Off Limits, Professor

Elena Reyes had a rule: never be the first one in the room. First meant exposed. First meant sitting there alone while everyone else filed in and decided, without saying a word, whether you belonged there at all. She’d learned that her freshman year, the hard way, back when she still thought showing up early made a good impression instead of a target. She hadn’t broken the rule since. So of course, on the one morning that actually mattered, her alarm hadn’t gone off. She woke up to sunlight already too high in the window and grabbed her phone off the nightstand with the particular dread of someone who already knows the time is going to be bad. 8:41. Her seminar started at nine. She was still in last night’s t-shirt, her hair had dried wrong from the shower she’d taken before bed, and her notes for the course, printed and highlighted with more care than she’d admit to anyone, were sitting in a neat stack on her desk that she now had four minutes to grab. She threw on jeans, twisted her hair into something that could generously be called a bun, and ran. The walk from her apartment to the Humanities building was normally twelve minutes if she didn’t rush. She made it in eight, lungs burning in the cold, backpack slamming against her hip with every stride. November in this town didn’t ease you into winter, it just handed it to you all at once, and by the time she hit the building’s front steps her breath was showing in the air and her hands had gone numb around the door handle. Third floor. Room 304. She’d circled it in her planner three separate times, like the ink might make her less late by sheer repetition. The door was already closed when she got there. Elena stood outside it for a second, hand on the handle, running the math on which was worse: slipping into a room of strangers ten minutes into the first day of her final semester, or not showing up at all and hoping the professor didn’t notice a gap on the roster. She thought about the scholarship letter sitting in the drawer by her bed, the one full of phrases like contingent upon and satisfactory academic standing, phrases that always seemed to be quietly warning her that everything she had could still be taken back. She opened the door. Every head turned. Of course they did. Twenty-some students, all mid-settle into a Tuesday morning, and here she was, walking in like a small disaster. But it wasn’t the students who made her stomach drop. It was the man standing at the front of the room, mid-sentence, who stopped talking the second the door opened. He wasn’t what she’d expected. She’d pictured someone older, going by the reputation that had already made its way through the department: tweed jacket maybe, reading glasses pushed up into greying hair, the kind of professor who quoted himself more than he quoted the syllabus. Instead there was a man who looked barely older than the TA she’d had sophomore year. Dark hair, sleeves rolled up past the forearm, a battered paperback held open in one hand like it had been there his whole life. He had the kind of stillness that made a room quiet without him raising his voice. “Nice of you to join us,” he said. Not unkind. Not particularly kind either. Just even, like he’d already decided not to waste any real energy on it. “Sorry.” She said it to the room in general, not to him specifically, because looking directly at him felt like it would cost her something she didn’t have to spare this early in the morning. She scanned for an open seat and found exactly one. Of course it was the one directly in his eyeline. Front row. By the window. She sat, cheeks still burning from the cold and the entrance both. “As I was saying.” He turned back to the rest of the class like she’d already stopped existing, which somehow annoyed her more than if he’d made a bigger deal of the interruption. “This course isn’t about admiring literature from a safe distance. I’m not interested in you telling me a poem is beautiful. I want to know why it costs you something to read it.” Elena pulled her notebook out with hands that were only just starting to warm up, uncapped her pen, and told herself: this is just Professor Cole. Adrian Cole, according to the syllabus still sitting untouched on the corner of her desk. Some rising name in the department, if the whispers she’d caught in the hallway last week were anything to go by. Youngest tenure-track hire in twenty years, someone had said, in the tone people usually reserved for gossip rather than genuine achievement. He set the paperback down on the desk and picked up a single loose sheet of paper instead. “We’re starting with something unfashionable,” he said, glancing around the room like he was daring someone to object. “No trigger warnings, no easy answers. Just look at what the poem is actually doing to you, and be honest about it. That’s the only rule I have in this room. Honesty over comfort.” Elena almost laughed under her breath. If honesty were that simple, she wouldn’t still be carrying around the thing she carried, the thing she’d crossed three states to get some distance from. He started to read. And here was the part she hadn’t braced for: his voice. Low, unhurried, turning the words over like he actually meant every one of them instead of performing them for an audience. Just saying them, plainly, like the poem mattered to him personally. The room went quiet in a way rooms didn’t usually go quiet for a nineteenth-century poem about grief. She caught herself watching his hands instead of following along in her own copy of the text. She looked back down at the page fast, annoyed at herself for the slip. When he finished reading, he didn’t throw the question out to the room the way she expected. He looked directly at her. “You. New arrival. What’s the poem afraid of?” Every head in the room swung back toward her, and she felt her face go hot all over again, this time for a different reason. But something in her, the same something that had gotten her flagged as combative in a professor’s notes once, a comment that still lived somewhere in the back of her skull no matter how many years passed, pushed the nerves down and made room for an answer instead. “It’s not afraid of losing someone,” she said, surprised at how steady her own voice sounded. “It’s afraid of surviving losing someone. That the person just keeps going. Gets up, eats breakfast, forgets to be sad for an hour without meaning to. That’s the actual horror in it. Not death. Continuing.” The room went silent for a beat too long. Something shifted in his expression, something she couldn’t have named exactly if she’d tried. Not surprise, not quite. Closer to recognition, like she’d said something he hadn’t expected a room full of twenty-two-year-olds to reach on the first try, first day, first five minutes. “Good,” he said, quieter now, almost like it was meant only for her. Then, louder, to the rest of the class: “That’s the kind of reading I want from all of you this semester.” He moved on. Started unpacking the next stanza, called on someone else, and Elena told herself that was that. One sharp answer on the first day, nothing more. The kind of small exchange that happened in every seminar, on every campus, forgotten by lunch. Except twenty minutes later, when he’d assigned the reading for next week and dismissed the class, she caught him watching her again as she packed up her bag. Not staring, exactly. Just noticing. The particular way you notice something you hadn’t planned on noticing at all. She looked away first. Outside, the November air was sharp enough to clear her head, and she walked fast across the quad, telling herself firmly that it meant nothing. He was her professor. She had a scholarship to protect and a life to quietly rebuild, and exactly zero room in either of those things for a man whose voice she was apparently going to be thinking about for the rest of the day, whether she liked it or not. She didn’t look back at the building. If she had, she might have seen him still standing at the window of Room 304, a paperback held loosely in one hand, watching her cross the quad with an expression on his face he hadn’t let anyone see in a long, long time.