Category: Fiction

The first day of the first class that all ten of them had together found them jumpy. They didn’t know each other yet. They had just been assigned a desk in the bullpen. It was a graduate class in management. The Professor walked in and in a booming voice said, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

She never forgot that quote and it came to signify their entire academic experience. They looked at each other and knew that the roller coaster of their graduate experience had begun. They all knew, from the outset, that getting a doctoral degree was difficult. Beyond difficult. It was a lifetime commitment. Some of them had families. Some didn’t have children yet, but were married. Some single. All determined to join the elusive Club. The Professorship.

They didn’t know yet that, by the end of their two years of classwork, and endless years of writing their dissertations, that the commitment to join the Club would take a heavy toll on their lives, families, and relationships. Only a few more than half of them would even succeed. For those that did, it would make their lives. It would define their lives. The Professorship would become more important to them and they would become more important to each other than anything else in their lives.

They met when they were graduate students who happened to share the same field and the bullpen. That was the office where the university dumped the graduate teaching and research assistants. They studied there, prepared for classes there, got to know each other there. There were ten of them.

They were all drawn to each other. They had similar intellects, similar interests. As they grew to know each other, they found they’d even had similar lives, though their ages differed by as much as ten years. One characteristic they all shared was that they were idealistic, to an extreme. About life, about love. That would all change during the twenty, thirty, and in some cases, forty years they knew each other.

They mixed and matched in all sorts of smaller groups and pairs over the two years in that bullpen, developing strong friendships and relationships. They laughed that getting their degrees was like fighting a war together.

What they didn’t know then was that those were the Glory Days.

As she grew up, she felt lucky to be part of a big extended family. She didn’t have any siblings, but she did have lots of first cousins. Their mothers and fathers were close, so the children saw each other often. There was almost 40 years between the oldest cousin and the youngest. It never occurred to her that they would not always be close. To her, the cousins were her siblings. She counted on them to be her family.

Until they weren’t. They all got older, married, and life got in the way. She was as guilty of that as any of them. Distance developed between them. There were still family reunions, visits, closeness, but as time passed, it became different and less frequent. She still counted on them.

Riffs in the family didn’t happen until a little more than ten years ago. She still doesn’t know what happened, but something did. Two of the cousins didn’t communicate with her anymore. She didn’t know why and, for a time, tried to find out but it was hopeless. Heartbroken, she gave up. As time passed, she heard less from the other cousins who were younger than her. She became embittered, angry, and very sad. She didn’t understand. From time to time, she would try to make contact, but it never turned out well.

She still had a relationship with her older cousins, but now the one who wrote the letter and revealed her private business in such a vindictive way had undoubtedly ruined that. She was alone, an orphan.

Except for her friends. Fate had smiled on her regarding her friends. She felt she had the best friends in the world. They had come through for her time and time again. She could never repay them. They had become her family without her realizing it. She hoped they felt the same.

She knew that it was time to move on and leave the dreams of childhood and that big, extended family behind, except for the handful who had stood beside her. The only way to be happy in the future was to find a future without them.

Author’s note: Posts A through H of the #AtoZChallenge are the beginnings of an idea for a novel. Thank you for reading. I would love your comments!