Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Nobody knows. Not David, who saves me a seat every lecture and has opinions about my coffee order. Not my parents, who call every Sunday after church and would probably sell the other tractor if they thought it’d help. Not even the cluster of women who trail Professor Salvatore around campus with their hungry eyes and lip gloss, the ones who show up to his lectures in heels and leave looking faintly devastated when he doesn’t glance their way.
I don’t wear heels. I wear a cotton dress my mother hemmed for me last Christmas, with small blue flowers on it, and flats that have seen better days. I sit in the third row because I got here early on the first day of freshman year and the habit stuck. I draw my circles and keep my hopeless, embarrassing, absolutely futile feelings to myself, because I’m Elsa Lively from Nebraska, and he’s Professor Luciano Salvatore, and the distance between those two facts is roughly the same as the distance between my parents’ cornfield and the moon.
My circle slows.
He’s moved to the front of the podium now, which he does when he’s about to make a point that matters. No notes. He never uses notes. His lectures are built in real time, assembled from something inside his head that the rest of us can only try to keep up with. His suit today is charcoal, cut so sharp it looks like it was made for the express purpose of ruining my concentration. Which it wasn’t, obviously. He doesn’t dress for a twenty-year-old farm girl in the third row. He dresses like a man who was raised to understand that clothing is armor, and his armor has never once had a seam out of place.
I know things about him. Small, collected things, gathered like blackberries. Carefully, one at a time, trying not to get scratched.
He drinks his coffee black. He arrives on campus before seven every morning because I saw him once from the library window, crossing the quad alone in the November cold. His office smells like old books and something subtle and Italian. Not cologne exactly, more like the memory of a place I’ve never been. He doesn’t smile. Not ever. Not when a student makes a clever point, not when someone tries to flatter him, not when the department chair introduces him at events with a warmth he never returns.
I know this because I watch him. The way you watch a painting you love in a museum you can’t afford to visit twice. From a respectful distance. With the quiet understanding that this is as close as you’re ever getting, and that’s fine, that’s enough, that has to be enough.
My finger pauses. Restarts.
“Layered security isn’t about building one impenetrable wall.” His voice cuts through the low hum of two hundred laptops. A girl three seats to my left actually sighs. “It’s about creating a system of concentric barriers so that a breach of one layer doesn’t compromise the core.”
I write this down. Then I write, in the margin where my circles live: He’s talking about himself and doesn’t know it.
Then I scratch it out, because that would be very hard to explain if David leaned over to borrow my notes again.
David. I glance sideways. He’s doing that thing where he pretends to take notes but is actually ranking baseball players on the back of his syllabus. His pen moves with the easy, unconcerned rhythm of someone who has never once lost sleep over a forearm vein. I like David. He’s uncomplicated and kind and he carried my books across campus in the rain last week without being asked, which my father would approve of. David Burnes is exactly the sort of boy a girl from Nebraska should have a crush on.
I look back at the podium. At the man who isn’t a boy, who isn’t from Nebraska, who isn’t uncomplicated or kind in any way that’s easy to name.
My circle tightens.
And then I see them.
At first, I think I’m wrong. The lecture hall is full, the back rows are always a sea of baseball caps and laptop screens, and my eyes shouldn’t be able to pick out two men in dark suits among two hundred students. But they’re not students. They’re sitting too still, backs too straight, and their suits are wrong for campus. Too expensive, too sharp, the fabric catching the fluorescent light differently than anything a graduate student could afford.
My finger stops.
Stops mid-circle, pressing into the paper hard enough to leave a dent.
Because I’ve seen those suits before.
Not these exact suits, maybe, but this exact quality. This exact stillness. This exact way of sitting in a room that isn’t theirs, watching everything while appearing to watch nothing. I saw it two years ago, in an alley off Lexington Avenue, on the worst night of my life and the night that saved it.