Teacher's Delight

Chapter Nine Zarina

She had rehearsed the sentence on the walk over — I'd like to request you as my adviser for the innovation track submission — clean, professional, the kind of sentence that could be said and received without either party reading anything into it that wasn't there. She'd rehearsed it so many times it had started to lose its shape, the way words did if you turned them over too long, and by the time she reached his office door, hand raised to knock, she wasn't sure anymore whether it still sounded like a normal thing a student said to a professor or like something else entirely.

She knocked anyway. His voice said, "Come in," in the flat, unbothered tone he used for everyone who wasn't her, and for one absurd second she almost turned around.

He was behind his desk, sleeves pushed up, a stack of problem sets beside him with red ink bleeding through the top page. He looked up, and something in his face did a brief, complicated thing before it settled into the careful neutrality he'd been wearing around her since September.

"Ms. Immani."

"I have a request." She stayed standing, deliberately, because sitting felt like committing to a longer conversation than she'd planned for. "I'm submitting Amara Grid to the innovation track competition. I'd like to request you as my faculty adviser for the submission."

He didn't answer immediately. His pen, which had been moving across a problem set a moment before, went still.

"Why me?"

It was not the question she'd prepared for. She'd expected when's it due or send me the draft or even, in her more paranoid rehearsals, a flat no. She had not expected him to ask her to justify the request, and the honesty of it — the fact that he seemed to actually want to know rather than simply process the logistics — knocked something loose in her that four months of careful distance had kept sealed.

"Because you're the strongest technical reviewer in the department on infrastructure finance," she said, which was true, and also not the whole truth, and she watched his face while she said it to see if he could tell the difference. "And because the interview—" She stopped. Started again, more carefully. "Because you already understood the model better than anyone else who's looked at it. It seemed like a waste to pretend otherwise."

Something crossed his face at the interview, quick and involuntary, gone before she could read it fully. He set the pen down.

"I have a full advisory load this cycle."

"Priya mentioned you don't."

"Priya talks too much."

"Priya's not wrong, though, is she." Zarina heard the edge come into her own voice and didn't entirely try to soften it. Four months of Ms. Immani said like a correction, four months of watching him laugh easily at everyone in the room but her, and she was tired, suddenly, in a way that outran her own careful professionalism. "I'm not asking you to do me a favor, Professor. I'm asking you to do the job you're qualified for. If you'd rather not, say that plainly, and I'll request Okonkwo, and it'll take him four months to answer an email, and the submission will suffer for it, but at least I'll know where I stand."

The silence that followed had weight to it. He looked at her — really looked, the way he hadn't let himself in class, in the hallway, in any of the small enforced proximities of the semester — and for a moment the careful neutrality dropped entirely, and underneath it was something she recognized, because she'd seen it once before, across a desk, in an interview eighty minutes long.

"You don't know where you stand with me?" he said, quieter than before.

"No." The word came out before she'd decided to say it. "I don't. I haven't, since September, and I've spent a great deal of energy pretending that not knowing doesn't cost me anything, and I'm frankly tired of the pretending."

He stood. Not quickly, not dramatically, but the motion still changed the geometry of the room, closed some of the distance the desk had been providing, and she felt her own pulse do something unhelpful in response.

"It's not about the model," he said. "I want to be clear about that. The model is excellent. If you submitted it with any adviser in this department, it would advance."

"Then what is it about."

He didn't answer right away. She watched him decide something, watched the decision cost him visibly, the way a person's face changes when they're choosing between two kinds of honesty and neither one is comfortable.

"I don't think I'm the right adviser for you," he said, finally. "Not because of the work. Because of—" He stopped. Started over, more careful. "Because advising you closely would require a kind of professional distance I'm not confident I can maintain."

The room went very quiet. She heard her own breath, heard the radiator tick somewhere behind him, heard, underneath all of it, the specific silence of two people both understanding exactly what had just been said without either of them having said it directly.

"That's an honest answer," she said, when she trusted her voice again.

"It's the only honest answer I've got left. I've been giving you the other kind for months and I think we both know it hasn't been working."

She should have left then. That would have been the sensible thing, the professional thing, the thing that let them both retreat back into the careful architecture of Ms. Immani and graded problem sets and safe distance. Instead she stood there, close enough now that she could see the specific, tired weight behind his eyes, and asked the question she'd been carrying since a desk and an interview and a laugh that had ruined her for every ordinary conversation since.

"Then who is the right adviser for me, if not the person who actually understands what I'm building?"

He didn't answer that one at all. But he didn't look away either, and in the charged, unresolved quiet that followed, something passed between them that neither of them would be able to explain away as professional courtesy, no matter how carefully they tried, later, to file it under something smaller than what it actually was.