Teacher's Delight

Chapter Five Josh

The Thursday faculty meeting ran long, as it always did once someone raised the curriculum committee's proposal to restructure the core sequence, a topic capable of generating forty-five minutes of impassioned disagreement among people who otherwise agreed on almost nothing. Josh sat near the back with a coffee gone lukewarm an hour ago and let the argument wash past him, nodding in the places nodding seemed to be required.

"You're somewhere else today," Dale Okafor said, low, leaning over from the next chair. Dale taught operations, had the office two doors down from Josh's, and had known him long enough to notice when he wasn't actually in a room he was sitting in.

"I'm here."

"You're here in the way a coat rack is here." Dale glanced toward the front, where someone was making a fairly impassioned case for keeping statistics as a standalone module, and then back at Josh with the particular patience of a friend deciding whether a conversation was worth having in public. "How's Cohort B?"

"Fine."

"I heard you've got a live one this semester. Immani. Priya mentioned her — said the deployment model she's building for the innovation track is the kind of thing that gets written up somewhere eventually." Dale said it as simple professional gossip, the sort of thing colleagues traded without weight, and Josh knew that, knew there was nothing loaded in the sentence except what he himself brought to it. "You advising her on that, or just grading her?"

"Grading, mostly."

"Huh." Dale considered this with the mild interest of a man filing away a fact for later rather than pursuing anything now. "Surprised. Thought you'd have grabbed that one for the advisory list the second you saw the numbers. Isn't strong technical work with a real deployment angle exactly your thing?"

"It is."

"So?"

"So nothing. I've got a full advisory load." This was true, technically, in the sense that most true things could be arranged to look complete while leaving out the load-bearing detail — in this case, that he'd looked at the sign-up sheet for the innovation track's advisory pool three separate times, pen actually in hand once, and put it back down each time with the specific, cowardly relief of a man avoiding a decision by pretending the decision had already been made for him.

Dale didn't push. That wasn't Dale's way — he'd float something once, register the flinch or the absence of one, and leave it alone unless it came up again on its own. But he did look at Josh for one beat longer than the conversation strictly required, an assessing look Josh recognized because he'd used a version of it himself, in classrooms, on students who were saying true things in a tone that suggested they weren't saying all of them.

"You've been in a mood since September," Dale said, finally, mild as weather. "Everyone's noticed. Sarah in admissions asked me last week if you were going through something."

"I'm not going through something."

"Okay." Dale held up both hands, easy, unbothered, the universal gesture of a man declining to fight about it. "Just relaying the field notes. You used to be the guy who remembered everyone's dog's name. Now you've got this—" he made a vague gesture at Josh's whole posture, the crossed arms, the jaw — "energy. Like you're bracing for something."

Josh didn't answer, because the honest answer was yes, and the follow-up question would be for what, and there was no version of that conversation he was equipped to have in a faculty meeting, or possibly anywhere, with anyone, including — especially — himself.

Up front, the vote on the curriculum proposal finally happened, inconclusive, tabled for further discussion, the traditional funeral rites of any faculty meeting agenda item. Chairs scraped. People stood in the loose, relieved way of a room being let out early from something that had already run late.

Dale gathered his folder and paused at Josh's shoulder on the way out. "For what it's worth," he said, quieter now, no audience left to perform mild professional gossip for, "whatever it is, you don't have to carry it solo. I know you like being the easy one. Doesn't mean you always have to be."

He was gone before Josh could decide whether that had been an offer or an accusation, or whether there was even a meaningful difference between the two coming from someone who'd known him twelve years.

Josh sat a moment longer in the emptying room, turning the coffee cup in his hands, thinking — because he could not, apparently, stop himself from thinking it — about the advisory sign-up sheet still sitting in his desk drawer with his own handwriting halfway committed and then abandoned next to Zarina Immani's name. About the specific, careful distance he'd built over four months, brick by deliberate brick, and about how thin that distance had started to feel lately, worn down not by anything she'd done but by the sheer daily cost of maintaining it.

He thought about Marcus.

He always ended up thinking about Marcus, eventually, whenever the thinking went on long enough — Marcus Webb, who'd taught organizational behavior two floors up until eighteen months ago, who'd been exactly the kind of easy, well-liked, generous professor Josh had modeled half his own teaching persona on, and who now sold insurance in Ohio and hadn't returned a call in over a year, not because he was angry, Josh suspected, but because there was nothing left to say that didn't hurt to say out loud.

Josh had watched that entire unraveling from eighteen months' distance and told himself, with the particular confidence of a man who has never yet been tested, that he would never let it happen to him.

He had not expected the testing to arrive wearing a deployment model good enough to reorganize an entire semester around avoiding it.

He threw out the cold coffee, gathered his things, and went back to his office, where the sign-up sheet was still sitting in the drawer, still unfinished, still — if he was honest, which he tried to be with himself even when he could manage nothing else — exactly where he'd left it because some stubborn, undisciplined part of him hadn't been able to make himself cross her name off the list of things he still wanted.