Teacher's Delight

Chapter Ten Zarina

She did not tell them what had happened in the office. She told herself this was discretion, professionalism, the correct instinct of a person who understood that some things, once said out loud to a third party, became more real than she was prepared for them to be. She managed almost two full days of not telling them before Reese, of all people — quiet, steady Reese, who noticed things and generally had the grace not to comment on them — set a coffee down in front of her in the library and said, without preamble, "Something happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Zarina." Reese sat, unhurried, the way she did everything, and folded her hands on the table like she had all afternoon, which, this being a Thursday with no class until two, she more or less did. "You've re-read the same paragraph of the Kaminsky reading four times in the last ten minutes. You do that when you're upset. You did it the week your visa renewal got delayed and you wouldn't tell anyone that either, until Margaret got it out of you at eleven at night with an entire bottle of wine."

"I don't have an entire bottle of wine on me currently."

"I have half a granola bar and unlimited patience. Your choice."

Margaret arrived before Zarina could decide which offer to accept, dropping into the third chair with the particular energy of someone who'd been summoned by group chat and was arriving fully briefed. "Reese texted me code red, library, bring snacks, so I brought these—" she produced a bag of pretzels from her tote with the flourish of a magician "—and also every ounce of my attention. What happened? Is it the McIntyre thing? It's the McIntyre thing."

"There is no McIntyre thing."

"You said that exact sentence three weeks ago and it was a lie then too." Margaret opened the pretzels, took one, and slid the bag toward the center of the table like a peace offering. "I've been keeping a log, by the way. Since October. I have data."

"You've been keeping a log of my professor."

"I've been keeping a log of a very specific pattern of behavior that any reasonable observer would find fascinating, yes." Margaret held up a hand and counted on her fingers. "One, he only does the slow-down thing to you. Two, he stopped calling on you by first name around week three, which — nobody else noticed this, but I sit close enough to see the seating chart he keeps, and your name's the only one on there with a little checkmark next to it, like he's tracking something. Three, and this is the one that actually got me, he left the room for four minutes during the guest speaker session in October, the exact four minutes you were also out getting water, and came back looking like a man who'd just run a marathon in his head."

Zarina put down her coffee, because her hand had started to feel unsteady around it and she didn't trust herself not to spill it. "That's circumstantial."

"That's a lot of circumstance, Zarina."

Reese, who had been quiet through Margaret's recitation, watching Zarina's face with the particular attentiveness of someone gathering better evidence than any checkmark on a seating chart, finally spoke. "You went to his office hours yesterday."

"To request him as my adviser for the innovation track. That's it."

"And?"

Zarina looked at the granola bar sitting untouched on the table, at Margaret's expectant face, at Reese's steady, patient one, and felt the carefully maintained wall she'd been holding up since Tuesday afternoon develop its first real c***k.

"He said he doesn't think he can be the right adviser for me," she said, quietly. "Not because of the work. Because — his exact words were that advising me closely would require a kind of professional distance he isn't confident he can maintain."

The silence at the table lasted a full three seconds, which for Margaret was an eternity.

"Okay," Margaret said, finally, in a voice that had lost its teasing edge entirely, gone careful and serious in a way that told Zarina her friend understood exactly what those words meant and wasn't going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a joke. "That's not nothing. That's a grown man telling you something true and hoping you don't notice how true it is."

"I noticed."

"I know you did. That's why you've re-read the same paragraph four times." Reese pushed the granola bar closer. "How do you feel about it?"

"I don't know." It was the most honest thing Zarina had said out loud about any of it, to anyone, and saying it made something in her chest loosen very slightly, the specific relief of admitting confusion instead of performing certainty she didn't have. "For four months I thought I'd imagined the interview. Thought I'd built up one good conversation into something it wasn't, and that the way he's been since was just — who he actually is, and I'd been foolish to think otherwise. And now he's telling me I didn't imagine it, and I don't know what to do with that, because nothing about the actual situation has changed. He's still my professor. There's still a rule. There's still a program, a grade, a PhD offer I haven't even told either of you about yet that somehow makes all of this more complicated instead of less."

"Wait," Margaret said. "A what offer?"

"That's a different conversation."

"Zarina."

"A later conversation," Zarina said, firmly, though not without a small, tired laugh, the first real one she'd managed in days. "One crisis at a time. Today's crisis is Professor McIntyre. Let me have this one first."

Reese and Margaret exchanged a look — the specific, wordless look of two friends deciding, together, that they would let this go for now but were absolutely coming back for the PhD thing later — and Margaret pushed the pretzels forward again, and for a little while, in the library, with two people who noticed things and cared enough to say so, Zarina let herself just sit with not knowing, instead of solving it.