt the anxiety-inducing act of small talk.
There were about a dozen people standing around the room, acting like they enjoyed asking each other about their hometowns and undergraduate degrees and the weather for god’s sake, when Max arrived. No one particularly noticed her – which happened to be exactly the way she liked it – and she looked quickly around for Mira. She wasn’t here yet, which Max was slightly irritated by but not surprised about given how busy Mira liked to keep herself, so Max went over to the large oak conference table in the middle of the room and found a seat two chairs over from the end. In her observations, this particular spot was the best one for seeming like she was a part of whatever conversations were going on around her without actually drawing attention to the fact that she was generally on the outside looking in.
She set her ragged old backpack – the same one she’d been carrying since high school – on the floor at her feet, and pulled out a brand-new notebook and a pen. Snippets of conversation floated through the room (I just got back from a summer abroad. My fiancée and I are trying to buy a house but it’s crazy timing right now. My undergraduate capstone was on gender studies and popular culture.) and Max knew that Mira would have wanted her to try and insert herself into one of them – pick a subject she knew about and go introduce herself.
But every time she’d ever done this in the past, people seemed to think she was bragging or being a show-off. She didn’t understand the difference between I just got back from a summer abroad and I was at the top of my class in undergrad and now I’m getting a dual master’s degree in library science and user design. Everyone else seemed pretty clear on why one was ‘sharing’ while the other was ‘gloating,’ and Max found it was almost always best to just keep her mouth shut.
She flipped open her notebook and wrote the date and ‘GLISSO – First Meeting’ at the top of the first page, and then checked the time again. The meeting was due to start any minute, but Mira still wasn’t here to call it to order. She put her pen to the page, falling back on one of her oldest hobbies to fill the time until this limbo of waiting was over.
Max looked around the room, observing the little pockets of conversation taking place, and she scribbled down every example of non-verbal communication she could find. It was like a scavenger hunt, searching for eye rolls and sighs and body language to decode the subtext running underneath all that small talk.
There was the summer abroad conversation, taking place between two girls whose postures hinted at adversarial attitudes beneath their benign conversation. There was the guy trying to buy a house, who seemed not to notice the fact that the people standing with him were beginning to divert their attention elsewhere, looking around the room.
And there was the gender studies conversation.
Wow.
The girl at the core of that group – the largest one in the room by far – was strikingly beautiful, so much so that Max’s hand involuntarily scribbled the word onto the page along with all of her other notes. Wow. She was tall and lean, built like an athlete but with womanly curves that Max had a hard time not lingering on. Her rich, dark skin was smooth and her natural hair stood out in delicate ringlets framing her face, and something inside Max stirred, urging, Go talk to her.
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