The Forbidden Professor

Chapter 2

My aunt dropped me off on a humid morning in August, the car loaded with everything I owned that seemed worth bringing.

I was now moving in late, classes having already begun the day before, all because I’d decided that I wanted to delay finding out the truth.

That maybe I had made a mistake.

My aunt had spent the last forty-eight hours trying to convince me not to pass up on the opportunity to attend such an incredible university.

And I was grateful that she had and disappointed in myself for wanting to go back underneath my covers and hide.

She hugged me for a long time before she got back in the car and I tried hard not to let her see the tears that were trying to burst free.

I stood at the gates until her car disappeared and then I dragged my suitcases and walked in.

The campus looked exactly like it did in the photographs I'd studied. The iron gates, the stone buildings, the trees lining the main path in two perfect rows.

I had memorized those pictures.

Now it was real and it looked exactly the same…and yet I felt nothing like I'd expected to feel.

No signal from my body that I was in the right place.

Just the August heat pressing down on everything and the quiet understanding that I was here now and the only way out was through.

My father might have walked through here at some point. For some reason.

And I’d come to find out why.

I found my dorm building, found my room, found the narrow bed and the desk and the window looking out onto a parking lot instead of the trees from the photographs.

My roommate wasn't there. But her side was already made, already lived in…fairy lights strung unevenly over the headboard, a small succulent on the windowsill with a tiny clay face pressed into the pot, its expression one of mild distress.

I stood in the doorway looking at it and felt something loosen slightly in my chest, feeling mildly comforted by the plant’s expression that felt like it was mirroring my own.

I unpacked in the quiet. Slid my father's photograph into the back of my desk drawer… I had long ago decided to keep it somewhere where I’d have to choose to look at it rather than having it just always be there.

The constant reminder still too much for me.

Then with a deep breath, I headed off to my first class.

~0~

The lecture hall was bigger than I'd imagined.

Tiered seating, maybe two hundred spots, high ceilings, windows along one wall letting in light that had already started to go golden with the afternoon. I stood at the back for a moment watching the room fill.

Intro to Constitutional Law. Professor Blackwell.

I'd registered for it because my father was a lawyer and it made me feel close to him. That was the whole of my reasoning. Other than that, I wasn’t even sure why I was here.

I found a seat in the front row.

My father used to say you either showed up all the way or you shouldn’t bother showing up at all.

I sat in the front of every class I'd ever taken since I was old enough to choose my own seat. And even now, with everything that had brought me here pressing against the back of my ribs, I went to the front.

The room filled around me. I opened my notebook and wrote the date at the top of the first page and sat with my pen hovering with nothing to write yet, which was probably the most accurate picture of where I was.

Then the room changed.

Complete silence.

I looked up.

My first thought was that I'd never seen anyone like him before.

Not handsome…that word was too small and too simple for what he was. He was more than that. Far beyond.

He was tall, well built, dark-haired, and had dark eyes.

He looked like he was somewhere in his mid-thirties with features that had never needed to soften for anyone and hadn't. His clothes fit like they had been specifically tailored for him, and the sleeves of his white shirt were already rolled.

I watched as his eyes moved across the room, a slow sweep that took in the whole space.

They reached the front row.

Then they reached me.

And stopped.

It lasted less than a second.

Maybe less than that.

But long enough that something moved through me, low and warm and completely without my permission, before his gaze continued on like it had never stopped at all.

Like I had imagined it.

Then he spoke.

"Power," he began, "doesn't announce itself."

"Constitutional law is the architecture of power,” he said. “Who has it. How they keep it. What happens when someone tries to take it." He explained slowly. "This class will teach you to read that architecture. Not to admire it. But to read it."

He paused.

No one made a sound.

"Most of you are here because doing Law sounds like stability. A way to know the rules well enough to remain safe. To keep others safe." The stillness behind his expression deepened in a way I couldn't name. "That's not what this is. This is the opposite of that. By the time you understand constitutional law, you will understand exactly how precarious everything is. How little the rules actually protect you. How everything that seems solid was actually built by someone with an interest in having you believing it is solid."

I was writing before I'd decided to write.

My pen moving across the page and I was aware that I was leaning slightly forward…aware of it the way you're aware you've been holding your breath and only notice once you exhale.

He talked for fifty minutes without notes, without warmth, without stopping.

I'd thought I knew what law was. My father's work. Cases and precedents and the orderly machinery of a system.

This man was describing something alive. Something that moved and bent and belonged to whoever was strong enough to hold it.

Before I knew it, I’d filled more than fifteen pages of notes.

I have never filled fifteen pages in a fifty-minute class in my life.

At the end, he picked up a marker and wrote something on the board.

When he left, the room seemed to exhale.

Around me everyone was suddenly talking at once and I sat still in the middle of it with all my pages of notes and something unsettled moving through my chest.

I'd come here for my father. I'd walked through those gates this morning thinking about documents I couldn't yet trace. I'd sat down bracing myself for whatever this place was going to show me.

I hadn't been prepared for this.

I looked at the board.

Office hours: Friday. 3–5pm. Whitmore Hall 214.

I stared at it for a moment.

I had no reason to go. No question, no assignment, nothing to bring him. I was barely hours into my first day and office hours were for students who needed something.

I took a picture of the board anyway.

I walked back to the dorm in the golden August light with the specific feeling of something without knowing what it was yet. I looked back at the photo of his office hours before putting my phone away.

I knew where I wanted to be on Friday.

I just had to work up the courage to do it.