Second Semester

The lamps along the quad flicker on a timer nobody remembers setting, one by one, like something counting down. She walks under them anyway, clipboard against her hip, the same nine buildings in the same order she’s checked every night this week. Term hasn’t started. The dorms are dark, curtains open, waiting.

She used to like this hour. Now she just does it.

Cold gathers in the stone the way it always has here, old and specific, like the buildings remember winters she wasn’t alive for. Her breath fogs. She writes West Hall — locked on the clipboard without looking down.

Something watches her cross the lawn. It has watched her for weeks now, patient as weather, and she has stopped bothering to call it nerves.

She doesn’t turn around. Turning around never helps.

“You’re going to wear a groove in that lawn,” Nathaniel says, and there he is, hands in his coat pockets, breath white, smiling like a man who has never once startled anyone in his life.

“Someone has to lock the doors.”

“Someone else could do it in daylight.”

“Someone else isn’t asked.”

He falls into step beside her without asking if he can, like the space next to her simply belongs to whoever wants it most. She lets him. He’s easy that way, a colleague’s warmth, a familiar joke, two years of faculty dinners between them and nothing sharper than that. If she had to name the safest person on this campus, she might have said his name a month ago without thinking twice. Tonight the air around him feels different. She can’t say how. Weather again, probably. She’s been telling herself it was the weather for two weeks.

“Come have a drink,” he says. “Just one. You’ve been a ghost lately.”

“I have rounds.”

“You always have rounds.”

“That’s the job, Nathaniel.”

He laughs like she’s joking, and for a moment it almost sounds like the old laugh, the one she used to like. Then it doesn’t. It goes on a beat too long, and underneath it something pulls tight in his voice, thin as wire.

“One drink. That’s all I’m asking. It’s not a crime to want your company.”

“I know.” She keeps walking, keeps her voice level, the voice she uses for students who don’t want to hear the answer. “And the answer’s still no. It was no last week. It’ll be no next week, too, so let’s save us both the trouble.”

“You say that like it’s simple.”

“It is simple.”

“Nothing about you is simple.” He says it soft, almost fond, and that’s the part that finally makes the hair rise on her arms. Not the words, but the hunger underneath them, unhidden now, like he’s stopped bothering to hide it because it never got him anywhere. “I’ve watched you shut every door in this place for two years. I just want one open.”

“Then you’re going to keep wanting it.” She stops at the last doorway on her list, keys already out, done with the conversation before he is. “Go home, Nathaniel. Sleep it off.”

She should have kept walking. She thinks that a half-second later, the last clean thought she has. She should have kept walking and let him stand there in the cold with his hands in his pockets and his ruined face, and instead she turns to make sure the door’s locked, and his hand closes around her wrist.

“Don’t,” she says, and means it as a warning, not a plea, because she has never once been afraid of him, not really, not until this exact second when his grip doesn’t loosen the way it’s supposed to.

“You don’t get to just—” His voice cracks down the middle. “Everyone gets you a little. The freshmen get you. The other tutors get you. I get nothing. Not even a drink.”

“Let go.”

“I could anchor this,” he says, and it isn’t to her, not really, it’s to himself, feverish and low. “I could anchor us, right here, if you’d just—”

“Nathaniel.” Sharp now. Her free hand braces against his chest, more instinct than plan. “Let go.”

He doesn’t. She shoves. He staggers back into the doorframe and comes off it faster than either of them means for him to, hands finding her shoulders, not to hold her but because he’s already falling and taking her with him, and the clipboard hits the ground before she does, and the back of her head meets stone with a sound she registers more as light than noise, a white crack behind her eyes.

He’s saying her name. He’s saying it over and over, Maggie, Maggie, God, Maggie, and his hands are under her head now instead of on her wrist, careful in a way that means nothing anymore, and she thinks, distantly, this isn’t how tonight was supposed to go, and then she thinks nothing at all in words, only cold, only the stone, only the sense of the sky tilting very slowly overhead like something sliding off a shelf.

There is no pain, in the end. That surprises her, in whatever’s left of her to be surprised. There’s only a kind of unwinding, thread by thread, the campus around her going soft and grey at the edges the way a photograph goes soft when you hold it too close to a flame.

And then. Not death, not quite, not the dark she braces for. Something else.

Something finds her. The way a hand finds a doorknob in an unlit room, sure of where it’s going even though it’s never been here before. It doesn’t ask. It doesn’t have to. It pours into the space she’s leaving the way water finds every low place in a floor, patient and total and starving in a way that has nothing to do with violence and everything to do with thirteen years of having nowhere at all to be.

She doesn’t understand it. She won’t remember trying to.

The last thing she is aware of, is the shape of a thought that isn’t quite a thought. Oh, it says, simple as that, oh, there you are. And whether it’s her voice or some other voice entirely, she never gets the chance to know.

Black.

Not exactly nothing. A held breath with no lungs behind it.

Then. Cold stone against a cheek. A dull ringing behind two eyes that open before anyone tells them to.

The ceiling is unfamiliar and completely familiar at once, both true, both wrong, a hallway that means nothing and then, a half-second later, means everything, though the meaning slides away before it can be caught. Above her, someone has already fled. Footsteps somewhere down the west stairs, too fast, too clumsy for a man who prides himself on control, gone before she can turn her head to look, gone before she even knows there’s a he to look for.

She lies there a long moment. Her fingers move first, against the stone, checking that they still can. Her breath is loud in her own ears, too loud, like she hasn’t used it in years.

She doesn’t remember her name.

She knows, with sudden and total certainty, that she should. She knows there is a name that belongs in the shape of this mouth, this throat, and it isn’t there. Just a smooth, blank space where it should sit, like a word on the tip of a tongue that never arrives.

She sits up. The clipboard lies a few feet away, papers scattered, one shoe half off. Somewhere down the corridor a security light clicks on, sensing motion, and she flinches at it like she’s never seen light before.

Get up, something in her says, calm and old and entirely unfamiliar. Get up. You have rounds.

She doesn’t know whose voice that is. She gets up anyway.