Want, стр. 19

Twenty minutes in, the chat says that Kayla’s missing. I check the third-floor bathroom and see her shoes, the toes turned in again.

Kayla? I say.

She’s in the large handicap accessible stall and opens up the door and motions for me to come inside. I look back and forth, not sure if I’m supposed to do this or if I care if I’m supposed to do this. I’m not super invested, in this moment, in keeping my job.

You okay? I say.

She nods again for me to come in with her. There’s a bandage around her arm and it has slipped.

I come through the door and she locks it behind me. I sit down on the floor next to her. Are you okay?

She nods.

What’s this?

She tells me that her mother saw the bruise on her face from where her boyfriend hit her and when she told her what had happened, her mother took her to a doctor and had a birth control device implanted in her arm.

I hit him back, though, she says. My mother lets men put their hands on her, but he won’t do it to me again.

May I? I say, nodding to her arm.

I unwrap the bandage slowly and roll it in my hands. I hold it up above the mark where the device has been implanted and I slowly wrap it, asking, with each rotation, if the pressure is too tight.

Fine, she says each time, so I keep it extra tight, watching her face.

Okay? I ask, when I have finished.

Fine, she says another time.

I text the Chilean writer three days in a row and she doesn’t answer and I get frantic. I call her and I email and I’m afraid both that she is not okay in some bodily unsafe way and also that I’ve accidentally scared her off. I’m so sorry, she emails on the fifth day. My son was in town and we got busy. Everything all right?

The next Thursday, I leave work early because I leave early even more now; he’s taken my students from me and, I figure, if I’m caught now, I’ll have something to say.

I go up to the campus where I teach my night class. I’m early and am hoping to find an empty office where I can read. In the small café, at the foot of the stairs, leading up to the department offices, I see the girl who emailed, weeks ago, asking to meet.

Kate, I say, grabbing her arm. Honey, I say, more like a mom than I meant. We never met.

She reddens—on her shoulders, bare like always, on her round cheeks.

It’s not a big deal, she says.

She’s with friends, a thin boy with too-big glasses and a tall, dark girl I’ve never seen. They look back and forth between us. I’m often mistaken for a student, not because I look so young but because I don’t assert much authority, because no one knows who I am or why I’m there. I slip in and out and teach my class and am not around besides that, because I’m not sure why anyone would or should listen when I speak. I felt the same when I was a student at this vaunted institution, like I didn’t quite deserve it, like any minute, someone would come and ask me to leave.

Come up, I say to Kate. I’m getting an office; come with me.

She looks at her friends and the small boy looks down at his shoes.

Come catch me up, I say.

She has a coat slung over her arm and a big bag that she drapes across her body. There’s something sloppy about her that I admire, not unlike Sasha. She’s always seemed to take up space unapologetically.

I ask the kids behind the desk for an office, though I’m early. I tell them that I’m sorry. For the first hour that I’m required to hold office hours, I am in one office, then someone with tenure takes that office over and I’m switched to a smaller one with random extra chairs piled in the back for the remaining hour.

Either of them free? I say.

The girl who always makes my copies and who is always kind smiles, gets up. She was a lawyer before this.

413, she says. This is the bigger office, without broken chairs. I smile at her, grateful.

What’s up? I say, when the door’s closed and this girl has slung her coat across the seat, her bag still hung across her chest and on her lap in a heap.

You know, she says. Busy.

Her skin begins to splotch again and I wonder if she’s even younger than I think, teenaged, some sort of prodigy.

You wanted to talk? I say.

It’s nothing, she says. I wanted. This weird thing happened the other day.

Okay … I say.

She tells me she was at a party with other students from the program.

I was drunk, she says, and looks down at her bag, still in her lap.

Okay … I say.

I was talking to this guy, she says. And he asked me about my dissertation advisor, about what I study. I told him, and he told me he had this guy I’d heard about.

She says: I’d heard about, like it holds within it more than the words mean.

She says: I told him I’d heard he was an ass to girls.

Okay … I say.

It’s just … Her shoulders are red again and she grabs hold of the hair behind her ears and starts to twist it.

I heard the guy was creepy, and I told him, she says. And he told me that wasn’t a thing, that he’s sort of a flirt but it’s all fine because the guy has a kid.

I laugh then, though probably I shouldn’t.

The office that we’re in is small and the books on the shelf behind her were all written by another, much older man who teaches here, who has tenure, who isn’t ever here.

I was just so pissed off, she says. Like he didn’t care, you know? Like a guy being