Chapter 3 Nothing Happened

• The lights come back on before I even finish standing up.
• Just a flicker, then normal fluorescent glow, like the building's electrical system hiccuped and forgot to apologize for it. The door's still shut, but when I check it, it's not locked. It probably swung shut on its own from a draft. Old building, old hinges, nothing that needs an explanation beyond that.
• Professor Sujin is looking at me like I've grown a second head.
• "Mr. Kim." Her voice is back to normal, even, unreadable. "Are you alright?"
• "You didn't feel that?"
• "Feel what."
• I open my mouth to say *your eyes, they were gold, the door just* and then I hear how it sounds before I say it out loud, and I close my mouth again.
• "Nothing," I say. "Power flickered. Guess I jumped."
• She studies me a second too long, the way she does everything, like she's grading me on a curve only she can see. "You should get some sleep, Mr. Kim. Midterms make everyone see things that aren't there."
• That's it. That's her answer. Not *what did you see*, not *let me explain*, just a dismissal wrapped up neat enough that I can't argue with it without sounding unhinged.
• I leave her office feeling like an idiot. By the time I'm down the stairs and out into the actual daylight, most of it already feels like something I imagined, a bad transition between one thought and the next, the kind of thing you swear happened until you try to describe it to someone else and the words won't hold together.
• Daniel doesn't buy any of it when I try anyway.
• "So the lights flickered," he says, not looking up from his laptop, "and a door closed because of a draft, and you think your professor is secretly evil."
• "I didn't say evil."
• "You said her eyes turned gold."
• "For like half a second."
• "Bro." He finally looks up. "You've been pulling all nighters for a week. Your brain is doing what brains do when you don't sleep. It's not a conspiracy, it's melatonin."
• He's probably right. He's definitely right, actually, when I lay it out like that. Overworked brain, weird lighting, a professor who's intense enough to make anyone's imagination do backflips. I decide to let it go.
• It doesn't stay let go.
• Two days later I'm in the library at eleven at night, the kind of dead hour where it's just me and a handful of other burnouts scattered across different floors, when I see her.
• She's not supposed to be here. Professors don't usually haunt the library at eleven on a Thursday. But there she is, three tables down, a stack of books in front of her that look older than the building we're sitting in, leather bound, no titles on the spines that I can read from this distance.
• She's not reading them, exactly. She has one hand resting flat on top of the stack, eyes closed, like she's listening to something instead of looking at it.
• I should mind my own business. I tell myself that twice.
• Then I get up and walk over anyway, because apparently three days of talking myself out of this wasn't enough, and some part of me needs to know if what I saw in her office was real or if I really am losing it.
• "Professor Sujin?"
• Her eyes open. No flash of gold this time, just brown, tired, human. Whatever I saw in that office feels further away with every second she looks at me like this, unbothered, faintly amused that I've interrupted her.
• "Mr. Kim. Can't sleep?"
• "Neither can you, apparently."
• "I don't need much of it." She closes the top book, unhurried, and the leather makes a soft sound against the table. "What are you doing here."
• "Paper's due Monday. I'm behind."
• "Everyone's behind. It's what Thursdays are for." She nods at the seat across from her, an invitation I don't remember her ever giving anyone in class. "Sit if you're going to hover."
• I sit, mostly because refusing feels harder than sitting does.
• Up close, in bad library lighting instead of her office's warm lamp, she looks exactly like what she is supposed to be. A professor. Tired around the eyes in a way she hides well. Nothing gold, nothing strange, nothing that isn't perfectly explainable by exhaustion and bad fluorescent tubes.
• I almost believe it.
• Then I notice the books again, stacked neat in front of her, and one of them has slid just enough that I can see part of the cover under the dust jacket. No English on it. No language I recognize at all, actually, just a symbol pressed into old leather, something that looks less like writing and more like a shape meant to keep something in, or keep something out.
• She catches me looking and slides the book back under the others, casual, like it's nothing.
• "Library books," she says, before I ask. "For a paper of my own."
• "What language is that?"
• "Old." She says it like that answers the question. "You should focus on your paper, Mr. Kim. Yours is due Monday. Mine isn't your concern."
• It's a clean redirect, the kind of thing a normal professor says to a student who's asking too many questions about her personal work. I let it drop, because pushing feels like it would cost me something I'm not ready to spend yet.
• But when I pack up an hour later and glance back at her table on my way out, she's watching me leave, and this time I don't tell myself I imagined it.
• I just don't know what it means yet.