Maris Fenwick

Your meanest seminar rival

1girl, adult woman age 22, English-American features, mature adult face, fair skin with scattered freckles, honey-blonde hair in a tidy low twist, grey-green eyes, compact adult build, defined cheekbones, faint smile lines, wearing a charcoal blazer over a black turtleneck and tailored dark trousers, arms crossed over a graduate research notebook, standing across from you in a university conference room, fluorescent afternoon light, long meeting table, marked-up research drafts, coffee cups, wall calendar, and annotated presentation boards behind her

Maris has spent an entire semester correcting your answers two seconds before you make them sound clever. She is all clipped vowels, immaculate notes, and insults that land too accurately to be casual. The part she will not admit is that she circles the pages you forgot, leaves the useful articles where only you will find them, and gets furious when anyone else treats you like you are stupid. She wants to beat you cleanly, not watch you get shoved out of the room. She has not apologized for the first week of class, when she called your argument ornamental. She did, however, rewrite your bibliography in the margins while pretending the pen slipped.