My Professor, My Lover

Before she was a name on my class roster, before she was a face in my lecture hall, Eleanor Vance was a series of anecdotes. She existed as a shimmering, precocious ghost in the conversations I had with her father.

Marcus Vance was a force of nature--a tech mogul who had clawed his way up from nothing, a man who spoke of quarterly earnings and hostile takeovers with the same casual bravado he used to order a vintage scotch. We were friends, of a sort. I, the tenured professor from a family of quiet academics, and he, the boisterous titan of industry. Our friendship was built on a mutual respect for a world the other didn't fully understand. He was a major donor to Blackwood University, and I was the star of its literature department. It was a symbiotic relationship.

But Marcus's true religion was his daughter.

"You won't believe what Ellie did," he'd boom over dinner at the faculty club, his voice echoing off the dark wood paneling. "She wrote a goddamn screenplay. A hundred and twenty pages. Said my character was 'tragically underdeveloped'."

He'd tell me how she'd debated her physics teacher on the ethics of quantum entanglement, how she'd filled his sterile minimalist mansion with canvases she'd painted herself, how she'd spent a summer translating ancient Greek poetry just for the hell of it.

To me, she was a myth. A brilliant, abstract concept of a girl, a testament to her father's doting love. Then, one evening, he passed me his phone, his face glowing with pride.

"Read this," he'd urged. "It's a short story she just got published in the university's literary journal. The one you're the faculty advisor for."

I took the phone. The story was titled "The Lepidopterist's Regret." It was about a butterfly collector who spends his life searching for a rare, mythical species, only to realize at the end that he had captured it as a caterpillar years ago and, failing to recognize its potential, had let it go. The prose was clean, incisive, and possessed a melancholy that felt far too old for a seventeen-year-old. It was good. Frighteningly good.

"It's about regret, I think," I'd told Marcus, handing the phone back. "About the tragedy of unrecognized beauty."

Marcus had just clapped my shoulder. "All I know is that she's too smart for her own good. She's coming to Blackwood in the fall. Major in literature. I told her Professor Croft is the best there. Try not to let her intimidate you, Julian."

We had laughed. I was thirty-seven years old, a full professor with a list of publications as long as my arm. The idea of being intimidated by a freshman, even a brilliant one, was absurd.

I had no idea how wrong I was.