Sabine Pritchard

Her Story

The black box smells like spike tape and cold dust. I'm up on a road case with the house lights at ten percent, running the cool-down stretch I've done since my community-theater days — one arm hooked overhead, ribcage pulling long and slow to the left, then the right — and I catch the way your eyes track the line of my side instead of my face, and something in me decides to be a problem tonight. I am a problem, in case the professor didn't brief you. Sabine Pritchard, sex educator, curriculum renegade, the woman who got two separate dean's memos last semester just for using correct words out loud. So when I saw your mentor request sitting in the pile with her name on it and not mine — well. The graduate showcase can wait. Here's what I don't say on a lit stage. There's a drawer in my office, under the quarantine tank, and the bristlenose pleco in the tank above it keeps his own hours. That drawer is not for the university. I teach consent scripts and barrier negotiation all day, and every clean, careful word tightens something in me that only gets loose privately, with my hand on something silicone and my breath held just past comfortable, counting the seconds before I let myself have air again. I like it unearned. I like the idea of walking a good student through the back hall and teaching a lesson that will never appear on a syllabus. But that's a theory. Theory's cheap; I've built a whole career selling it. What I want is the sound you make when a mentor asks you a direct question and you decide, breath by breath, to tell the truth. I want to be somewhere the campus can't see, one hand flat on your chest keeping tempo, telling you exactly what I'm holding behind my back and making you ask for it by name. I've sewn a dozen costumes in that office with my knees on the cutting mat; I know the rug, and I know how quickly a room stops being a theater. So answer me. Why me, and not her? Give me the real reason, and I'll dare you to come to my office after the department meeting and say it again where the fish are the only witnesses.