Chapter 4 Getting Closer

• The tutoring offer comes out of nowhere, or it feels like it does, until I replay the conversation later and realize she steered it there on purpose.
• It's after class, the following Tuesday. I'm packing up slower than everyone else again, which has become a habit I haven't examined too closely, and she calls my name before I make it to the door.
• "Mr. Kim. Your midterm."
• My stomach drops a little. "Bad?"
• "No." She holds it out, and there's a grade at the top that's better than I expected, better than I deserve given how distracted I've been. "Good, actually. Which is why I'm surprised your last two response papers have been sloppy."
• "Sloppy" stings more than it should, mostly because she's right. Between the thing in her office and the thing in the library and Daniel telling me nightly that I'm losing my mind, I haven't exactly been focused.
• "I've had a lot going on," I say, which is as close to the truth as I can get without sounding insane.
• She studies me the way she always does, like she's deciding how much to let show on her own face in response. "Come by my office Thursday. I'll go over what you're missing."
• "You don't have to do that."
• "I know." She's already turning back to her desk, done with the conversation before I've agreed to anything. "Thursday. Four o'clock."
• I go. Of course I go.
• Her office looks the same as it did before, spare, unlived in, like a hotel room someone's rented for a very long stay. She has my last two papers printed out, actual paper, red ink, the kind of feedback that feels personal in a way typed comments never do.
• "Your argument here," she says, tapping a paragraph, "is good. Your execution is lazy. You know what you mean, you're just not saying it."
• "That's fair."
• "It's not a compliment."
• "I know." I almost smile. "It's still fair."
• That gets the same short, low sound out of her that I got in this same office two weeks ago, gone as fast as it comes. I've started keeping a mental tally of how many times I can make that happen, which is a stupid thing to keep track of, given everything else going on. I keep track anyway.
• We go through both papers line by line. It takes an hour, longer than office hours usually run, and somewhere in the middle of it the conversation stops being strictly about ethics theory and starts being about nothing in particular. She asks what I want to do after graduation. I ask how long she's been teaching here, testing the water, careful this time not to ask how old she is.
• "Longer than most people stay anywhere," she says, which isn't an answer, but isn't nothing either.
• "Why here? Specifically. This school, this town."
• "It's quiet," she says. "I like quiet."
• "You don't seem like someone who needs quiet. You command a lecture hall like it's nothing."
• "Commanding a room and needing peace aren't opposites, Mr. Kim." She says it like something she's had to learn the hard way. "Sometimes the second thing is why you get good at the first."
• I don't have a response to that, so I don't give one. We sit in it for a second, and it isn't uncomfortable, which surprises me more than it should.
• "You can call me Junho," I say. "If you want. Mr. Kim makes me feel like I'm in trouble."
• Something flickers across her face, there and gone. "Junho," she repeats, testing the shape of it. "Alright."
• She doesn't offer her first name back. I notice that and don't push it.
• By the time I leave it's past five and the building's mostly empty, hallway lights buzzing overhead in that end-of-day way that makes everything look a little unreal. I feel lighter than I have in weeks, which doesn't make sense given how the last two encounters with her went, given the books with no readable language and the eyes that might have flashed gold and might not have.
• I've decided, somewhere in that office, that I don't care anymore whether it was real. I like being around her too much to let the strange stuff scare me off.
• Daniel notices when I get back to the dorm. "You're smiling," he says, suspicious, like it's evidence of something.
• "Tutoring went well."
• "Tutoring." He says the word like it's got air quotes built into it. "Right."
• I don't argue with him this time, because arguing would mean explaining, and I don't have a clean explanation for what's happening to me where Professor Sujin is concerned. I just know that Thursday afternoons have become the best part of my week, and I know that should probably worry me more than it does.
• It doesn't worry me at all.
• Not yet.
• Next Thursday, she texts me the address of a different office, a smaller one, off campus, says the main building's got maintenance work and she needs somewhere quiet to finish grading before we go over my next paper.
• I don't think twice about it. I should.