Summa cum Laude

The clock on the back wall strikes three, and I’m not entirely sure what side of the day we’re on. I’m wrapping up my last ever final paper in a basement computer lab that I favor for its casino-effect. Down here, I can’t quite tell how long I’ve been up for. The din of outdated monitors echoes inside my skull, filling the little crevices in between all the Big Ideas fighting for my attention. If you listen closely for long enough, you can hear the impending twirl of the clock’s second hand. Every twenty minutes or so, the hulking copy machine in the corner groans as the scanner resets. 

They call Creedmoor a “Little Ivy”--one among a few liberal arts colleges that consistently ranks near Harvard and Yale in the U.S. News & World Report Top 25. A premier academic commons nestled in the stunning woodlands of Western Massachusetts, as the brochures will tell you. The stunning woodlands don’t matter much to me since I don’t spend much time outside. 

I brought my talents here to study English four long years ago. Creedmoor was the best school I got into and I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that I don’t belong. This inferiority complex is a bitch but also a tremendous source of fuel. Put succinctly, I’m killing it. I made Phi Beta Kappa my junior year. My professors are all fighting for me to pursue a Phd. in their respective fields. 

I’ve really set myself up to phone it in for my Senior Spring Finals. But I’m not too good at phoning it in. I could be outside with my classmates popping champagne. Instead, I’m alone but sweating like the world is watching. Hunkered down in the corner at the furthest monitor from the door, I’m surrounded by empty cardboard cups, shriveled bags of Irish Breakfast Tea, and crumpled Power Bar wrappers. Sometime earlier this morning–or was it yesterday?--a nervous freshman stumbled in to use the printer then immediately dipped upon seeing me. I must have looked like a wild animal.

The dreaded triple all-nighter. I’ve seen it attempted only once, by a now-graduated senior, Kwame Bazile, who used to hole up with me here in the dustiest corner of campus. Two quiet try-hards, Kwame and I were united in a fight to evade all the aspects of campus life that we found frivolous–everything from partying and casual hook-ups, to regular meals and basic hygiene. Achieving maximum isolation from our classmates, we were intent on really doing something with the tens of thousands of dollars that were being invested in our education. I wouldn’t have called us friends because neither of us came to college for friendship. We were comrades, though. Game recognizing game. 

One fated finals period–his last–Kwame spent three straight days in our hideaway, emerging only for bathroom breaks and trips to the coffee vending machine down the hall. He was putting the finishing touches to his Senior thesis on String Theory, the magnum opus of his hard-fought battle through the academic upper echelon. I watched in awe as he clacked away at the keys, traipsing back and forth from a white board covered in a labyrinthine array of abstract mathematical diagrams. Whenever I stepped away from my own, inferior Sophomore finals, I fetched him boxed meals from the dining hall in a show of solidarity. 

Kwame’s memory guides me now through this eleventh hour of my Creedmoor career. I’ve spent five days and twenty pages considering the particular way James Joyce describes a tree in a cursory moment of Ulysses. I’ve attended to existing criticism and analyzed a certain underlying religious fervor. I’ve expounded upon historical context, sociological implications, and the grand semiotic mystery of it all–that yawning abyss which separates signifier from signified.

That yawning abyss which separates signifier from signified--Jesus, how far up his own ass can one man go? Through all the long months now invested in my studies, it is not lost on me that I might be wasting my time. So many of my peers have been skating through undergrad on far less effort and emotional investment. They will graduate near the top of our class while still having gotten laid and partaking in their fair share of controlled substances. Right now they’re all probably smoking weed on the quad and talking philosophy, while I’m still locked away reading and writing about philosophy, really caring about philosophy, still desperately ensuring that my professors will notice just how much I care.

After the first sleepless night, I was extremely tired. On night two, I was so exhausted that I probably couldn’t have slept if I tried. After night three, I succumbed to a special kind of delirium, a warbling state of mind in which I am alternatively convinced about being either the smartest or the stupidest person in the world. 

Right now, I’m in the brilliant stage. After polishing off my concluding paragraph, I lean back in my chair triumphantly. I can hear blood humming in my fingers and I can taste a sweet something in the air. When I look away from my computer screen, every object in the room is rimmed with a soft violet luminescence. Is this what it feels like to be high? 

Halfway through his triple all-nighter, I watched Kwame conk out on his keyboard. After failing to wake him, I called Campus Safety and they brought an ambulance along. He ended up in the hospital with a caffeine overdose. When he woke to the doctors pumping his stomach, Kwame told them to please hurry because he had a paper to turn in. What a fucking soldier

After witnessing Kwame’s ordeal, I switched from coffee to Irish Breakfast Tea. Though the caffeine concentration was lower, I learned that the tea was more than enough to keep me awake if I sipped a cup every two hours. 

With only one last round of revision ahead of me, I should need only one more cup to finish things off. I’m about to get up and fetch some hot water, but the turn of a door handle keeps me in my seat. When the door at the front of the lab opens, a column of light tumbles in, followed by a towering cumulonimbus cloud and then an angel. An angel I know personally. Clara Marseille. 

I’ve been crushing on Clara since day one at Creedmoor, when we sat next to each other in our First Year Writing Seminar. I haven’t talked to her since, but that hasn’t stopped me from living out our entire life together in my head. Everytime I see her around campus, I add another lush chapter to our romance. We’ve climbed mountains, traveled the world, and exchanged vows at a rock concert. We’ve enjoyed successful careers in the arts and raised a couple of kids who have added their own glorious chapters to the family legacy. We’ve died together hand in hand, at the exact same time on the exact same day some seventy years from now. 

Clara’s eyes are emerald pools, her hair is long, black, and flowing about her head like a dark corona. When she enters the room she moves like a mirage, floating the floor on a thin layer of sparkling mist. 

“Hey, Russell.” She waves at me, and little embers dance off her fingertips. 

In my disheveled state, Clara’s address doesn’t register as actual. I haven’t ever even tried to talk to her again. Instead, I’ve remained perfectly content with our love-in theory, the idea of us. If college has taught me anything, it’s that ideas are way sexier and more reliable than the real thing. 

Turning in my chair, I stare back blankly, entirely convinced that this Clara is nothing more than a projection

“Hey Russel. You good?” 

The mist dissipates, her hair falls across the strong curves of her shoulders, and she smiles. At me? At me. Not out of courtesy or pity. Not like I’m some cooped-up weirdo, but like I’m a person genuinely worth smiling at. Even for a being as impossibly flawless as Clara Marseille.

“Y-yeah. I’m good.” Even more terrifying than her question is the sound of my own voice. Compared to the carefully-honed eloquence of my writing, my speaking rings small and pathetic. “H-how are you? Wrapped up your finals yet?”

“Yeah, I finished last night. Just have to print something off,” she gestures at the old copy machine.  “I take it you’re going down to the wire?” She nods at me and my nest of refuse. 

“Umm, yeah.” I lift my tepid cup of tea in salute. 

“You know,” Clara continues casually, leaning back on the desk chair behind her, “I always see you down here working your ass off. Seems like you really care about what you’re studying.”

“Ha. Yeah.” I manage to pry my fingers from the keyboard and turn all the way toward her. “I’ve got the try-hard gene. Mix in clinical anxiety plus a heaping helping of imposter syndrome, and I pretty much spend most of my time in this basement.”

She laughs and I dip my head bashfully, but on the inside I’m beaming with pride. 

“Try hard,” Clara considers the words carefully, resting her chin in her palm. “I’ve always thought that was a stupid term. If we’re not trying, then why are we here?”

“Well I think some people are here because someone in their family paid for a new building. And I think a lot of people are here just because their parents expect greatness from them. But yeah, there are a few of us who are actually trying.”

I’m shocked at my own candor and hope Clara doesn’t take it the wrong way. I guess three days without sleep has helped me to shed some of my inhibitions. 

“Well, sure,” she laughs. “But I mean, like, here on this planet. I think trying is great. I feel the best when I go to bed exhausted, knowing that I poured my whole heart into whatever I got up to that day. Seems like you understand that feeling even better than I do.” 

“Eh, I guess you could say that.” I have a special gift for dodging compliments. “Or maybe I’m just a little slow on the uptake. To tell you the truth,  I always feel like a bit of a freak down here. Or just plain stupid.”

“Stupid? Russel, what the hell are you talking about? No one thinks that. I definitely don’t think that. I read your writing when we were first years and it was insanely good, so I’m sure you’re like the next James Baldwin by now.” 

“Well, that’s nice of you to say.” A lump forms in my throat and my skin goes electric. I can feel my face burning red but I don’t even care. “You were always so eloquent in those writing sem discussions. All that hard theory we read seemed to come to you so easily. People like you really intimidated me. Just breezing by while I was playing catch-up.”

“Russel.” Clara stares me down like I’ve got a hole in my head. “No one has been breezing through this place. And anyone who acts that way is either failing or fucking faking it. I get theory because I work to get it. I spent the last few days sleep-deprived and obsessing over essays that barely matter anymore, just like you. I’m just not as messy.”

Embarrassed, I look back down and start to consolidate my sprawl of trash. “Well, I really appreciate the validation,” is all I can think to say. “It’ll do me good as I wrap up the last one.”

“No problem,” she shrugs.

There’s a little silence as I go about collecting three days of wrappers and cups and shriveled-up tea bags. I assume that Clara has moved on to her printing, but then she gut punches me with an unbelievable question.

“Hey, Russel. Once you come back up into the light of day, would you want to grab coffee or something?” 

Snapping to attention, I see that she is biting her lip and staring down at her feet, for the first time looking just as nervous as I feel everytime I see her. 

My lips begin to form the words of course, as my brain reminds me not to sound too eager. But just before my lips and my brain can get on the same page, my eyes drift to the clock in the corner of my computer screen: 10:36 AM. 

Fuck. Just under ninety minutes until this essay is due. All my excessive polishing has me running the risk of blowing my Senior finals period, falling inches short of the finish line I’ve been barreling toward for the past four years.

When I refocus my attention, I see the ground beneath Clara erupt in flames. The lab’s fluorescent lights flicker out and the fire casts treacherous shadows across her face. Though Clara doesn’t seem to notice, I watch in horror as a chasm opens in the floor between us, spitting lava and sparks. 

“Um, well,” I say in a too-loud voice, grinning sheepishly. The heat has me sweating bullets again. “You know, I probably can’t. Still got a few more pages to edit, and when the clock runs out,” I nod toward my old friend on the back wall, “I think I’m gonna pass out for like twenty hours.” 

“Oh. Okay.” Clara frowns slightly, then quickly makes her frown disappear behind a smile. “Well I admire you, Russel. And I really wish we’d had the chance to get to know one another better. Have a great life, okay?”

As she says this, the flames die out, the chasm closes, and the room goes cold. 

“Thanks, Clara.” My words are lost in the sudden howl of an Arctic wind. 

As she turns away to sit down at a computer, goosebumps raise up all along my arms. A thick frost creeps across the wall above her. Icicles form in all the corners of the lab.

As Clara goes about printing, I get back to my writing, and the climate in the room returns to normal. When I hear her finish, I turn back around, but she has her sights set straight ahead. The sparkling mist reappears and a cloud emerges behind her, shuttling her back out the door. I glimpse wing tips just before it closes. 

I spend the next eighty minutes in a revisionary fervor that makes me forget just how good it felt talking to Clara. In the last five minutes of my last Creedmoor Finals, I sprint all the way across campus to slam dunk my paper into a manila folder posted outside my professor’s office. 

I will see Clara later that week at graduation. As she returns to her seat after receiving her degree, she will smile at me, both acknowledging and forgiving the nice-awkward moment we shared a few days before. The smile will say that I probably could have kissed her there in the computer lab if I had wanted to, if I was concerned with that sort of thing. 

I will not smile back. Instead, I will instinctively avert my gaze. This will make Clara very sad, and Clara is not a girl who has very much to be sad about. Our moment of misrecognition will cut a little scar on a day that is supposed to be nothing but special. 

When I look down into my lap, my eyes will fall on a leather folder impressed with the seal of a Little Ivy, a special place to keep my hardwon diploma. When the certificate arrives in the mail, it will bear the words Summa cum Laude–Latin proof that I fully conquered the school where I always felt like I was falling behind. 

Over the years, my diploma will drift from a shelf in my childhood bedroom, to the wall of the office in my first apartment, to a box in the basement of the house I’ll buy with the first person who I learn to love. My success at Creedmoor will get me a lot of things, though my favorite readings will fade from memory, and all my prized essays will eventually end up in recycling bins. I will cling to only a few lasting treasures–office hours-wisdom from my best professors, delirious laughs with Kwame, the time my crush wandered into the computer lab as I was on the verge of losing my mind.  

Some seventy years after graduation day, when my brain is little more than gray matter and even those token memories have turned to dust, one image will loom larger still. There in the blur I will see a kindness left hanging, the time I failed Clara Marseilles.