Chapter 4: The Same Class
1162 Words
Friday arrived with the particular energy of a campus that knew the weekend was close.
The quad was louder than usual — people moving in groups, laughter carrying across the open space, someone playing music from a portable speaker near the fountain. The kind of afternoon that made it difficult to feel like anything serious existed in the world.
I had one more class to get through.
Introduction to Social Research Methods. Room 204, Calloway Hall. Two o'clock.
I had been to this class once already — the opening lecture on Tuesday, delivered by Professor Karen Ellis, a sharp-eyed woman in her fifties who had made it immediately clear that she did not believe in easing anyone in gently. She had assigned reading on the first day. Actual reading. With page numbers.
I found a seat in the middle row, pulled out my notebook, and was reviewing Tuesday's notes when the door opened.
Prisca walked in.
---
She did not see me immediately.
She came in with Dora beside her — the two of them mid-conversation, Dora gesturing with both hands about something, Prisca listening with that particular half-smile she seemed to reserve for Dora's more elaborate statements. They moved down the aisle, scanning for seats, and then Prisca's eyes traveled across the row and landed on me.
A beat.
She lifted her chin slightly in acknowledgment. Small. Clean. The kind of greeting that says *I see you* without making anything of it.
I nodded back.
Dora, following Prisca's eyeline, located me and her entire face rearranged itself into unconcealed delight. She grabbed Prisca's arm and steered them both directly toward my row.
I was not entirely sure I was prepared for this.
They settled into the seats beside me — Prisca closest, Dora on her other side. Prisca set her notebook on the desk and uncapped her pen with the quiet efficiency of someone who came to class to actually work.
"Same class," she said, glancing at me briefly.
"Same class," I agreed.
"Funny," Dora said, from Prisca's other side, in the tone of someone who did not find it funny at all but rather entirely expected and satisfying. "The world is so small."
"It's one university, Dora," Prisca said.
"Small world," Dora repeated, untroubled.
---
Professor Ellis arrived at exactly two o'clock and launched in without preamble.
The lecture was dense — research paradigms, qualitative versus quantitative frameworks, epistemological positions. Ellis moved through it at a pace that assumed everyone had done the reading, which, based on the expressions around the room, was an optimistic assumption.
I wrote fast.
About twenty minutes in, from the corner of my eye, I noticed Prisca had stopped writing. She was staring at her notebook with a small vertical line between her brows — the expression of someone who had hit a wall.
Without quite deciding to, I tilted my own notebook slightly in her direction.
She glanced at it. Then at me, briefly, with a questioning look.
I tapped the page quietly. The section where Ellis had explained the distinction between ontology and epistemology, which I had drawn out in a simple diagram because the spoken explanation had moved too fast.
Prisca looked at the diagram for a moment. The small line between her brows eased. She gave a short, almost imperceptible nod and went back to writing.
Nothing was said. No dramatic moment. Just — a small thing, offered and received.
But something about it felt warmer than any of the actual conversations we'd had so far.
---
After class the room emptied in the usual Friday rush.
Dora was on her feet immediately, gathering her things with the energy of someone who had somewhere better to be. "I have to run," she announced. "Campus bookstore closes at five and they're holding something for me." She slung her bag over one shoulder, pointed at me with her pen in a way that somehow felt like a verdict, and said, "You take good notes, Daniel." Then she was gone.
Prisca watched her go with familiar resignation.
"She does that," she said.
"Leaves quickly?"
"Leaves and makes it feel like she planned the whole situation before she left."
I laughed. "Did she?"
Prisca considered it with genuine seriousness. "Probably," she said. And then seemed to realize she had used that word again — the same one from the library — because the corner of her mouth moved in that quiet way.
We walked out together. Not by any formal agreement, just by the natural rhythm of two people leaving the same room at the same time, moving in the same direction.
The afternoon had cooled slightly, the sun lower now, casting long shadows across the quad. Students moved around us in the loose, unhurried way of a Friday.
"The diagram helped," she said, after a moment.
"Ellis moves fast."
"She does." Prisca tucked her notebook under her arm. "I'm usually fine keeping up. The ontology section just — collapsed on me."
"It collapsed on me on Tuesday too. I drew the diagram to make sense of it for myself."
She glanced at me sideways. "Do you do that often? Diagrams?"
"When words stop working, yes."
She seemed to file that away somewhere. Not commenting on it, just — noting it. In the way she had, quiet and deliberate.
We reached the fork in the path where the quad split — one direction toward the north dormitories, the other toward the off-campus apartments.
She stopped.
"I go this way," she said, nodding left.
"I'm the other direction."
A brief pause settled between us. Comfortable, somehow.
"Same class on Tuesday," she said.
"Same class on Tuesday," I confirmed.
She nodded once, adjusted her notebook under her arm, and started down her path. Four steps away she half-turned, without stopping.
"The diagram was good, Daniel."
Then she faced forward and kept walking.
---
I stood at the fork for a moment longer than necessary.
Peter called while I was still standing there.
"How was class?"
"She's in my Social Research Methods class," I said.
Silence. Then — "Get out."
"Same row. Sat right next to me."
"Daniel." His voice had the reverent quality of someone witnessing something significant. "The universe is involved. This is no longer just you."
I started walking, smiling despite myself. "It's just a class, Peter."
"Nothing," he said firmly, "is just anything. Call me later."
---
That night I opened my notebook.
Below *Prisca* and *Clearly* and all the small notes I had been collecting without meaning to, I wrote one new line.
*She said the diagram was good.*
Closed the notebook.
Outside the apartment window, Boston moved through its Friday night — lights and voices and the distant sound of the city being itself.
I sat at my desk for a long time, not studying, not doing much of anything.
Just thinking about a girl at a fork in a path, half-turning without stopping, and the particular way she said my name.
- Writer
