Teacher's Delight

Chapter Two Josh

He'd gotten the discount rate wrong on purpose. Not the number itself — the number was fine. The eleven percent was a defensible figure if you pulled from an older vintage, and he'd known when he said it that she'd catch the discrepancy before he finished the sentence. That was the point. He needed a reason to make her talk for another thirty seconds, needed the sound of her voice laying out a correction with that particular flat certainty she used when she thought someone was testing her, and he needed it to look, to every single person in that room, like pedagogy and nothing else.

It was working. That was the worst part. Nobody in Cohort B thought anything of it. A rigorous professor, a tough grader, the kind of reputation that looked good on a syllabus and better on a tenure file. Nobody but Margaret Chen, apparently, who he'd caught watching him watch Zarina with an expression he did not enjoy being on the receiving end of, sharp and assessing, like she was building a case.

He hoped she wasn't building a case. He hoped, with the specific fervor of a man who had spent four months rehearsing indifference in a bathroom mirror, that whatever she thought she'd noticed stayed exactly where it was — a suspicion, unconfirmed, easy enough to laugh off if it ever surfaced out loud.

"You're doing the thing again," said Priya, the teaching assistant, once the room had cleared, and it was just the two of them and the projector cooling down with its small electronic tick. She had a stack of problem sets under one arm and the unbothered directness of someone who'd worked for him for two years and had stopped being intimidated by him around month three.

"What thing."

"The Immani thing. Slowing everyone down so you can make her repeat herself." Priya said it lightly, filing it under classroom color commentary rather than accusation, which was worse, somehow, because it meant it was visible enough to be commentary at all.

"She's the best student in the room and you ride her hardest. Everyone's noticed. They think you don't like her."

"I have high standards."

"Sure," Priya said, in the exact cadence Margaret had used forty feet away and one flight of stairs up, though he had no way of knowing that, and laughed at something on her phone, and left him alone with the tick of the cooling projector and the particular quiet of a room that had held her fifteen minutes ago and now didn't.

He was, by every account that mattered to his own sense of himself, an easy person to work for. He brought doughnuts to defense days. He remembered his students' names past the add/drop deadline, remembered whose visa paperwork was a nightmare and whose kid had a school play, and he'd been told, more than once, by more than one dean, that he had a gift for making people feel like the smartest version of themselves in a room. He believed that about himself. He'd built a career on it.

None of that was available to Zarina Immani, and he knew it, and the knowing sat in his chest like something swallowed wrong.

It had not always been like this. Four months ago, across a desk in an admissions interview he hadn't even been required to sit in on — he'd asked to, because her application materials had done something to him he couldn't yet name, a deployment model so far beyond what he usually saw from incoming MBAs that he'd read it twice before the interview just to make sure he wasn't imagining the quality of it — four months ago he had sat across from her and laughed, actually laughed, at something dry and understated she'd said about Lagos traffic and infrastructure planning, and she had looked at him like being taken seriously was a foreign country she was pleased to be visiting.

He remembered thinking, with the kind of clean, uncomplicated admiration a professor was allowed to feel for a promising student: this one's going to do something extraordinary.

He remembered, less cleanly, walking out of that interview and standing in the stairwell for four full minutes before he trusted himself to go back to his office, because somewhere in the space of forty-five minutes the admiration had picked up a second current running under it, one he did not have a category for that didn't frighten him.

He had a category for it now. He'd built one, brick by brick, out of every story he knew about what happened to men in his position who let that current run anywhere it wanted. He had one very specific story in particular, close enough that he didn't need to imagine the ending — he'd watched it happen in real time, watched a friend's career come apart at the seams over exactly this kind of thing, watched the particular flavor of ruin that followed a professor who couldn't keep a clean line between what he owed his students and what he wanted for himself.

So he'd built the line. Overbuilt it, if he was honest, which he tried to be with himself even when he could be nothing but careful with everyone else — he'd built it so high and so cold that the easiest, kindest version of himself didn't have anywhere to stand near her at all, and the only thing left over was this: precision instead of warmth, correction instead of the laugh he used to give away for free.

He told himself this was the responsible version of caring about someone's future. Most days he almost believed it.

He gathered his laptop, killed the projector, and walked past the window that looked down onto the quad, where — he hadn't meant to look, told himself he hadn't meant to look — Zarina Immani stood with her phone to her ear, one hand pressed flat against her sternum like she was holding something in, her whole posture gone tight and careful in a way that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with whatever was happening four thousand miles away.

He watched for exactly as long as it took to recognize that watching at all was already more than he'd allowed himself in weeks, and then he made himself stop.