Teacher's Delight

Professor McIntyre had a way of saying her name that made it sound like a correction. "Ms. Immani." Not unkind, exactly. Precise. The way you'd handle something you didn't quite trust not to break. "Walk us through your assumption on discount rate again. Slower this time." She had not gotten the discount rate wrong. She knew this the way she knew her own name, the way she knew the exact number of days until her flight home for the winter break, which was fifty-one, not that she was counting, except that she was. But she straightened her spine anyway and repeated herself, slower, because arguing with him in front of thirty-one classmates had stopped being worth the win somewhere around week four. "Nine percent," she said. "Given the risk profile of the underlying asset class, and comparable project finance instruments in the region." "And if I told you the World Bank's own shadow rate for comparable infrastructure in West Africa sits closer to eleven?" "Then I'd ask which vintage you were pulling from, Professor, because the 2024 revision brought it down to nine-two, and I built the model in April." Something moved behind his eyes. Not quite a smile. Zarina had catalogued approximately six of Joshua McIntyre's real smiles over the course of the semester, and none of them had been for her, not since the interview, and she was not going to think about the interview, not in this room, not with Margaret two seats over already smirking into her laptop like she could smell blood. "Correct," he said, and moved on to cold-calling someone else. That was it. That was the whole exchange. It shouldn't have cost her anything. She had been right. She was almost always right, in this class, in the ways that mattered on paper, and it changed nothing about the fact that she spent the walk back to her seat with her jaw tight and her pulse doing something stupid and adolescent, like she was seventeen and not thirty-one, like this was about a boy and not a grade. It was not about a boy. She wanted that on the record, if only to herself. It was about the fact that a man who had once looked at her across a desk in this same building and said, this is the best deployment model I have seen from a student in a decade, and I mean that, now could not seem to address her without the air between them going glass-brittle. She didn't understand it. That was the part that sat in her like a stone she kept swallowing and swallowing and never digesting. She had turned over every version of it — had she said something wrong after the interview, had he heard something about her, had she misjudged the warmth in the first place and built a memory more generous than the moment had earned — and none of it landed. None of it explained the specific, surgical care with which Joshua McIntyre had spent four months making sure he never looked at her one second longer than the question required. "He did it again," Margaret said, the second class ended, sliding into the seat beside her with the particular energy of a woman who had been waiting an hour to say this. "The slow-down thing. He does that to you and only you. I've been keeping count." "He's a rigorous professor." "He's a rigorous professor to everyone else. To you he's like—" Margaret searched for it, hand turning in the air. "Like he's daring you to get something wrong so he has a reason to be annoyed at you instead of whatever the actual thing is." "There is no actual thing." "Sure," Margaret said, in the tone of someone who had decided to let it go for exactly as long as it took to reload. Zarina gathered her laptop, her notebook, the printed model she hadn't needed because she'd had the numbers memorized before she walked in, and did not allow herself to look toward the front of the room, where Josh McIntyre was talking to a teaching assistant with the easy, open posture that every other person in this building got to see every day. He laughed at something the TA said. She heard it land somewhere under her ribs, unwelcome, the way weather does. She had not always found that laugh irritating. There had been an afternoon — an interview, a desk, late autumn light doing something unfair to the side of his face — when that same laugh had made her feel, for the first time since landing in this country, like she had walked into a room where someone actually saw the size of what she was trying to build. She let herself have half a second of it now, the memory surfacing uninvited the way it always did, warm and specific and entirely at odds with the man who had just made her repeat a correct answer in front of the whole cohort like she were a nervous first-year. Then she put it away. She was good at putting things away. It was, arguably, the single most useful skill she owned, more useful than the discount rate, more useful than the model, because she had built an entire company on the ability to set aside what she felt and do what needed doing, and she was not about to let one bad-tempered finance professor be the exception. Her phone buzzed as she reached the hallway. Afisa. Not a text — a call, which from her sister at this hour, Lagos already dark and gone quiet, usually meant one of two things: money, or the kind of tired that didn't want to be typed out. She let the door swing shut behind her, McIntyre's voice and that laugh and the whole overbright classroom sealed away on the other side of it, and answered. "Tell me it's good news," Zarina said. "It's Tuesday," Afisa said, which was not an answer, which meant it wasn't. Zarina closed her eyes for exactly one second, recalibrated, and started walking.