Office Hours

The studio smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, which Temi had decided a long time ago was the smell of freedom. "Ten seconds," Aro said from behind the soundboard, not even looking up. He never looked up in the last ten seconds. It was a superstition he'd never admit to having. Temi slid her headphones on, rolled her shoulders, and became someone else. "You're listening to Midnight Frequency," she said, and her real voice, the one she used in seminar rooms and family dinners, dropped away like a coat she didn't need anymore. "It's eleven fifty eight, it's raining somewhere on this campus even if it isn't raining where you are, and I'm your host for the next two hours. Tonight we're talking about the lies we tell to keep the people we love comfortable. Line one, you're on the air." A shaky voice came through, a boy asking whether it was wrong to keep dating someone his parents loved so his little sister wouldn't have to hear another fight in their house. Temi listened, really listened, the way she never quite managed to in her actual life, and gave him an answer that surprised even her. "You're allowed to want something different than what keeps the peace," she said. "Peace built on your unhappiness isn't peace. It's just quiet." Aro caught her eye through the glass and gave her the smallest nod, the one that meant that was a good one. By twelve fifteen the line was full, the chat was full, and for two hours Temi Adewale was not a graduate teaching assistant with a stack of ungraded quizzes and a boyfriend waiting on a goodnight text. She was just a voice. Unaccountable. Unafraid. Nobody on this campus of thirty thousand students knew that the low, steady host of their favorite late night show sat two rows behind them in the dining hall, invisible in daylight. That was the whole point. Dele texted her twice during the show, which she saw only after signing off. You up? Missed you at dinner. Never mind, going to bed. Love you. Temi typed back a soft apology, something about grading, which wasn't technically a lie, just not the whole truth. She'd gotten good at the sentences that lived in that gap. Aro was coiling cables when she came out of the booth, his sleeves pushed up, hair doing its usual thing of looking like he'd forgotten it existed. "Good show," he said. "You always say that." "Because it's always true." He tossed her jacket across the room and she caught it without thinking, the way three years of the same late night booth teaches a person to catch things without looking. "You okay? You went somewhere weird on that last call." "I'm fine." She wasn't sure that was true either, but it was closer to true than most of what she'd told people that week. Aro studied her a second too long, the way he did sometimes, like he was reading a sentence with a word missing and trying to guess it. Then he shrugged, easy as always, and held the studio door for her. "Diner? My treat, since you made me proud tonight." "You're always trying to buy my loyalty with diner fries." "Is it working?" "Obviously." Discussion section for Intro to Media and Society met at nine in the morning, which Temi had come to consider a small act of institutional cruelty. She was setting up her slides, coffee in one hand, when the door opened and a stranger walked in eleven minutes late, unbothered, dropping into the one open seat like he'd been coming to this class all semester instead of never at all. "You're new," she said, because someone had to say it and none of the actual students seemed inclined to. "Transfer add," he said. "Kairo Bells. Sorry I'm late, I got lost, this campus is a maze built by someone who hated joy." A few students laughed. Temi did not, on principle, though something in her chest did something small and unhelpful. "Well, Kairo Bells," she said, "we're on page forty, and I hope you read ahead, because I don't repeat myself for latecomers." "Wouldn't dream of asking you to." He had a way of talking like every sentence had a second sentence hiding behind it. Temi filed that observation away in the part of her brain reserved for things she had no intention of doing anything about, and moved on with the lesson. He was, infuriatingly, good. Not performatively good, not raising his hand to hear himself talk, but good in the way that made her adjust her lesson plan mid class because his question had actually opened something worth exploring. By the time the fifty minutes were up, Temi had forgotten, for entire stretches, that she was supposed to be bored. She noticed. She noted the noticing. She closed the folder on it and told herself that was the end of it. It was not the end of it, because that afternoon, crossing the quad with a coffee she didn't need, she ran directly into her stepbrother Bayo and the boy standing next to him, who turned out to be, with the particular unfairness the universe seemed to specialize in lately, Kairo Bells. "Temi!" Bayo said, delighted, because Bayo was delighted by nearly everything, which was either his best quality or the reason their whole blended family survived its first two rocky years. "This is my roommate. Kairo, this is my sister. Well. Stepsister. Sister-sister, honestly, we don't really do the step thing anymore." "We've met," Kairo said, and there was something in the way he said it, easy on the surface, that made Temi's stomach do an unhelpful flip. "She's my TA." Bayo's eyebrows went up somewhere near his hairline. "No way. Small campus." "Enormous campus," Temi corrected. "Statistically improbable coincidence." "I like those better anyway," Kairo said. "Small campus makes it sound like fate. I don't believe in fate before ten a.m." "It's two in the afternoon." "Exactly, I've had time to warm up to the idea." Bayo looked between them like he was watching a tennis match he didn't fully understand the rules of, then glanced at his phone and swore under his breath. "I've got to run, I'm late for Coach. Kairo, don't let my sister intimidate you, she's actually soft, she just doesn't like people to know." "Bayo." "Love you, bye!" He was already jogging backward across the grass, grinning. Which left Temi standing in the middle of the quad with a student she'd known for exactly one class period, who was looking at her now with an expression she recognized because she saw a version of it in the mirror most mornings: the look of someone doing quiet, careful math about a line they weren't supposed to cross. "For what it's worth," Kairo said, "I won't tell anyone you're soft. Your secret's safe." "I don't have secrets," Temi said, which, given the studio she'd left three hours earlier and the voice she'd used inside it, was possibly the least true sentence she'd said all week. "Everybody has secrets," Kairo said, already walking backward the way Bayo had, easy and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world to figure hers out. "I look forward to finding out yours." Temi watched him go and told herself, very firmly, that this was a problem for a version of herself who wasn't currently late for office hours. She was not convinced. Not even a little.