“I guess Pembroke has this aura,” she said, making a wide motion with her arms, “that’s old-money, WASP, and conservative. I still feel like I need to prove that I belong there. And you’d think I’d get the hang of it, after moving around so much, but I still feel like the new kid trying to find a place to sit in the cafeteria. You know what I mean?”

John nodded as he started on another tomato. “Kind of,” he said. “I haven’t had to be the new kid too often, but the ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it’ nonsense from graduate school still lingers.”

“Exactly! And I feel like I’m faking it. I just want to know when I’m going to make it. I’m thirty-four and I’m an assistant professor, which qualifies as “making it” in academia, but I still have to do so much extra work to be seen. It doesn’t matter that I ran the same race, jumped the same hurdles as the assholes in my department, and I still have to put up with their shit.”

Her rare curse word made him glanced up from his chopping to see her take another drink. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said with a sad smile.

“Go on,” he said. “I’m not going to tell your department that you feel inadequate.”

She shrugged. “I’ve talked to my girlfriends about this a million times. When you’re a woman trying to be yourself in these institutions that don’t want you, that didn’t ask for you to pull up a seat at the table... You get angry, and you want to lash out. But you don’t, because being angry comes with a whole host of implications. You end up getting called aggressive or hysterical by a man who hasn’t had to worry about job security since the ’70s.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t know if any of that makes sense,” she said in an apologetic tone.

John transferred more chopped tomato to his bowl before wiping his hands on the towel on his shoulder. “You’re actually making perfect sense,” he said as he ducked down to retrieve a skillet.

Victoria frowned. “Yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, placing the skillet on the stove. “My sister, Jessi, has said the same thing for years. She’s a civil engineer and it’s a regular boy’s club wherever she works. She never has the opportunity to be angry in public. She saves it for me actually. We usually hit the gym and beat the ever-living shit out of a punching bag.”

“Does it help her?” Victoria asked sitting up.