Chapter 4: The Project

“Partners are assigned, not chosen.”

Dr. Vass says it like she knows someone in the room is going to have a problem with it. She doesn’t look at anyone in particular. She doesn’t have to.

I write the date at the top of a fresh page and keep my pen moving so my hands have something to do.

“The semester project requires two people with genuinely different perspectives on the same event or belief system. That’s not something you can manufacture with a friend.” She opens her folder. “I’ve made the assignments based on your research backgrounds and your application essays. Trust the process.”

Across the table, someone shifts in their seat. The girl who is always out of breath, whose name I now know is Fatima, writes something in her notebook and underlines it twice.

I do not look to my left.

Dr. Vass starts reading names. Two by two. A guy named Reeves gets paired with Fatima. A quiet woman named Soo-Jin gets paired with someone from the sports management side of the cohort. The pairings are cross-disciplinary, I notice. Cognitive science with sports management, back and forth, the same pattern each time.

I put that together about four seconds before she says it.

“Nora Callahan.”

I look up.

“Cole Whitfield.”

The room does not react. Why would it. Nobody here knows. To everyone in Seminar Room 114 we are just two graduate students with different research backgrounds sitting on the same side of a round table.

Cole doesn’t make a sound. I don’t look at him.

“You’ll have until Friday to connect with your partner and agree on a case study topic,” Dr. Vass says. “I want a one-paragraph proposal on my desk by end of next week. The rest of the semester builds from there.”

She moves on. The room moves on.

I write partner: Cole Whitfield in my notebook in the same handwriting I use for everything else. Neat. Even. Completely normal.

My pen doesn’t shake. I’m proud of that.

After class I take the long way to the library.

Not because I’m avoiding anything. Because I need the air and the longer route goes past the east garden and the benches are usually empty at this time and I think better when I’m moving. That’s all.

I make it exactly as far as the bottom of the seminar building steps.

“Nora.”

I stop.

Not because I have to. Because something in my body still responds to that voice before my brain gets a vote. I hate that. I make a note to hate it later when I have time.

I turn around.

Cole is three steps above me, which means he’s even taller than usual, which I didn’t need. He has his jacket unzipped and his bag over one shoulder and he looks like someone who has been thinking about what to say and is not entirely sure he’s ready.

Good. Neither am I.

“We should figure out the project,” he says.

Not hi. Not it’s been a long time or this is strange or any of the hundred things that would require me to have a feeling in a public place. Just: we should figure out the project. Practical. Respectful. Clean.

I hate how much easier that makes it.

“Yes,” I say. “We should.”

“I can work around your schedule.”

“I’ll send you a time.”

He nods. He doesn’t push for more. He doesn’t stand there with his eyes doing the thing I noticed in the seminar room, the thing that looks like two years of reconsideration sitting just behind the surface.

He just says, “Okay,” and that’s it.

I turn and walk to the library.

I don’t think about the way he said my name until I’m three blocks away, and then I only think about it for a minute, and then I stop.

The reading room on the third floor of Harlow Library is mine.

Not officially. But I found it in the first week of orientation, a corner table behind the periodicals shelf where the light comes in at the right angle in the afternoon and there’s an outlet and nobody tends to sit nearby because the shelf smells faintly of old binding glue and most people find that off-putting. I find it grounding.

I set up my laptop, my notebook, my coffee. I open the assigned chapter for Thursday. I read the first paragraph three times.

When an individual receives information that conflicts with a pre-existing belief, the brain does not neutrally evaluate the new information. It searches, first and instinctively, for reasons to reject it.

I close the laptop.

I open it again.

I read the paragraph again.

I have read variations of this idea in eleven different papers over the past two years. I have written about it, presented on it, built an entire research direction around it. I understand it academically with the kind of depth that takes years to develop.

It does not stop it from landing differently today.

Cole believed Dex because believing Dex was easier. Not because Cole was a bad person. Because his brain did what brains do when they’re afraid of what the alternative means. It searched for reasons to accept the easier story and it found them and it stopped looking.

I know this.

I have known this for two years.

Understanding why someone broke something doesn’t fix the thing.

My coffee has gone lukewarm. I drink it anyway and turn to a clean page and write at the top: Case study options. Below it I write three possibilities, all of them legitimate, none of them what I’m actually thinking about.

My phone buzzes.

A number I don’t have saved. But I know it. I know it the way you know a song you haven’t heard in years. It starts playing before you even place it.

This is Cole. Here’s my number so you can send the time. No pressure on anything else.

I read it twice. The no pressure on anything else does something I don’t have a name for. It’s careful. It’s considered. It’s exactly what someone would say if they understood that the project is the only thing they’ve been given and they’re not going to use it as a door to something more.

I save the number.

I don’t reply yet.

I look back at my case study options and I add a fourth one and then immediately cross it out before I can finish writing it.

But the two words are still visible under the single line.

False testimony.