The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [99]
Just as he was about to lean down and embrace her, he saw what she was doing with her yellow number-two pencil on the bubble sheet. She was erasing one scorer’s score and changing it so that it matched the other. He watched her do this to another score sheet without even looking at the portfolio, let alone reading the essays to determine which was the right score. For a few seconds he actually considered pretending he hadn’t noticed, but as he watched her change score after score, his desire shriveled up and anger replaced it. Finally he said in a low voice, “What are you doing?”
She shrieked and threw her pencil. “Fuck!” She turned to Vic, her face flushed, from either embarrassment or surprise or both. She didn’t answer his question but stood up and backed away from him, trying to recover her equilibrium.
“How long have you been doing that?”
She shrugged, like one of his teenagers. “I don’t know. Couple of days.”
There was noise in the hall, a clanking sound, which could have been the janitor emptying the trash can. There could be straggling scorers lurking about or other FTA employees. He tried to keep his voice down. “You’re compromising the whole project! How can you know which is the right score unless you read them?”
She took a few more steps away from him, arms folded on her chest. “What difference does it make? I mean, come on!”
“One’s right and one’s wrong. That’s the difference.” Ironic, him saying that, after what he’d just been thinking about sex and hotels.
“Oh, really?” she said, trying for coy. “Didn’t you say yourself that all holistic scoring just pretends to be unbiased?”
“I said it tries to be unbiased.”
Gigi smiled a tight little smile and displayed her palms, like, same difference.
Vic dropped down onto a nearby table. It was happening again, and he’d so hoped that it wouldn’t, not with Gigi. He was weary, so weary, of being saddled with the task of trying to make unreasonable people see reason, which he’d been doing, it seemed, all his life. The most unreasonable people of all had been his own parents.
Caroline swore that the Asperger’s gene, if there was such a thing, must’ve come from Vic’s side of the family, and he really couldn’t argue with that. Vic’s father always wore his trousers, as he called them, belted up above his waist and too short besides. You could always see his black socks, even in the summer when he wore sandals. Vic drew his father’s attention to these fashion errors, but his father couldn’t have cared less. For a while Vic’s father played drums, badly, in a small circus that toured Iowa, and before Vic knew enough to be embarrassed, he went to hear his father’s band accompany Tonja, the henna-haired trapeze artist, as she swung by her knees over their heads. The absurdity of it was stunning. But Vic’s father was a college professor, and, among his university colleagues, eccentric behavior was tolerated, even expected. The man taught in the English Department, after all. He taught the Bible as literature, and he was an atheist! What sense did that make?
His mother collected unbeautiful, unnecessary things—magazines, dolls, Kleenex boxes—and stacked them around their house, forcing the occupants to walk ever narrowing pathways between the rooms. Forget about sitting on the furniture. His mother never once answered the phone or the door, not wanting, she explained, to be put on the spot.
By the time his parents went into assisted living they decided, after never exchanging a cross word in their entire marriage—or not one Vic remembered—that they hated each other so much they had to have separate apartments. But even that wasn’t enough, because they ran into each other around Melrose Meadows and became offended by the