It's Not Shakespeare

Chapter 1

Adult Dystopia

J
AMES
A
LAN
R
ICHARDS
hated his name. He hated his name, he hated his dirty blond hair and receding hairline, he hated his hazel eyes, and he hated the last pair of glasses he picked out for his astigmatism. He hated his outdated cell phone, his shitty old car, his prick of an agent, his douchebag department head, and his teeny-tiny office with the old wood furniture that got all sticky with dust over the summer and smelled like cottage cheese, old wood polish, and sweat socks. And he
really
hated turning forty-fucking-three. He particularly hated that no matter how much he worked out and watched his diet, his muscles seemed to get massier with age, instead of staying lean and pretty.

But in spite of all of that, he didn’t feel like a bitter person.

For one thing, he loved his job.

For another, he loved his Boston terrier, Marlowe. He loved Marlowe’s sporty black face and white throat and stomach, his pink, happy tongue, and his constantly surprised, protuberant eyes. He loved the fact that Marlowe would lick his face or his hands or his ankle or his pants leg or his toes (if they were bare) at any time of the day. He loved that Marlowe started out the night sleeping at the foot of his bed but eventually crawled under the covers, so that when the alarm went off he was in place to lick James’s toes until he got up.

And he loved taking Marlowe to the dog park that was a ten minute drive from his little community college in Rocklin, and throwing that little grunting, slobbering miracle of goodwill his own special doggie ball in the Roseville dog park until Marlowe was so exhausted he rolled over on his back and looked piteous enough to be carried to the car, like a perky insufferable cat.

James loved it when Marlowe did that. It made him feel needed and special, as though there were one human and one human only on the planet who could meet that need in Marlowe and James was it! Huzzah! Two doctorates in literature, a tenured professorship, a decent house, and it all meant squat. His crowning achievement was carrying a Boston terrier to the car because he was sucker enough to believe the little rat bastard when he lolled his tongue and said, in his particular doggie way, “Oooohhh puhlleeeezzz, nice human, if you don’t tote my fat, lazy terrier ass to the car I shall surely dai-eeee!”

Okay. Maybe he was a
little
bitter, but he tried not to take it out on Marlowe. It wasn’t Marlowe’s fault that the little goombah was the only thing in James’s life that knew the concept of loyalty and devotion.

But still, those stolen hours in the Roseville dog park remained the highlight of James’s day.

One day in early April, about three weeks before spring break, James was standing at the door of room H-12 in the Humanities building, thinking longingly of that hour in the dog park and then an hour working out on the equipment in his spare room. He was startled out of his rather tame daydream when an androgynous Goth chick with dyed blue-black hair sticking out in clumps from a hack job and too much hair glue slunk out of her seat in the corner of the room and slouched to the opposite end of the door frame from James. She stood there, scowling at him from black mascara, black eye shadow, black lipstick, and white foundation, apparently doing nothing but breathing and catching light from the ghastly fluorescent fixtures in the silver piercings that lined her ears, punctured her nostril, her lip, and her eyebrow.

James smiled warmly. He honestly did like teaching literature, and Sophie was in his science-fiction/fantasy class. He’d had to get special permission to teach the class at South Placer Community College—it was actually graduate level course, but they managed to sneak it in as a humanities class at the community level.

“So, Sophie, did you enjoy the talk on Silverberg?”

Sophie Winchester wrinkled her freckled nose. (At least it looked freckled under the deadly pallor of her make-up.)

“Yeah, sort of,” she grunted. “But I wanna know something.”

James raised his eyebrows. “Sort of” was high praise from Sophie—he’d learned that when he’d had her for English 1A, and he’d passed out the traditional teacher evaluations at the end of class. His had said,
Wasn’t a complete weenie,
and at first, he’d been offended. Then he’d caught one of his colleagues reading a long, detailed diatribe in the same handwriting, outlining the man’s deficiencies in historical theory, with annotations. Sophie’s distinct “serial killers got nothin’ on me” style penmanship was hard to miss. About then, he’d decided that
Wasn’t a complete weenie
might be Sophie code for
Teaches like a fucking god!

“Okay,” James said cautiously—Sophie’s papers were brilliant, but they were also written with an acid tongue, and James was almost afraid of what she was going to say next.

“All right, so I’ve had Psych 101, and I get the whole Freudian school of interpretation, but really? Do you have to say the tower of glass was phallic? I mean, why can’t missile-shaped objects just be the shape of aggression toward the universe? Why does it have to be a really giant penis? Because, I’ve got to tell you, it doesn’t speak well of men when you do that. And I would be totally pissed off if you started referring to negative energy characters as cavernous vaginas of need.”

James gaped at her. He realized that his mouth was open, and he closed it out of instinct and then looked down at Marlowe, who, he was starting to think, was the only sympathetic soul on the planet.

“Uhm,” he said, floundering, “I guess that, uhm, the missile-shaped object is just a traditionally male force. I mean, uhm, we
are
equipped with one from birth, right? I mean, I can see how you could make those energies neutral, but if you started talking in terms of ‘positive aggressive energy’ and ‘negative mutable energy’, people would start falling asleep before you got to the actual concept, don’t you think?”

Sophie listened, and then thought for a couple of beats, and then took a deep, meditative breath. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Is there a type of literature where gender roles are exploded and the actual energies don’t have a traditional chromosomal energy signature?”

James fought the temptation to repeat “traditional chromosomal energy signature,” just because it was such an awesome example of erudition gone weird, and thought hard to answer her question.

“Uhm, postmodernism works with exploding traditional literary forms,” he said seriously, “but, uhm, I don’t teach that class. You’ll have to wait until you hit a four-year school, probably graduate level. So, uhm, why are you at South Placer?”

Sophie grunted. “My parents are teachers. Lots of knowledge. Just enough money to qualify for jack-fucking-squat in the land of financial aid.”

James grimaced. “Fucking NCLB,” he muttered, and Sophie rolled her eyes and nodded. No Child Left Behind—the nation’s big lie about making everybody ready for college. The bill had produced the singular effect of making every ambitious student apply for college when the thing they’d really rather do or be was actually in a vocational school or another area of post-high-school education completely. The result was that the community colleges were stuffed full of bewildered students who couldn’t get
any
of their classes, and running
very
low on professors to teach those classes because
nobody
was getting any money to hire. And the number of students who dropped out in order to pay their own rent was appalling.

But not Sophie, James thought in admiration. Sophie was going to make it or kill someone trying.

He was just a little bit relieved that he wasn’t the one she’d be gunning for. But right now, she was looking at her watch and grunting hostilely, as though she had someone in her sights.

“Uhm,” James said brightly, “are you, uhm, waiting for someone?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “I
was
waiting for someone, but he’s officially too late, and now I’m just pissed at someone.” For the first time, to his knowledge, she looked just a tad bit self-conscious. She looked up and caught his sympathetic gaze, scowled, and then bent and scratched Marlowe between the eyes.

“You get it, don’t you, Marlowe?” she said, and James thought he saw spots in front of his eyes. If he didn’t know that was Sophie’s voice, he would have thought it belonged to an actual girl. “Men are fuckers, even the ones who are supposed to know what it’s like to be a gaping vagina of need.”

James felt bad, then. She’d obviously been killing time while waiting for her boyfriend, and now she was embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Sophie, Did your date stand you up?”

“Not mine,” she muttered. “Yours.” She sighed again, met his eyes with her own disgruntled brown ones, and said, “Damn. He really fucking wanted to meet you, too. I’m sorry, Professor—I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

James gaped at her—
again.
“Sophie?” he asked, his voice pitching up about two octaves. “You were going to set me up with a
man?
”

“Well, aren’t you gay?” she said, looking bewildered for the first time since he’d seen her,
ever.

“Well,
yes,
” he snapped, “but it’s hardly common knowledge.”

She pursed her lips and pulled her head back, clearly surprised. “To
whom?
”

“Well, uhm, you know. To
everybody.
”

Sophie didn’t say anything. She just gaped back at him and then whirled around and stalked off, mumbling something about the world being full of fucking idiots, and no wonder they thought she was strange if they were all so goddamned stupid. James watched her go, opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish, until Marlowe yelped a little and stood up, resting his front two paws delicately on James’s pant leg. James bent down and scratched his head, talking softly to him.

“It’s not like I wander around campus with a himbo on my arm, right?”

Marlowe licked his hand and assured him that no, most assuredly James did
not
walk around campus necking with available tadpoles, and while James was taking solace from his dog, a shadow fell over them both.

James straightened up and smiled warmly, thinking it was someone looking for directions, and what he saw made his mouth run dry.

“Uhm….” Bloody ass-fucking hell—“uhm” really was his word of the day, wasn’t it? Didn’t he have a degree or two in something involving actual words?

The young man across from him was…. Holy Jesus, the last time James had seen someone that beautiful had been the night before on his computer, at one of the nicer pay-for-porn sites, when James had given up and masturbated in sheer desperation. And this guy was
so
his type, too. (On the computer, at least. In real life, James tended to date bookish, pale-looking men a lot like himself, except without the stunning personality defect of owning a dog or having a sense of humor.) He was about an inch shorter than James, with longish hair, the kind that was parted in the middle and would have hung in his eyes except for the cunning use of layers as it framed his face. His eyes were brown-black, and his skin was dusky, Latino brown. He had tattoos, big ones, of twined barbed wire and a dragon, wrapping in a coil from his elbow to his shoulder on both arms. His biceps were thick, ripped, and totally impressive, his red tank top clung to his narrow waist and his wide chest, and his mouth was as pillowy as a mattress commercial.

And now those pillow lips were twisted in an irritated grimace.

“Is this where Sophie Winchester has class?” he asked, and James tried not to let his heart just leap out of his chest.
This
was the guy Sophie had been trying to fix him up with? James’s opinion of Sophie’s taste skyrocketed—but his opinion of her intelligence took a few hits. Like
this
guy was going to be interested in bookish, geeky, sandy-haired, pale James.

“Yes,” James said through a dry mouth. He pointed weakly. “She went that way.”

That grimace again, with those sexy pink lips. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” For the life of him, James couldn’t think of another damned thing to say.

The guy looked down at Marlowe, who was sitting on his haunches, one paw balanced on James’s trouser cuff. “Nice dog!” he said with appreciation. James summoned up a smile—because who couldn’t smile about his dog, right? And the underwear model smiled back, something warm in his eyes, before turning on his heel, leaving James to lean back against the frame of the old classroom and taste his beating heart in his throat.

“Did you see that, Marlowe? That was as close as I’ll ever get to a real underwear model. What in the hell was that girl thinking?”

Marlowe’s only answer was to bark impatiently, and James went back into the classroom to fetch his briefcase and Marlowe’s lead. He had an appointment with a dog park that was suddenly looking not nearly as fulfilling as it had ten minutes ago.

I
T
WAS
a nice spring day, at least—or, it should have been spring. It had snowed in the Sierras well into the first week of April and rained down in Roseville. When normally the air would have been balmy, even sticky and warm, there was still a bite of wind in the air and big, puffy gray clouds wallowing in from off the Sierras.