My Professor’s Dark Christmas Obsession

The email arrived at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, which was already a weird time to get anything from Hartwell University’s system. Autumn almost didn't open it. She was curled up in bed with a half-eaten bag of chips on her lap and her laptop balanced on her knees, doing that thing she did at the end of hard days where she just scrolled without really seeing anything. Her roommate Maya was asleep in the next room. The apartment was quiet and cold because the heating unit had been making a sound lately that she didn't trust, so she kept it low. She opened the email. “Your enrollment in ADV LIT 490 has been confirmed. You are currently the only registered student. Your instructor, Dr. Gabriel Moreau, has been notified. First session: December 10th, 9 AM, Whitmore Hall, Room 114.” She read it three times. She had been trying to get into that class since October. The registration portal had rejected her four separate times, thrown error messages, deleted her waitlist spot without warning, and once, in what she could only describe as a personal attack, crashed entirely while she was in the middle of filling out the override form. Her advisor had told her to just keep trying. It was just an admin thing, he had said, waving his hand like the last two months of her life hadn't been a bureaucratic nightmare. She had needed that credit to graduate in January. So she kept trying until something finally gave. Autumn was the only registered student. She told herself it was fine. Told herself it was actually great, being the only student. It would result in more attention, more discussion, and a faster pace. She told herself a lot of things that night and believed most of them. She did not sleep well. December 10th was a Wednesday and Hartwell University looked like a movie set that had been abandoned mid-production. The winter term barely qualified as a real semester. Most of the students had gone home a week ago, leaving behind empty dorm buildings and parking lots with maybe three cars in them and hallways that echoed in a way that made Autumn feel like she was trespassing. She jogged through the cold with her bag bouncing against her hip and her breath coming out in little white clouds, seven minutes late because she had stood in front of her closet for too long that morning for reasons she was not willing to examine. She found Room 114 at the very end of the humanities building, at the end of a corridor where all the other classrooms were dark. She stopped outside the door for a second. Through the narrow window in the door, she could see the back of a man writing on the board. There was just one desk and just one chair. Just him. She pushed the door open. "Miss Calloway." He turned around before she had fully stepped inside, like he had heard her coming from the end of the hall. "You're seven minutes late." He said it the way someone might comment on the weather. He wasn’t annoyed or trying to be patient. It was just like he noted a fact and moved on. He was taller than she had expected, with dark hair turning silver at the sides and the kind of calm, steady face that made you feel like he was always a few steps ahead of whatever was happening. He was looking at her like he had been expecting her specifically, not just any student, not just whoever had enrolled in his class, but her, Autumn Calloway, in this coat, with this bag, seven minutes late. It should have felt strange. It felt like a relief, which was somehow worse. "Sorry," she said. "The registration portal had me convinced this room was in the science building until about twenty minutes ago." "Sit down," he said, and turned back to the board. She sat. She looked at the empty room around her, eleven vacant chairs, one board covered in dense handwriting, one professor who already knew her name without her saying it, and she thought: I should ask about the other students. But she didn't ask. For the next two hours, Gabriel Moreau took apart three hundred years of literary theory and rebuilt it in front of her like it was alive. He was demanding and precise and he listened to her push back on him the way very few professors ever had, like her argument actually had the chance of landing somewhere. He asked her eleven questions. She counted them without meaning to. Every single one felt like it had been made to fit the exact shape of how her brain worked, like he had read something she had written in private and built a syllabus around it. "Tell me what you think the text is hiding," he said near the end of the session, leaning back against his desk with his arms crossed, watching her. "I think it's hiding the author," she said. "I think the whole thing is a misdirect. All that language, all that structure, it's a curtain. You pull it back and there's just a person who was scared of something and couldn't say it out loud." He was quiet for a second. Then he said: "Yes." Just that. Like she had said something he had been waiting a long time to hear. She walked out of the building into the cold and stood at the top of the steps and felt something she hadn't felt in years. Like her brain was actually on. Like someone had finally turned a light on in a room she had been sitting in the dark. She pulled out her phone to text Jess about it, opening the thread and staring at it. Their last real conversation was eight days ago and it had felt off in a way Autumn still couldn't name, like Jess was holding something back, or had already decided something about her that she hadn't said yet. She locked her phone and walked to her car. She told herself she would text Jess tomorrow. She didn't ask herself why she hadn't told anyone about the class being empty. She figured there was a reasonable explanation. She was good at that, finding reasonable explanations. What she didn't know, walking across that empty parking lot with her face turned away from the wind, was that the class had been built for her. Not stumbled into, or assigned to. Built. The registration errors had not been a glitch. They had been a filter, run quietly and patiently over eight weeks, testing whether she would keep pushing until something gave. She had pushed. She had given him exactly the answer he needed. That night, two floors below her apartment, her neighbor Paul opened his laptop and sent a message. Paul: She took the bait. First session complete. Then he closed the laptop and went to bed. The building was quiet, and Autumn lay on her ceiling staring up at the dark, thinking about the way Gabriel had said her name when she walked in. Not like he was reading it off a list. Like it was a word he had been holding in his mouth for a long time and had finally been allowed to say out loud. She told herself that was a strange thing to think. She told herself to go to sleep. She did not go to sleep for a very long time.