Chapter 11
Amy
Advanced Literature is not my best class.
I’m better at science or art, at things that can be proven.
Literature requires you to sit with ambiguity, to inhabit interpretations that can’t be confirmed, to say “perhaps the author meant” and feel comfortable with the perhaps.
I’ve never been comfortable with perhaps.
Perhaps is the space where bad things hide.
But the class fits my schedule, and the professor, an older woman named Dr. Chaudhary who wears reading glasses on a chain and has the air of someone who’s heard every possible wrong answer and found it instructive, doesn’t seem like the type to call on people without warning.
I take my now standard middle-row seat. Notebook out. Pen uncapped. Date written across the top of a fresh page.
I look at the door when it opens. He has to enter slightly sideways to clear the frame. This is not an exaggeration.
The doorframes in the older buildings are narrower than those in the newer construction, and he is wide across the shoulders in a way that only happens when width is made of pure muscle, not performance.
Dark hoodie again.
No bag.
He scans the room in a single sweep, the way you scan a room when you’re assessing it rather than looking for a friend.
His eyes find me in approximately four seconds. and he takes the seat directly behind me. Not across the room. Not at the back. Not any of the eleven other empty seats distributed through the space.
Directly.
Behind.
Me.
I feel him settle into the chair. I feel the weight of him, not literally, the chairs aren’t connected, but in that same way I felt him yesterday in the lecture hall. Like proximity to him is its own climate.
Dr. Chaudhary begins class by asking if anyone has thoughts on the Plath excerpt assigned for this week. I have thoughts, but I keep them to myself.
My hand is wrapped around my pen so tightly the cap is leaving an impression in my palm.
Three girls volunteer.
Dr. Chaudhary nods encouragingly through each response. And then she looks toward the back of the room, toward the area behind me, with a raised eyebrow that suggests she’s noticed the new addition.
“We have a student who started this week,” she says. “Would you like to introduce yourself?”
A pause. Long enough to be deliberate.
“Saint.” His voice is low and unhurried and very close, directly over my left shoulder, and it moves through me the way bass moves through a floor. You feel it before you consciously register the sound.
“Just Saint?” Dr. Chaudhary asks, with the mild tone of someone who’s learned not to push.
“For now.”
Silence blankets the room, the kind that follows something that everyone felt but no one can name yet.
Dr. Chaudhary holds his gaze for two seconds and then nods once, decisively, and moves on.
She asks for thoughts on Plath’s use of mirror imagery. The chapter. The self that cannot be loved. The reflection that shows only what you fear about yourself.
“Amy,” she says, and I blink. I hadn’t volunteered. “You look like you have something to add.”
I open my mouth. “The mirror doesn’t lie,” I say, the words arriving before I’ve decided to say them. “That’s the point. It’s not distorted. It shows her exactly what’s there. And that’s the thing she can’t survive, not the distortion, but the accuracy.”
Silence again.
Then, so quiet only I could possibly hear it, from directly behind me.
“Accurate.” One word. Barely a breath.
But I feel it land between my shoulder blades like a hand pressed flat against my back, and I spend the remaining forty minutes of that class absolutely not turning around and absolutely not thinking about the way it felt when he said it.
After class, I escape through the far door.
I make it all the way to the library on the second floor, to the corner table tucked behind the periodicals in the section that hasn’t been updated compared to the rest of the space and therefore sees no traffic, before I let myself process what just happened.
He takes a seat behind me.
He said my answer was accurate.
His name is Saint.
I take out my phone and type the name into the search bar. Saint Kenyan University gives me nothing: no social media, no directory listing, and no archived articles. Saint alone gives me results for a neighborhood in St. Paul and several churches.
I try Vikiar Kenyan University.
One result. Another archived student paper, two years old, a brief note in the campus news column:
The university confirms that all students enrolled in alternative or specialized academic programs remain subject to standard codes of conduct. No comment was offered regarding individuals.
Alternative academic program.
The same phrase from last night’s search. The same evasive, institutionally comfortable language that means there is something here we are not going to explain to you.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown: Lunch. West Hall. I’ll explain what I can.
I stare at it. Then I type back.
Amy: Who is this? How did you get this number?
Unknown: Azriel and I have my ways.
I don’t know how he got my number.
I don’t know why any of this is happening to me, in this place that was supposed to be the first safe thing I’d ever managed to build for myself.
But I go to lunch. Because the alternative is sitting in a library corner searching dead ends for the name of a guy who sat behind me and breathed one word against my back and somehow made it feel like the most honest thing anyone has said to me in years.
And because I need someone to explain things.
And because…And this is the part I examine with the clinical detachment of someone who has been in therapy and knows the vocabulary. I am not as afraid as I should be.
My nervous system is running at about a seven. My sleep is destroyed. I have a note in my bag from a man I’ve never spoken to and a text on my phone from someone who shouldn’t have my number.
But underneath the fear is something else. Something I recognize, though I wish I didn’t.
I feel seen.
And that is the most dangerous thing of all because I’ve confused being seen with being safe before, and I know exactly how that ends.
I pick up my bag, and I go to meet Azriel, and I try very hard to remember that.