Chapter Text
They held introductions in a circle at the out-of-state student orientation, a kind of group therapy for people who shelled out sticker price for UCLA. Phainon’s cohort was made up of feeder school graduates who’d shot for the Ivy League and fallen a bit short, players of niche sports like water polo lured by scholarships, trust fund kids who wanted to drink and tailgate in sunny California.
“I’m Phainon,” he said. “I’m from Connecticut.”
“Okay,” said Mydei, the junior who had been assigned, clearly under duress, to wrangle this motley band of freshmen. “Is that it, or...?”
Phainon racked his brain for a third fact. “Uh, I like music.”
“Great. Next.”
Mydei towed them along for a perfunctory tour, pointing out landmarks seemingly at will. “The Rende. Don’t eat there,” he advised. “Humanities Building. Or Kaplan, I guess. They keep renaming this stuff.”
The tour finished at the top of the arduous flight of steps that carved through the middle of campus, which Phainon suspected was by design. Everyone was too short of breath to speak. “No questions?” Mydei prompted, poker-faced as they flagged in varied states of collapse. “If not, you’re free to go.”
Phainon said nothing. He wasn’t going to cross an upperclassman with visible neck tattoos on his first day at college.
“Oops!” Someone jostled him in the ribs and he grunted. A girl with cotton-candy pink hair tripped past, taking the steps two at a time. “Sorry! Are you okay?” she called over her shoulder. Phainon managed a grimace, and she turned back around and smacked his tour guide in the arm. “Mydei, you’re sick, quit making the freshmen climb the Janss.”
A second girl in a purple butterfly top trailed after her. She stuck to the handrail to avoid another collision, giving Phainon a curious look as she passed by.
“It’s orientation,” Mydei argued. “I’m orienting them to climb these ten times a day once classes start.”
“Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night. Hey—we’re gonna be late, the counselor skits start at three and I told Cassie we’d put on a good show…”
Phainon straightened up, massaged the elbow-shaped bruise forming in his side, and began the descent back down the hill. He had a suitcase to unpack and a seven-hour flight to sleep off.
Over the next few days a relentless churn of events ran 8 a.m. to midnight, offering up themed scavenger hunts, financial literacy workshops, degree planning sessions with catered lunches. Phainon only checked out a few before his interest waned. The other freshmen roamed around these in enormous packs they had formed by some tacit agreement, and despite having arrived the same time as everyone else, he seemed to have missed the window for an invite.
He explored campus on his own and got acquainted with its army of leafy sycamores and handsome Romanesques. He passed by tech hotshots pitching startup clubs, sorority girls with cell phones glued to their ears, poets sporting thrift sweaters and copies of Said. Pick-up frisbee games broke out across the college green.
If nothing else, it did look exactly like the glossy admissions brochure.
Eventually he wound up considering the library’s bas-relief facade for lack of anything better to do. Around him a few students were posted on the steps in a sprawl of Macbooks and coffees, tackling whatever mysterious work had surfaced before classes even began.
“Hey,” said a voice, just before he resigned himself to going inside.
Phainon looked down. It was his new student tour guide, who was neither studying nor posturing to be. There wasn’t so much as a pencil in sight.
“You stepped on my Capri-Sun,” he informed Phainon, gesturing with the straw between his teeth.
“Oh crap,” said Phainon, backing up gingerly. “I’m sorry.”
Mydei chewed on his straw and squinted up at him. “From the out-of-state orientation, right?”
“Right.” Whether this was a good thing or not was yet to be seen. Mydei spoke at most five words at a time, and had seemed ill-equipped for a job that revolved around shepherding nervy freshmen. It probably wasn’t the best memory to be associated with.
They lapsed into silence while fruit punch pooled down the stairs.
Phainon tried, “I’ll buy you a new one?”
Hearing this, the girl perched on the handrail beside them looked up from her phone and hopped off. “No, don’t!”
Phainon eyed her jangling pink tote bag, rife with trendy keychains, then her equally pink hair. She was the same girl who had bumped into him on the Janss, he realized. He edged out of range of her elbows as discreetly as he could.
“It’s just juice,” she said, nudging Mydei with her sneaker. To Phainon she assured in a stage whisper, “He doesn’t care, I promise. Don’t mind him.”
Mydei’s flat expression said otherwise, but Phainon knew better than to confirm with him. He’d seen this dynamic plenty in high school. Chatty girls who ran tight ships, the recalcitrant jocks they walked all over.
The last girl from the other day emerged from out of nowhere to complete their squad of three. Phainon tried not to jump and failed.
She picked at the hem of her long-sleeve top, staring opaquely at him. “What’s your name?”
“Phainon,” he said, distracted by how little she blinked.
“I think I saw you in my hall earlier. You live in Rieber, don’t you?”
Phainon nodded. He had scored a rare single in the housing lottery. Back in July, opening the email in his cavelike bedroom from where he had lived out his bout of summer malaise, he’d thought it a stroke of luck. Now he was beginning to understand why people wanted an assumed other with whom to attend the dining halls.
“I thought so,” she went on politely. “Have you seen any rats yet?”
“He probably just has roaches,” said the first girl.
“Does Rieber not have a rat problem?”
“That was Hedrick. When I was there, anyway.”
“You said it was termites.”
“It was both, Cassie. I didn’t want you to freak out over the mousetraps.”
“I haven’t,” Phainon managed. He was winded just listening to them.
“Freshman woes,” inserted Mydei, with the smugness of one standing on the other side of them.
The pink-haired girl said innocently, “Maybe it’s just that the rats have standards, and don’t want to live in a frat house.”
Both girls began to giggle, one laugh bright and the other soft, a sound that carried and turned a few heads.
It occurred to Phainon for the first time that students congregated here not because it was particularly convenient, but because it afforded them an audience. It satisfied them, to make an obstacle course of the library lawn and trip up passersby as they chatted about nothing, their friendship on redolent display.
He hitched his Jansport up. “I should get going,” he said. Somehow this was the longest conversation he had sustained with anyone since arriving on campus. “Sorry, about your juice and all.”
“Wait!”
A charm bracelet-covered hand tugged at his sleeve. He frowned at it until its owner released him.
“That’s Cassie, that’s Mydei, I’m Hyacine,” she prattled, beaming aggressively; the Kevlar smile of RAs on which the affected apathy of underclassmen slid right off. She was pretty good at it. “Phainon, you said? You should come to dinner with us. Cassie’s been complaining she wants to meet more people in her year.”
“Hyacine,” the other girl protested, turning red, but she still snuck a look to check his reaction.
Draped across the steps, Mydei pillowed his arms behind his head and waited as well.
Phainon hesitated. He glanced at the library’s thick double doors.
“Oh please, the quarter hasn’t even started! What could you possibly be studying for?” Hyacine peered up at him in a watery way that had obviously won her no shortage of arguments.
He looked the other direction and took in the clusters of students dotted all across the landscape, who had magnetized over shared majors, chance residence hall encounters, grapevine introductions brokered through acquaintances of acquaintances.
Maybe they, too, had sensed this same moment he did. The click of some gear settling into place.
“Okay,” he relented. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
Hyacine made a fist-clenching victory motion that tugged a smile out of him. Phainon let her pull him down to join them on the steps.
*
He and Cassie investigated the dorm kitchens: unusable. The communal billiards table: in good repair. Hyacine and Mydei plied them with institutional lore, a patchwork of unverified and probably ahistoric claims. Exploring the tunnels was not grounds for expulsion—only freshmen believed this. Touching the invert fountain tacked a quarter onto your graduation time, this was real. Except for the one-time baptism you received as a new freshman. Mydei pushed him into it a second time. Phainon splashed so much water on him he had to go home and change.
He learned to play blackjack, speed, blitz. New contacts cluttered his phone and immediately became archaic. He couldn’t bring himself to delete them. Cassie’s actual name was revealed to be Castorice. Hyacine begged him to make an Instagram profile, or join Facebook so she could tag him on memes in group pages with memberships numbering in the tens of thousands. He complied and resolved to forget all his passwords.
At the end of each day, Phainon locked himself in the safe haven of a lukewarm dorm shower. There he would close his eyes and wait for exhaustion to descend.
It was easy to get caught in the current of infinite introductions, free T-shirts and stress balls manufactured in school colors, and conjoined twin popsicles doled out by volunteers manning fleets of Colemans. Alone, he remembered how to be tired.
Not that he minded. Tired had a way of precluding any other feeling.
When he crawled onto the university-issue twin size his eyes closed automatically, and though the radiator buzzed and indistinct music thumped down the whole hallway, for the first time in a long time, he slept without dreaming.
*
Eventually, they had to confront the fact they’d come to college to learn.
Syllabus week arrived in a flurry of textbooks and flyers. Overnight the campus woke up, shook off its coat of brown and orange leaves, and commenced quarter at a businesslike clip.
Castorice wanted to study something creative: fine arts or digital media. Phainon was, he told people evasively when asked, keeping an open mind. They signed up for one shared elective, PHILOS 01: Historical Introduction to Philosophy, on emphatic recommendation of Hyacine. Something about her favorite professor. Just the name about put Phainon to sleep.
On the first day of lecture he sat drumming his pen back and forth across his knuckles until he felt Castorice staring. She was too polite to say anything, so he stopped unasked. Still restless, he shifted in his seat, caged by the fluorescents overhead and the bar of the armrest. He had been slightly too tall for every desk he’d sat behind ever since a growth spurt in the third grade.
“What do you think he’s doing?” Castorice murmured.
Phainon focused on the blackboard and realized the professor had been writing uninterrupted for a long stretch.
It did not appear to be a syllabus. In fact it might not have been anything related to philosophy at all; Phainon closely examined the strings written in a looping hand, and registered no meaning.
“No clue.”
“Should we say something?” Her anxieties rose infectiously as she consulted her phone. “Class should have started ten minutes ago.”
By ‘we’ she meant him. Phainon watched the board fill and weighed how much he wanted to chance ruining his first college class. For all he knew this was standard practice, since he had no frame of reference. “I don’t know,” he muttered back. “Maybe give it another five.”
“Oh, are you gonna ask?” The student sitting to his left abandoned the margin scribblings of his notebook to lean over in interest. “Thank god, we would’ve been here forever. I don’t think he even knows we’re here.”
Phainon tensed, pinned between two expectant gazes on either side of him.
“Professor,” he said aloud, squaring his shoulders.
The man’s chalk did not falter. Students turned Phainon’s direction from neighboring rows, a gradual craning of heads that rippled through the lecture hall.
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Professor,” he tried again.
At that the man dashed a final series of marks onto the board and turned.
Phainon was caught off guard by the eye patch he wore. Then the expression in the other gray-green eye. His features were refined, framed by pieces of pale hair escaping a ribbon just above his shoulder, but the coldness settled over them had an unwelcoming effect.
“What is it?”
Phainon forgot what he had planned to say. “We were wondering…” He made a vague gesture that could have indicated himself and his seatmates, or the entire room. “When class was going to begin. It’s ten past the hour.”
The professor twirled his chalk aloft, as if at any moment he might swiftly return to writing once more.
“I see,” he said. “And you are…?”
“Phainon,” said Phainon.
“Phainon,” repeated the professor. To Phainon’s relief he set the chalk down with a clack and yanked the chain on the projector screen with surprising vigor, covering the scrawl on the blackboard. “Well then, since Phainon has kindly reminded us all of the time, let’s begin.”
He strode to the lectern and clicked around on a laptop until a painfully spare PowerPoint titled PHILOS 01 in Arial displayed. There was not even a stock theme applied.
“This,” he said, advancing the slide without preamble, “is Historical Introduction to Philosophy. My name is Professor Anaxagoras. Take care not to call me Professor Anaxa, Professor A, Prof Nax, or any other diminutive or abbreviation…”
Phainon looked slowly toward Castorice out of the corner of his eye and found she was already doing the same. She covered a giggle with her hand.
“Readings will be challenging, and should you not engage in our discussions, you will fall behind,” the professor warned. He began to pace with the clicker held behind his back. “The world of philosophy is vast. In the scope of this course, we have time for only a broad survey. My hope is to introduce you to the tools of logic and reasoning we use in the field, and spark an interest that extends beyond the classroom.”
Half an hour later, they stumbled out of the drafty building into the warmth of the sun again. The professor had gunned through the slides rattling off required readings and collaboration policies, assigned homework due the following week, and dismissed class early. He had not bothered waiting for the room to empty before resuming his transcriptions on the blackboard.
Castorice shifted her textbooks in her arms. “What did you think?”
“He was young,” Phainon said absently, picturing the professor in his loose blazer and blue jeans. “He couldn’t have been much older than us.”
“Mm,” Castorice agreed. Then she added, “The weekly quizzes look tough, but at least we’re allowed to consult a partner,” and he realized she was asking about the course.
He glanced sidelong at her.
“Are we partners, then?” he half-joked. He did fine with humanities, but he imagined a studious type such as herself might prefer an equally diligent partner. One of the hand-wavers who camped in the front row to better establish their academic dominance.
To his surprise she said solemnly, “I’d like that.”
Phainon looked forward again. He was slightly afraid if he said the wrong thing, she would change her mind. But they joined the trickle of students filtering out onto the pavement, and Castorice accompanied him all the way back to their dorms, where she said goodbye at his door and that she had already booked a study pod if he wanted to join her later.
*
“You’re dropping the course?” said Hyacine. “But Professor Anaxa…”
The four of them had begun frequenting the B-Plate, which was the loosely triangulated midpoint of their respective places of residence. It mostly served organic tofu a dozen ways, and they had to jockey for tables with the Hydroflask-wielding fine arts majors. But its menu suited Castorice, who was a staunch vegetarian, and Mydei, who ate like he planned to live past one hundred.
Mydei met Phainon’s eyes over the table in a way he had come to know meant, Here she goes.
“I know he’s controversial,” Hyacine began, as predicted. “But he is a rare teacher. He doesn’t just teach the material, he teaches you how to think.”
Phainon squinted, trying to see the professor in some sort of Dead Poets Society light. “How did you meet him again?” As far as he knew she was a nursing student.
“He taught medical ethics my freshman year. Not really his field of interest, but lots of grad students get saddled with big intro classes like that.”
“The professor is a grad student?” Castorice mirrored Phainon’s own surprise.
“PhD, actually,” Hyacine amended. “He was finishing his master’s when I met him.”
Phainon silently mathed it out. Straight into his master’s out of college, then another couple years before moving on to the doctorate. He was probably twenty-four or twenty-five. Older, if he had waited any in between, but he seemed, from what little Phainon knew of him, like the type to board the academia train at first stop and never get off.
“I took a class with him too,” said Mydei out of the blue. “Intro philosophy.”
They all turned to look at him. Mydei let them wait as he polished off his salmon pilaf and finally pronounced, “I liked it.” He tossed the fork on the plate with a clatter. “Shit ton of readings though.”
Phainon stared. “Are you interested in philosophy?”
“Not really.”
Hyacine flapped a hand in dismissal. “Never mind that. Why don’t you like the class?”
Phainon gave up demystifying the course shopping habits of D2 athletes and concentrated on dissecting a bite of free-range omelet. He was reluctant to offend.
“Professor Anaxa is a character,” he said at last.
The first day of class marked the shallow end of the odd behaviors the professor was prone to. Though it was hard to deny he lectured passionately, he also ran the course with a disdain for any sort of convention that might lend it structure. Sometimes he flew off on a tangent in the first minutes of class and didn’t return until time was up. When they came across a reading or school of thought he took issue with, which was often, he tore it apart mercilessly. He cold-called as he saw fit. No one knew what the exams looked like.
“But more than that,” Phainon went on, troubled, “I’m pretty sure he hates me.”
“That can’t be true,” Hyacine said. “He doesn’t hate anyone.”
“I interrupted him writing on the blackboard on the first day of class.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. Phainon frowned.
He had the sense every time the professor’s gaze slid over him that it contained dislike, but deep down, part of him had hoped someone would reassure him otherwise.
“Well, he’s not for everyone,” Hyacine relented, evidently needing no more proof of his grudge against Phainon. “You know what’s best for you! It’s just, the drop period is over. You’ll have to withdraw, and it’ll go on your transcript.”
Phainon paused, fork in hand. “What?”
“Oops. You didn’t know?”
He shook his head mutely. The deadline must have slipped past him in the whirlwind of the first weeks. His calendar was throttled with recitations and seminars, plus the revolving door of introductory club meetings he never followed up on.
Beside him, Castorice began to giggle.
“What are you laughing about,” he demanded, astonished.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m glad I get to keep my partner.”
*
Phainon was invited to his first college party. He and Castorice and Hyacine journeyed one block out from campus to the peeling white colonial that housed Sigma Nu, where the crew-cut frat brother stationed at the door eyed their ratio and asked as a password who they knew. The interaction made Phainon raise an eyebrow, but the girls were already slipping inside, arms linked and gossiping, so he followed their lead.
In the packed kitchen they found Mydei manning the bar, a plastic foldout table stocked with two-liter sodas and bottom shelf alcohol. Mydei poured each of them a vodka Coke and warned them not to throw up; he was on cleanup the next morning. He added an extra two fingers of liquor to Phainon’s cup and smirked.
Set loose in a house full of strangers and bass-heavy music, Phainon looked for something to occupy himself with. He trailed behind the girls for a while, but quickly lost them as they wove through the crowd and held ecstatic reunions with friends whom he had never met before.
Instead he toured the hallways for a while, sipping his powerful and disgusting drink and inspecting the house’s byzantine layout, until he realized people were having sex behind some of its closed doors. It put him off enough to return to the din of the first floor, where he claimed a sagging beige armchair in a corner and tried not to look out of place.
Around midnight Hyacine found him. She dropped onto the cushion beside him, which wheezed and pitched her onto him before she straightened. Her half-empty red Solo cup contained a different and more garishly colored drink than the one Mydei had made.
“Having fun?” she shouted over the music.
“What?”
“I said are you having fun!”
“Oh,” said Phainon lamely. “It’s alright.”
Hyacine frowned and appeared to see him for the first time, eyes focusing.
“Do you not know anyone here?” Her wide-eyed expression was without judgment, which made Phainon feel infinitely worse.
He shrugged. “Just you guys,” he said, and repeated, trying to dispel the pitiful image of a dog abandoned by its owner, “It’s alright, though.”
“Oh no! Gosh, I’m sorry we left you. I should have realized.”
“It’s okay,” Phainon reassured her. He didn’t expect to be babysat by the only people on campus who had invited him into their fold.
“No it isn’t,” said Hyacine fervently. She clapped a hand to her forehead. “I feel awful.”
Phainon, itching to end their circular exchange, offered, “I haven’t had much luck meeting people here, honestly. I’m used to it, Hyacine.”
When people did strike up conversations with him, girls mostly, they were meandering and one-sided: what was his major (undecided), where was he from (Hartford), what sport did he play, clearly he played one (he didn’t). These always left him feeling vaguely ill at ease afterward, relieved and disappointed in equal measure.
The concern in her eyes only amplified. “Really,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“Really. When I first got here, all the other freshmen went everywhere together in these huge groups. I felt like the only one who didn’t get sucked into one.” He smiled for her benefit. “I got a lot of stares for showing up to events alone.”
Hyacine looked him up and down and said, “I think it was because you’re six feet tall and platinum blond.”
Phainon laughed. He was not sure what she was getting at.
After that they began to routinely attend parties on the weekends. Sometimes it was at rows of frats Phainon couldn’t keep straight, their identical grimy basements and thumping playlists running together in his head. Otherwise they wound up in more intimate gatherings hosted at off-campus apartments, where acquaintances in bookish majors like Arabic and classical civilizations offered him joints and picked his brain on topics that made him feel like it was his first day on Earth.
He didn’t particularly like the sardine-can squeeze of bodies in near darkness, or the scrutiny of better-read strangers to whom he played court jester. But it felt like the right thing to do. It felt like the normal thing to do, and that had to count for something.
One weekend Phainon turned down an invite to the pre-health frat’s fall social and hitched a bus ride to the observatory at the top of Mount Hollywood. He purchased a ticket to get into the quiet planetarium show, where his only company was a mother bouncing a baby in a sling and a high school couple necking bravely under the Galaxies in our Neighborhood display. He picked a seat at random and watched the laser-projected night sky until it imposed onto his eyelids.
It comforted him to picture himself embedded in the glitter, so small he was practically dust.
In his mind’s eye he zoomed out once, twice, three times. Each click of the shutter shrank him by another magnitude. After a few more clicks, the vast and swirling cosmos eclipsed him entirely.
*
On a beautiful Saturday afternoon, while other students idled under spitting fountains and strung up hammocks between the fig trees, Phainon was navigating the deserted halls of the Humanities Building.
His Philosophy 01 grade was on the line. This was the natural outcome of having submitted, in a flash of daring inspiration, a one-sentence response for their first essay of the quarter. Truthfully, he’d turned it in still thinking he would drop the class and never have to hear about it again. The consequences hadn’t exactly been on his mind.
Professor Anaxa had returned it without a grade, only two figures scrawled across the top: an office number, and his hours.
Phainon found the office tucked away in a disused corner of the building. He steeled himself before knocking. It brought him back to that first day of class again: hand raised, sweat accumulating beneath the collar of his T-shirt as he waited for the professor’s acknowledgment.
He rapped on the door. “Professor Anaxa?”
“It’s Anaxagoras,” drifted out a muffled voice.
Everyone on campus, including Hyacine whom he seemed to favor, called him Anaxa. Phainon cracked the door open and let himself in.
The professor glanced up from his desk. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Yes,” agreed Phainon, unable to refute this. “It’s me.”
“Have a seat.”
The professor continued to work as Phainon pulled out the chair across from him. He was writing in the margins of a hefty stack of papers, grading maybe, or notating his own research.
Phainon stole a look around the cluttered office. His gaze traveled over dusty ficuses and boxes of unsorted books. The ten-pound kettlebell doubling as a paperweight on another desk scandalized him; he could not imagine the professor willingly engaging in an activity that made him sweat.
“It’s not mine,” Anaxa said without looking up, startling him. “I share the space with two other doctoral students.”
“Ah,” said Phainon. His understanding of the professor arranged into a familiar shape again. Then he added, compelled by some terrible impulse for idle conversation, “They couldn’t have given you your own office, with all the teaching you do?”
Anaxa put the pen down. “What did you need help with?”
Phainon reminded himself that as the professor hated him already, there was really not much to lose.
He reached for his backpack and pulled out the essay. Anaxa lifted an eyebrow.
“You wanted to see me about this,” Phainon supplied.
The professor said, “You can imagine why.”
“Why not just fail me? It would have been fair.”
“A poorly written essay,” said Anaxa, pushing aside the stack of papers so his attention was at last fully on Phainon, “is a lack of planning and intention. A one-sentence essay is a statement. You wanted to make a challenge. So.” He spread his hands in a gesture to indicate the floor was Phainon’s. “Let’s hear it.”
Phainon stared at his nearly blank paper as if it would spontaneously populate with words.
“The prompt,” he said. “You asked us to argue Godwin’s case for utilitarianism. That if you can only save one person in a burning building, the right choice is whoever provides the most ‘good’ to society.”
Anaxa had his arms folded as he listened, one index finger tapping against his coat sleeve. His sharp gaze did not move. Unnerved, Phainon continued, “I read the text. I don’t agree with him, and I’m not sure how to make an argument I don’t believe in to begin with.”
The professor sighed, and unfolded his arms.
“A romantic notion,” he said. “Unfortunately, by the time you graduate, you’ll be no stranger to writing theses that must convince you, as much as they do the reader.” Seeing Phainon’s expression cloud, he added wryly, “It’s not a bad thing. There’s much to be gained by constructing a different perspective, if only to disassemble it again in the end.”
Phainon nodded. It was exactly the sort of lofty platitude he had expected to hear. “I see.”
“Here,” said Anaxa, clearly sensing his reluctance, not that he was trying very hard to conceal it. “Start with this.” Without warning he leaned forward, tugged the paper out from under Phainon’s elbow, and oriented it before himself. “List your critiques first.”
Phainon eyed the professor, who was clicking his ballpoint pen expectantly, with moderate apprehension. “Well. I don’t think it’s that simple. How to decide whose life gives the most value,” he said slowly, and Anaxa began to jot down his dictation. “He says people are capable of thinking independently, rationally. But isn’t that contradictory? If everyone’s thinking for themselves, how could they agree on what’s truly rational? Even if they could,” he added, gaining steam, “all of this supposes maximizing ‘value’ is the right idea in the first place…”
As he rambled, the page filled with an elegant, and completely illegible, cursive. The professor had some of the worst handwriting Phainon had ever seen, ranking among harried calculus teachers and writers of cursory doctor’s notes.
“Done?” Anaxa prompted. Phainon nodded.
Anaxa spun the paper back around to face him. “Now refute them.”
Phainon wordlessly accepted the professor’s stenography. After squinting for a while, he made out the word “an.” Anaxa waved a hand and said, “No need to do it here. Spend some time thinking it over, and don’t hold back taking down your arguments. This will give you a better understanding of his ideas—and your own.”
“I see,” said Phainon, with a little more sincerity this time.
“Good. We’ll leave the grade null for now. You can turn it in to me by the next midterm.”
Phainon looked up to reply and saw the professor was rifling through the enormous stack of papers he had set aside, already preparing to resume his work from before Phainon’s intrusion.
Whatever polite thanks had been on Phainon’s tongue died. There appeared to be some part of his brain dedicated to giving Anaxa new reasons to dislike him, and it only lit up all the more vividly in the man’s presence.
“It’s just,” he blurted, “I can’t read your handwriting.”
Anaxa laughed.
It seemed to be genuine—a crisp, unrestrained burst of sound. “Do you need to?” The papers forgotten, he let them fall back into place, tucking a stray lock of hair behind his ear. “These are your ideas; you expressed them just minutes ago. Pretty passionately, I might add.”
Phainon did not register this response enough to be abashed by its obviousness. In wake of his sudden laugh, the professor’s ever austere features had settled into a faint smile, that cold gray eye curving, the thin but well-formed lips lifting at the corners.
Even as Phainon stared, it began to fade. Anaxa was frowning by the time he remembered to look up. “Did you have any other questions?”
“No,” said Phainon, composing himself. “Thanks for your help, Professor.” He crammed the essay into his backpack and excused himself, trying not to stumble under the weight of the professor’s gaze.
On the trek back to the dorms Phainon wondered if he had imagined it. There was a gentleness in that smile he had not seen from Anaxa before. Sometimes he broke into abrupt laughter during class, no doubt entertaining some privately amusing thought in his head, but that wasn’t quite the same thing.
It wouldn’t be horrible, Phainon thought, to see it again. It didn’t seem especially likely either.
*
Their first quarter on campus came to an end without fanfare, only a faint sense of relief at having survived. Phainon earned a B in his philosophy course. He got his final paper back and flipped through it page by page, going impatiently fast by the end, but there was only one note on the front.
Good thesis! Arguments are well structured. Would love to see the counterarguments explored in greater depth.
Not only was there an unnecessary exclamation point, but the note was readable. This was the work of a TA.
Strangely, the final grade disappointed him. Not because he made As in all his other courses that quarter, and not because he had made mostly As all through high school. Even a C might have satisfied him. It would give him cause for a sort of righteous indignation at least, and though he couldn’t picture himself doing this, he would have grounds to march into the professor’s office demanding an explanation.
The B was bland, detached in its ambivalence. It was like he had made no impression at all.
He tucked the paper in a manila folder and shelved it over his desk next to other retired materials from the quarter.
Administration had gone to great lengths to encourage the freshman class, via orientation events and later, email blasts and provost newsletters, to take advantage of the bountiful fields of study UCLA had to offer. Graduation and major requirements were faraway concepts of the future. In the now, they were to explore.
Phainon logged onto the course registration portal and filled out a schedule in twenty minutes.
Winter quarter’s arrival coincided with a cold snap that swept through campus, ridding most of the trees of their leaves. The students hurried to class without stopping to chat and put the flyer-pushers on the thoroughfare mostly out of commission. Phainon, who was used to snow and ice and long weeks of miserable slush-packed streets, found a windbreaker was more than enough to handle California winter.
The other routines of campus life reshuffled as well. New faces populated the lecture halls, and different routes to class had to be planned and evaluated. Which shortcuts best circumnavigated the wind tunnel behind Franz Hall; when to brave the lines of the busiest cafes and when to give up and go uncaffeinated.
Phainon’s new course load was disjointed and sort of grasping; sensible Calculus I blocks sandwiched between picks like urban policy and introductory screenwriting.
The shift in schedule was appreciated. He didn’t exactly forget about his philosophy grade, but he did shove it successfully to a back-burner.
*
In the tennis off-season Mydei trained three times a week at the student gym, soldiering through a gruesome full-body circuit that started with farmer carries and ended with squats to failure. For some reason, this conditioning also involved Phainon.
Mydei hated lining up for a squat rack during peak hours and so their schedules on these days began at 5 a.m., when Phainon would wake up to a rude text along the lines of Get up now or else. He would smack a hand over his vibrating phone, doze another ten minutes, and finally drag himself out of bed and through the turnstiles of the BFit. The timing of this routine was precarious because the building was pretty much next door to his dorm, and if he dawdled, Mydei would show up stone-faced at his door to haul him out personally.
Their first session Phainon benched two plates and deadlifted three. “Is that good?” he asked.
Mydei looked at him for a long time, impassive. “You really don’t work out?”
“Not unless you count the hike from the dorms to South Campus.”
Mydei sighed and combed a hand through his already messy hair. Then said cryptically, “The Bruins missed out.” It took a beat for Phainon to realize this was a compliment.
After they trained they would head to the nearest dining hall and refuel with a spread of bagels and eggs, fruit and waffles, whatever looked good on the service stations; or for Mydei, plain oatmeal and turkey sausage. Aside from the occasional sugary juice, which seemed to be his vice, Phainon had never seen him eat a refined carb.
The sun was usually just barely creeping up when they finished. Phainon would head back to his dorm for a shower, then decide what to do with himself before his first class of the day.
Sometimes he chipped away at homework. Sometimes he stretched, trying to loosen his muscles in time for the next nausea-inducing workout.
Often he didn’t do anything productive at all, just popped his headphones on and lay in bed studying the ceiling, or went on walks around campus looking at the frescoed arcades situated across from brutalist concrete boxes. A school built piecemeal to fit a century of changing fashions and an ever-growing student body.
It struck him that he, too, was part of this melange. He had washed up with a suitcase of cardigans and knit sweaters onto this land of tech hoodies and flip flops, paying out-of-state tuition with his dead parents’ money so he could wander around campus wondering why he felt oddly alone, even though all around him were people.
One of these walks was enough to take him right up to 9 a.m. At that point he would report to the languages building for intermediate Spanish, which he intended to check off a gen ed requirement with.
Señora Villalobos began every class with five minutes of compelled small talk. Phainon was terrible at conjugation, and would recount his morning in stilted, childish sentences to his partner. Hice ejercicio. Fui a caminar. ¿Y tú? He left out the part about the frescoes, and the tech hoodies. They hadn’t gotten to whatever chapter of the textbook covered that.
*
Phainon ended up losing his virginity in the same unremarkable way scores of college students across the country did: after a raging Everclear-fueled night on frat row.
He made eye contact across the room with the skinny flannel-clad guy from his Mesoamerican literature class, one of the farfetched darts he had thrown at the wall in hopes of landing on a major. They wound up back at Phainon’s single, where he asked Phainon if he topped.
“Yes,” Phainon invented, because this seemed to be the right answer. In his head he’d always thought his first time would be with a girl.
Afterward he lay there, thinking absurdly that he should have watched porn beforehand to study up, and realized he had never gotten his partner’s name. Then he thought maybe he should be offended his own name hadn’t been asked for either.
They didn’t speak again until the end of quarter, when the guy almost bumped into him as they turned in their finals at the same time. See ya around, he mouthed, smiling tightly and avoiding eye contact. Phainon doubted this would happen. They had never learned each other’s names.
He decided casual sex was not for him.
But he was glad he’d had it. It seemed like a checkbox to tick off on the long scroll of things one needed to accomplish, slotted in between the first kisses and cigarettes, the degrees to be earned, the modest sedans to be considered and financed and finally paid off. To what end, it was unclear to him. The scroll was always unfurling.
*
After all that floundering Phainon was no closer to figuring out what exactly he was there to study. His advisor Aglaea intimated that although policy dictated she reassure him he had plenty of time, he did not.
“The goal,” she explained to Phainon in her crisp Oxford accent, “is to have a concrete plan by the end of your freshman year.”
“I thought we had until junior year to declare a major,” said Phainon, sinking uncomfortably into the plush armchair opposite her desk, which had thwarted his attempts to sit up straight and was making him shorter than her.
Aglaea’s mouth pinched. “I would advise making a decision on your own, rather than letting the deadline make one for you.”
She headed the communications department and as far as Phainon could tell, served as some sort of catchall mentor for difficult cases like himself, undecided itinerants who shopped the course catalogue aimlessly and to little effect.
“Right.” He smiled weakly. “So, one last quarter to find the course that’ll define my life, then.” She didn’t laugh.
“It might help you to begin with what’s on your mind already,” she suggested, articulating with her hands. “What do you find draws your attention? What questions ail you? All you must do is locate that seed of interest.”
Phainon watched the gold bangles on her arm cascade. Installed in her carpeted office and surrounded by ornate spinning globes and leather-bound books of esoteric subject matter, the trappings of a life lived with purpose, she seemed to be from a different planet from him entirely. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Outside on the plaza, Castorice was waiting for him. “How did it go?”
“I am going,” he said darkly, “to be the first student here to take ten years to graduate.”
“That wouldn’t happen.” She turned her high-beam stare onto him in a way that was meant to be comforting. “They would kick you out first.”
They met up with Hyacine at the B-Plate for their usual debriefing over grilled shrimp and seasonal salads. Hyacine vented some grievance about a chemistry lab partner who wasn’t pulling their weight, then decided she was overthinking it. Castorice reassured her she wasn’t. They hashed and rehashed what the best course of action was.
Phainon’s mind drifted continually to his conversation in Aglaea’s office.
Back at the dorms Phainon clicked on his desk lamp and sat down in front of his laptop. The course selection period for spring quarter was ongoing. He had a shopping cart of some classes he’d been putting off investigating, but he left those alone.
Instead he filtered offerings by department and scrolled through the listings under Philosophy. The course titles he barely glanced at, ignoring them in favor of the instructor column, where he searched for one name in particular.
It didn’t take long to find. The corresponding course was PHILOS 03: Philosophy of Mind, meeting every Wednesday and Friday for ninety-minute blocks. He slotted it into the first spot on his course priority requests and made his submission.
*
Phainon showed up for class fifteen minutes early and staked out a seat toward the back, but not so far back he looked like a slouch. He spent the time backreading the group chat, where Hyacine and Mydei were arguing about whether or not Mydei needed to see a trainer for a huge bruise he’d garnered in practice, and wondering if the professor had managed to blissfully forget him in the span of the previous quarter.
Right on time, Professor Anaxa swept through the doors balancing an open laptop and a paper cup of coffee.
Perhaps because Phainon was staring rather intently, his gaze lifted to scan the lecture hall, and caught on him. Phainon saw the flicker of recognition. He looked away just as quickly, but the satisfaction was already Phainon’s.
It was a mystery to him why he even cared—to be remembered by a professor who didn’t seem to like him all that much.
The professor got his belongings in order, hooked his laptop up to the projector, and started class.
Phainon thought it wise to pay attention to his explanation of the course, given that he’d chosen it sight unseen.
“Welcome to Philosophy 03,” Anaxa began, fixing his rumpled jacket. Whatever schedule he lived on left him in slight disarray at most every entrance. “If you have taken the introductory course we offer here, you may have a better grasp on the foundations we’ll rely on, but it is not necessary. Now, to lay out our goals…”
He launched into one of his spartan PowerPoints, organized in the usual concise bullet points. If Phainon didn’t know better he could believe all of his slides were prepared in the ten minutes before each class began, but it was more likely the professor simply judged this to be an efficient means of pedagogy.
“Our focus is the discussion of philosophical issues as they relate to the mind. Determinism, materialism, behaviorism,” Anaxa recited. “We’ll look at questions concerning moral responsibility, the relation between mind and body, and what it means to have free will.”
Phainon had never come close to thinking about any of these things before, but that was what you attended classes for. To be posed with new ideas for your consideration. He ignored that this ran exactly counter to the advice Aglaea had prescribed him.
After class, which ended just as early as the first session of intro philosophy had, Phainon kept a surreptitious eye on the front of the lecture hall while he packed up.
The professor was unplugging the laptop from the display. He didn’t power it off immediately, instead frowning at the screen and typing a few strokes on the keyboard. Probably some bit of administrative housekeeping or another. Once in a while a student would pass by and bid him farewell, to which he would glance up briefly and answer in kind.
Phainon snapped out of it when a bookbag that swung from the row in front nearly checked him in the face. By the time he’d gathered himself, Anaxa had cased the laptop and was preparing to leave.
He threw his backpack over a shoulder and jogged down the steps just in time to meet the professor at the door.
“Hi,” he said, aiming for breezy, and probably landing on out of breath. “Phainon, from Philosophy 01 in the fall.”
“I remember,” Anaxa said blandly.
“Oh.” Phainon pretended this was news to him. “Then, I don’t mean to keep you. I just wanted to say I enjoyed your class that quarter.”
Anaxa’s gaze skimmed over him in consideration before settling back somewhere between his eyebrows. “And so, you’ve returned,” he finished for Phainon.
One of the other stragglers maneuvered around them to the exit and called, “Thanks, Professor.”
“Yes, see you.” The door shut again and Anaxa turned back to Phainon. “I am always glad to see a student take an interest in philosophy.”
Phainon laughed lightly. “Well, you made it interesting.” Something had caught his attention, that was true. He wasn’t entirely sure it had to do with the curriculum.
Anaxa’s mouth thinned, which confirmed to Phainon he wasn’t especially graceful about accepting compliments. The sly thought to try a third time and see how the professor would get around that one popped up, but before he could act on it, Anaxa cleared his throat and reached for the crash bar on the door.
“I’ll see you, then,” he said, looking expectantly at Phainon.
Phainon eyed him as he held the door and then followed Phainon through it. In the hallway, when the professor shook his sleeve down his arm to check his watch instead of setting off right away, Phainon realized he wanted to avoid heading the same direction.
He lifted an eyebrow. Beneath the inscrutable eye patch and his generally professorial bearing, Anaxa was actually sort of awkward.
Either that or he really did have a grudge against Phainon.
“See you next class, Professor Anaxa,” he said with a halfhearted wave.
Down the hall and out of sight, Phainon opened his phone. He had thirty unread messages. Four were private texts from Castorice, who had abstained from voting and was begging Phainon to make a call and restore peace to the group chat.
He pulled up the picture, winced, and typed, sorry dude, you should get that checked out. It was a seriously ugly bruise.
*
As the days warmed, it began to rain intermittently. Mostly in brief, fitful spells, but it was hard to predict their comings and goings, and the skies had turned decidedly gray. Even when there wasn’t rain, the marine layer rolled in from the coast each morning to ensure fog hung over campus.
This was serious for a student population used to LA’s copacetic and sunny days of fame. Beach volleyball plans fell through, and bike rides through the Palisades lacked their usual appeal.
Phainon didn’t mind the gloom. It lent a pensiveness to their study sessions in the upper floors of the library, where the rain drummed against the panes and their faces were lit by the stained glass Tiffany lamps.
Hyacine and Castorice had abandoned their textbooks in favor of whispered conversation. They wondered if it was uncommonly rainy; how long it had been since the last April this overcast.
Mydei told them they should enjoy it while it lasted, and to take it to the lobby if they wanted to chat. Hyacine threw Castorice’s empty Vitamin Water at him.
Like most of the student body, the three of them were locals. They hailed from neighboring suburbs, had grown up orbiting the school system and knowing they would one day enroll as their older friends and relatives had. Hyacine and Castorice had gone to the same high school together. Mydei they had met through a short-lived sports medicine internship of Hyacine’s that apparently put her off the practice permanently.
She had a story she liked to recount a few shots deep at parties, about how her first time courtside, a hardheaded tennis player had weathered silently through an ACL tear until he collapsed mid-set and had to be stretchered off. When this happened Mydei would fold his arms, close his eyes, and retreat into what Phainon imagined to be his monastic inner sanctum until it was over.
Phainon was thoroughly entertained by this anecdote. In fact he liked hearing all of their stories, about childhoods spent in two-bedroom ranch houses in Pasadena or Burbank, the disastrous piano lessons and favorite high school exes, Castorice’s twin sister whom he was directed to picture as Castorice, but extroverted, the time Mydei got grounded for his first tattoo and it made him so mad he snuck out and got another.
The more they talked, the less he had to supply about himself.
When the conversation did drift his way, he would laugh, and redirect it gently. After a while they learned not to ask. But they had probably gathered, through all the omissions and deflections, the shape of that void where something had once been.
*
On the last day of quarter the mood on campus was palpable, a weightless and effusive cheer. The rain had let up around the start of May and left campus preternaturally green. Every morning when Phainon stepped outside it was spring like he had never seen it before.
His final class before break was Philosophy.
Their last discussion was meant to be easygoing, or as easygoing as Professor Anaxa would allow anyway; a wrap to the reading on identity theory that had been assigned the week before. On the other side was the promise of a languid summer whiled away doing a lot of nothing.
Phainon approached it like his execution. Once again he’d managed a string of Bs on his assignments in Anaxa’s course, and he had the sinking feeling if this one ended in the same mediocrity as the first, it would hammer the final nail into some intangible coffin.
But by the time the ninety minutes was up, he hadn’t opened his mouth once.
Anaxa closed out the discussion, thanking them for their work and wishing them a good summer. Phainon stayed glued to his seat. He was pretty sure the professor didn’t believe in a participation grade—either you contributed something worthwhile, or you didn’t. Even if his silence tacked a minus onto his B in the end, that wasn’t what was on his mind. All throughout class a restlessness had stoked just beneath the surface of his skin.
It continued to simmer as he mechanically cleared his desk. Common sense told him to pack up and file out of the hall with the other students, who were already discussing where they would grab drinks that night, the roster of who all was going. He could also text the group chat and find someone to split the bill with at some overpriced restaurant in Silver Lake.
If he finished packing, he decided, and the professor was still there, he would impose on him one last time.
With vacation beckoning the room emptied more quickly than Phainon had anticipated. The door swung shut on the fading sounds of laughter in the hallway, and it was just him and the professor left.
He could tell the moment Anaxa realized this too. The tension that crept into his frame gave it away, even if he was assiduously staring at his laptop screen.
Phainon got up and shuffled down the aisle without any real plan as to what he was going to say.
It didn’t matter because Anaxa spoke first, zipping up his thin leather briefcase as Phainon reached the lectern. “I’m sorry, I’m in a bit of a rush.” He hooked the bag over his shoulder and his gaze strayed to the exit behind Phainon. “Did you need something?”
“Oh…” Phainon searched himself for a response, thrown at having been so promptly brushed off.
Somehow he could tell ‘I just wanted to talk to you’ was not the answer the professor was looking for.
“It’s nothing.” He mustered a smile. “Thanks for class, Professor.”
Anaxa looked at him then, and seemed to soften, his grip on the strap loosening.
“I’m moving offices,” he explained. “Facilities wants the keys back at noon; they’re closing early today. I suppose even the staff are ready to begin their vacations.” He rolled his lone eye up toward the ceiling, which stupidly thrilled Phainon, the idea they were sharing some private joke.
His gaze leveled once more, and the moment passed. “Enjoy your summer, Phainon.” And he made to walk past him.
Phainon said, “Do you need any help?”
Anaxa stopped. He looked askance at Phainon, and his neutral expression sank slowly into one of confusion.
“Help?”
“Yeah,” said Phainon, wondering what his own problem was, “with moving your things.”
The professor studied him for a long time, while Phainon tried not to twitch or say anything even more peculiar.
“Alright,” he said finally.
Phainon blinked. “If you don’t mind,” the professor added, rather stiffly.
He resumed walking and pushed through the door, his long pale hair trailing behind him. Phainon came back to his senses and followed.
They took the elevator to the fourth floor. The only sounds were the lurch of the car inching up the shaft and the ding that announced each floor. Phainon gained a new awareness of the sensation in his body as he shifted his weight from left to right and back again.
He tried to reassure himself it was normal to have offered a hand, that none of his actions were suspect. Any other student would have done the same.
In the office, it became apparent why Anaxa had accepted his help. Boxes upon boxes rose in uneven spires, haphazardly sealed in packing tape.
Phainon took in the scene. “You were going to move all this yourself?”
Anaxa squeezed past him through the doorway, setting down his bag. “I thought I would have time to borrow a dolly,” he said, annoyed. “They didn’t give me much notice.”
He sized up the boxes and, with some effort, eased one off the top of a stack. “Let’s go. It’s on the floor below.”
Phainon hefted two in his arms and trailed behind him.
They took the stairs this time since it was just one flight, which came as a relief to Phainon. If he was alone in the elevator with the professor again he was going to asphyxiate or, worse, say something stupid.
Anaxa reached the landing before him and glanced up over the banister. “You aren’t busy?”
“No,” said Phainon honestly, then wondered if this made him look like some kind of loser without any Friday plans. “Everything’s just about wrapped up.”
They exited the stairwell.
“I see,” Anaxa said. “Remind me, you’re… a freshman?”
“Yeah. Or was, I guess. Yours was my last class.”
“Mm,” said Anaxa, scanning the numbers on the placards down the hall. “Your first year, how did it go?”
This was, it dawned on Phainon, small talk. He would have bet money the professor was too pragmatic for such banalities. But he supposed he didn’t really know the man at all. Mostly he had just stared at him in class, and idly made up a bunch of assumptions in his head that definitely didn’t hold water.
“It went alright,” he hedged. “Can’t complain.” It was the most appropriate summary he could come up with that wasn’t also a lie.
They spent the better part of an hour shuttling boxes between the floors. It was dusty and strenuous work. Phainon experienced a begrudging gratitude toward Mydei for having dragged him to the gym and forced him through all those farmer carries, and for the constant hill workout that was campus, which he had cursed on many occasions hiking two hundred feet of elevation to get to class.
Once the last box had been transferred, they returned to the old office to retrieve their things. It was disturbingly bare now, the furniture stripped and out of place. Anaxa’s belongings had easily made up half of the clutter before.
The professor regarded the emptied space, wiping at his forehead with the back of a hand. His face was slightly flushed. It was the most disheveled Phainon had seen him yet.
“Thank you,” he said after a pause, turning to Phainon. “You’ve spared me a hefty fine from facilities, I’m sure.”
Phainon laughed. “Any time.”
He could hear Anaxa still regulating his breathing beside him. Considering he had moved maybe a third of the boxes, it made Phainon wonder how exactly he had planned to do it alone. “Do you need to sit down?”
“No,” Anaxa said shortly. Phainon bit the inside of his cheek.
He was sort of warming to the idea of lingering around to find more ways to tease that harassed expression out of the professor, just guilelessly enough he could not be accused of it, but he suspected that with the move completed his dismissal was imminent. “So,” he switched topics. “Must be nice to have your own space now.”
“Yes, well.” Anaxa closed his eye and tugged at his collar, trying to catch some nonexistent draft. “I’d gotten used to it by the end.”
“Had you been in there a long time?” Phainon fished.
“Since I started my master’s,” Anaxa replied. “I believe they would have kept me there longer, but I agreed to take on additional teaching hours.”
He shrugged out of his sport jacket, under which he wore a thin white button-down that was coming untucked. Phainon could see the perspiration gathered at the hollows of his pale chest, just visible in the gaps between the buttons. Still hot, he began to roll up the cuffs, but then something occurred to him and arrested his movements.
“Yeah,” said Phainon immediately, having missed his cue to speak. “That sounds rough.”
Anaxa’s lone eye narrowed. The meaning of the look in it was pretty clear. He also had realized Phainon had no business to be standing there still.
“Well, I’m sure you have someplace to be.” Anaxa reached up and clutched the panels of his shirt as if to keep them together, looking for all the world like he had suddenly caught a chill. His voice had resumed its usual detached coolness as well. “I also have matters to attend to, so if you’ll excuse me…”
Phainon shoved his hands into his pockets. His pulse was ratcheting up. He didn’t want this to be the note that his and the professor’s last interaction of the year ended on.
He tried to keep his spine straight as he said, “Did I do something to annoy you?”
“I—what?” Anaxa stared at him as though he’d sprouted a second head. “Of course not, you were helping me with my move.”
“I don’t mean now,” Phainon said. “During the rest of the year. I got the feeling I’d ticked you off somehow. Was it the first day of fall quarter?” he asked suddenly, and forced a chuckle. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you. The other students were all waiting, and they wanted someone to ask, so I felt like I had to step up. I guess that’s when you started disliking me…”
He trailed off. Anaxa’s bewilderment had worn off, and the look on his face settled into something Phainon couldn’t quite identify.
“You didn’t annoy me,” he said finally. “And I don’t dislike you.”
Before Phainon could even allow relief to wash over him, he went on, “I don’t dislike any of my students. No matter their capabilities, their grades, even their personalities. I’m not sure what kind of teacher it would make me if I did.”
“Oh,” said Phainon. “Right.” He hadn’t meant to imply the professor was petty enough to harbor personal grievances against his students, though now that he thought of it, he basically had.
Anaxa fell silent. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“Well, that’s good to know,” Phainon said, at the same time that Anaxa opened his mouth as well.
He waited on edge, but the professor only closed his mouth again without speaking.
Phainon attempted a smile. This was probably the best he could have hoped for, an admission he didn’t actually hate Phainon. Somehow he wasn’t as reassured as he would have thought. “I guess I’ll leave you to it.”
Anaxa readjusted his arms where they were folded over his chest and nodded, tight-lipped.
Without any other excuse to stay, Phainon located his backpack where he’d left it and slung it over a shoulder. He picked his way across the office. At the door he glanced back for one last look at the room and the professor.
Anaxa was gazing toward the empty desk, much in the same way as he had been staring at his laptop earlier in the lecture hall, in name of pointedly not noticing Phainon’s presence.
Phainon turned back around and left the office.
Outside, the sun had peaked overhead and warmed the concrete paths through. Underclassmen without any place to be in a hurry drifted by in twos and threes. Phainon walked past them and heard none of their carrying conversations, absorbed, instead, in trying to decipher if it was good or bad that he made the professor just as nervous as the professor did him.