Chapter 1 The New Professor

• I noticed her voice first.
• Not the flat monotone Professor Kwon uses for attendance. Not the bored drawl the TA gives when he explains the syllabus for the third time this week. Hers is different. Low. Even. The kind of voice that makes a lecture hall of two hundred students go quiet without her ever raising it.
• I'm in the third row. I didn't plan that. My last class ran over and this was the closest open seat.
• She writes her name on the board. Professor Sujin. No first name. No last name either, now that I think about it. Just Sujin, like that's supposed to be enough.
• It is.
• She turns around and the room goes still in a way rooms don't usually go still for a business ethics elective at nine in the morning.
• She's not what I expected. I don't know what I expected. Someone older, maybe. Someone who looks like the photo on the faculty page, tired and squinting into fluorescent light. This woman looks like she stepped out of somewhere else. Somewhere with better lighting.
• "I don't do attendance," she says. "I do participation. If you're here, prove it."
• Beside me, my roommate Daniel leans over. "She's hot," he whispers, like I hadn't noticed.
• I had noticed. I'm just not stupid enough to say it out loud in a room full of people who'd repeat it.
• The lecture starts and I stop thinking about her voice and start writing. She's good. Actually good, not just good for a Tuesday morning class. She doesn't read off slides. She asks questions and waits for real answers, and when nobody has one, she doesn't fill the silence for us. She lets it sit there until someone cracks.
• "Ethics isn't what you do when someone's watching," she says, pacing the front of the room slowly, like she's got all the time in the world. "It's what you do when you're certain no one is."
• Nobody writes that down fast enough. I do.
• She calls on a girl two rows up, then a guy near the door, then me. I answer. She nods once, like I passed something, and moves on. I don't know why that small nod does something to my chest, but I decide not to think about it.
• By the end of the hour I've filled four pages of notes and I still don't know anything about her except that she teaches like she's got somewhere important to be after this and this is the only hour she's giving anyone.
• Class ends. Everyone files out. Daniel's already talking about lunch, about the girl from his chem lab, about anything that isn't the class we just sat through. I'm slower than the rest, packing up, because my pen rolled under the seat in front of me and I have to fish it out.
• When I straighten up, she's watching me.
• Not in a way that means anything. Professors watch students. It's the job.
• But she holds it a second too long before she looks back down at her notes, and I tell myself I imagined it.
• "Mr. Kim." She doesn't look up when she says it.
• I freeze halfway through zipping my bag. "Yes?"
• "Your last paper for Professor Han's seminar. I read it."
• I didn't know professors read papers from classes that weren't theirs. I didn't know she knew my name, either, on the first day, before I'd said a single word she could trace back to me on a roster.
• "You cited a source that doesn't exist," she says.
• My stomach drops. "What?"
• "Page six. A journal article, dated four years ago, from a publication that stopped printing a decade before that." She finally looks up. Her eyes are dark, darker than they looked from the third row, and there's something amused in them that doesn't match the words coming out of her mouth. "I'm curious how you found something that isn't there."
• "I didn't, I mean, I used the citation generator, it must have—"
• "It's fine." She waves a hand, cutting me off easy, like it costs her nothing. "Fix it before you submit anywhere else. Sloppy work follows you."
• I nod, too fast, feeling like a freshman even though I'm not one anymore.
• She goes back to her notes. Conversation over. I should leave. Daniel's waiting by the door, mouthing something at me that's probably *let's go* or *what was that about*, and I lift a hand to tell him to hang on.
• "Professor Sujin?"
• She looks up again.
• "How'd you know? That the source doesn't exist. That's a lot of reading for a paper that wasn't even yours to grade."
• Something shifts in her face. Small. Fast. If I'd blinked I would've missed it.
• "I make it my business to know things," she says, "that other people miss."
• The way she says it doesn't sound like a professor being clever with a student. It sounds like something else. Something with weight behind it, like she's telling me the truth and daring me to notice.
• I don't notice. Not yet.
• "Right," I say, because it's the only word that comes out. "Thanks. I'll fix it."
• She's already looking back down at her desk when I turn to go, and I catch up to Daniel at the door, and he asks what that was about, and I say nothing, just a mix up on a paper, and he shrugs and starts talking about lunch again.
• I didn't tell him what I noticed on my way out. I didn't tell him that when she waved her hand to cut me off, for one half of one second, her fingers didn't look like fingers.
• They looked like something else was underneath them, waiting.