Two years ago, I took my brightest student ever out for beers. I was about to offer her an editing gig for Microsoft. First, though, I would follow my custom and pump her full of Bud Truth Serum. It didn't take her long to lament that she'd had to withdraw her applications to grad school. She was flat broke.
"You haven't withdrawn them yet, have you?" I replied, aghast.
And thus did my mentoring of Darcy commence as these things should: in a sleazy bar.
I adored Darcy. She was exactly why I still dabble in teaching. A great person, warm, brilliant, full of light and promise. To help her go to grad school would doubtless be one of my greatest accomplishments in life. I was excited. And then a friend had to go and mention a nightmarish and all-too-likely scenario.
"So how will you feel if she ends up staying with Microsoft, doesn't go to grad school, marries a soulless Microsoft loser, and bit by bit you see all those great qualities sucked out of her like they are the rest of us? If you become the agent of Darcy's destruction?"
Utterly. Mortifying.
"Okay, so here's the deal," I barked at Darcy later that day. "After a year, you're fired. And if you date a co-worker, you're fired."
"You can't do that!"
"Try me."
Even though she ended up working for two years, I was hyper-protective of her. She never met management. She never went to a meeting on campus. She never met a co-worker who wasn't a middle-aged woman. My proudest moment came when Darcy met a guy in a bar and he asked her out. Seeing his Microsoft badge, she turned him down flat. "My mentor would kill me."
"I don't believe Darcy really exists," a handsome young writer told me just last week.
"Fuck off," I replied. I almost have this cow in the barn. I'm not spooking it now.
Today is Darcy's last day in her job, and in a month she'll be in the grad school of her choice, where presumably her soul will be fed, not depleted. We went out to dinner last week, reflecting both backward and forward.
"One of the things I've learned in the last two years, and I hope this doesn't offend you," she began hesitatingly, "is that I don't want to work with Microsoft."
I have never loved another human being more than I loved Darcy in that moment. I gave her a hug.
"I have nothing more to teach you."