She doesn't laugh. She doesn't chat with the students around her. She arrives, she works, she leaves.
I recognize the behavior because I've been running a version of it at the compound for years.
Making yourself small so the world gives you less to deal with. Staying inside the lines so nobody looks too close.
Whatever she's carrying, it taught her the same lesson mine taught me: visibility is a liability.
I drop my bag onto the desk one seat over from hers.
She glances up. Quick, assessing, gone. Not unfriendly. Measuring.
My notebook comes out, then the pen.
Pink, feather on the end, borrowed from Shayla at the clubhouse because I left mine in my other jacket and she thought it washilariousto hand me this one in front of Maddox.
He laughed for five solid minutes. I kept the pen out of spite.
Dr. Petrov launches into regression analysis, and for forty-five minutes, my brain does its best impression of a car engine running on fumes.
The numbers blur. The variables swim. I write what I can and hope the rest reveals itself later through some combination of prayer and YouTube tutorials.
Then Petrov puts a problem on the screen and tells us to work with someone nearby.
I don't think about it. My chair's already angling toward her before the sentence is finished, notebook sliding across the gap between our desks.
We did this last week.
She walked me through regression like she was translating a foreign language into English, and I understood it for the first time all semester.
Going back to her isn't a decision. It's gravity.
"Round two?" I click the pink pen and hold it up like a white flag.
She glances at the pen. The corner of her mouth twitches. "You'restillusing that?"
"It's my lucky pen now. I passed the last assignment."
She turns her laptop toward me without being asked, and the fact that she does it automatically —no hesitation, no weighing whether I'm worth the effort—does something to my chest I'm not going to examine right now.
"Okay." She scrolls to a clean section of her notes. "This one's probability distributions. You good with those?"
I stare at the screen. "I'm going to pretend you didn't ask me that."
The almost-laugh. There it is. Quick, caught between her teeth before it gets out, but I saw where it was headed.
She walks me through it the same way she did last time. Patient without being patronizing.
Her eyes lift from the screen. Brown, lighter than mine, steady.
"Start with the mean." She taps her screen, pointing to a formula. "Then standard deviation. Once you've got those, the distribution curve is straightforward."
I look at her notes, then at mine. Hers look like a textbook. Mine look like a ransom note.
"Straightforward for who?"
The almost-laugh. I've been chasing it since the first time I heard it during the regression problem last week. Quick, caught between her teeth, gone before it fully forms.
But I know what it sounds like now. And I know how to get close to it.