The TA

LENA

The department lounge smells like burnt coffee and old radiators, with a damp, mildewy edge I've stopped noticing most days. The carpet is the same industrial gray it's probably been since the seventies, worn thin in a path between the door and the coffee machine, as if decades of exhausted graduate students have all walked the same desperate route.

I've claimed the corner table because it gets the best light for grading. It's become a small ritual. Sit here. Drink bad coffee. Work through the essays. Pretend the stack will somehow get smaller. There's a comfort in the repetition, in pretending my life fits into something this orderly.

It never does.

A pile of freshman papers sits beside my red pen, which has already bled through three essays about symbolism in *The Great Gatsby*. All three make essentially the same argument, as if the entire freshman class passed one thought around before submitting their papers. I used to find this funny. Now it just makes me tired.

Nate Ferro sits at the other end of the table.

Close enough that I notice when he stops writing. Close enough that the silence that follows feels deliberate, like he wants me to notice.

I don't look up immediately.

I've gotten good at that lately. Not looking. Keeping my eyes on the page even when I can feel someone watching me. It's almost automatic now, this small, practiced defiance, a shield I didn't know I'd need to build.

I've noticed Nate before.

Two weeks ago in the library, his eyes lifted from his laptop just as I walked past the periodicals. I remember the prickle at the back of my neck, the instinct to walk faster without knowing why. Last Thursday, he was standing outside the seminar room near the water fountain, lingering there when he didn't seem to have any reason to be. He hadn't been drinking. He hadn't been checking his phone. He'd just been standing.

Both times, I told myself it meant nothing.

He has every right to be in the library. The hallway. The department lounge. People exist in shared spaces without it meaning anything sinister. I know that. I've repeated it to myself so many times it's started to sound hollow.

I've been telling myself that for weeks.

But Nate isn't bothering to hide it anymore.

His pen taps against the papers in front of him. Once. Twice. Again. The sound needles at me, small and rhythmic, impossible to ignore.

I finally look over.

He doesn't look away.

"Rough batch?" he asks, nodding toward my stack.

"They're all rough." I glance down at the papers, grateful for something to do with my eyes. "Nobody's read past the SparkNotes page."

He smiles.

It's not a particularly nice smile. More teeth than warmth, the kind of smile that makes you want to check what's behind you.

Nate is handsome in a way that feels almost manufactured. Symmetrical features. Perfect hair. The sort of face that looks better in a photograph than it probably does across a dinner table, all surface and no warmth beneath it.

I've never liked him.

Not that I have an actual reason. Not one I could put into words if someone asked me to defend the feeling.

There's just something about him that puts me on edge. A low hum in the background whenever he's around, easy enough to ignore until I notice it again, until it swells into something louder.

I remember hearing him complain after a faculty meeting a few weeks ago. Something about Ashford getting the seminar he wanted. His voice had carried an edge that made the other grad students exchange glances.

At the time, I'd dismissed it as normal academic bitterness. Everyone complains about seminars, funding, workloads. It's the background music of graduate life.

Apparently, the department has plenty of that to go around.

Nate sets his pen down. The small click of it against the table feels louder than it should.

My stomach tightens before I even know why.

"You and Ashford seem pretty close for a seminar student."

He says it casually.

Almost too casually, the kind of casual that's been rehearsed.

My eyes stay on him.

His expression doesn't change.

"He's my advisor," I say. "We talk about my thesis."

I'm proud of how normal my voice sounds. Underneath the table, my knee bounces once before I still it.

"Sure."

He picks his pen back up and taps it twice against the table, an idle gesture that somehow feels anything but idle.

"Just an observation."

I wait, my pulse ticking up despite my best effort to look bored.

Nate tilts his head.

"You two have a rhythm."

My fingers tighten around my pen until the plastic creaks faintly.

"Tuesday," he continues, "when Priya was going on about the unreliable narrator thing, you both went quiet at exactly the same second."

I don't say anything. I don't trust my own voice right now.

"Same tempo. Almost like you'd rehearsed it."

He shrugs, as if the observation costs him nothing, as if he hasn't just detonated something inside my chest.

"Probably nothing."

The memory hits me before I can stop it.

Priya talking. Something about narrative distance. Julian beside her, his pen going still over his legal pad, the ink frozen mid-word.

My own hand had stopped moving at the same time. I hadn't even realized it until now.

I remember noticing.

I remember the strange little jolt it gave me, because for one second it had felt as though we'd shared a thought without speaking, a small, invisible thread pulled taut between us.

I hadn't thought anyone else noticed.

Apparently, Nate did.

Probably nothing.

The words sit badly in my stomach, curdling there like old milk.

I force my hands to stay still.

"I should get back to these."

I tap the essays, grateful for the excuse.

"Sure."

He looks down at his own papers, and just like that, the conversation is over.

At least for him.

I stare at the essay in front of me, but the words blur into gray static.

Same tempo.

Like you'd rehearsed it.

Has anyone else noticed?

I read the same sentence three times without taking in a single word. The letters might as well be in another language.

Then I give up.

I pack my things and leave the lounge, moving faster than I mean to.

The thought follows me into the hallway.

Down the stairs.

Past the bulletin board and the ugly fluorescent lights that make everyone look exhausted, hollow-eyed, half-alive.

How long has he been watching?

And worse:

Why?

I think about seminar.

The careful distance I've kept between my desk and the podium. The way I wait to raise my hand until other students have already spoken twice. The fact that I never stay after class.

Not once.

Not even on the day I wanted to talk to Julian so badly that my throat hurt from everything I wasn't saying, when I sat in my car afterward and cried without entirely understanding why.

I thought I'd been careful.

Maybe I haven't been.

Maybe everyone can see it, written plainly across my face every time Julian speaks.

Maybe they don't see anything at all, and I'm building a haunted house out of nothing.

I don't know which possibility scares me more.

The space between Julian and me is supposed to look normal. Professional. Boring. That's the whole performance, the entire architecture we've built to survive this.

But what if it doesn't?

What if people can feel the tension even when we're doing everything we can not to show it, like a current running just beneath the surface of the room?

I hate that Nate has put the thought in my head.

I hate that I can't get it back out, that it's already lodged itself somewhere I can't reach.

The paranoia isn't new. That's the worst part.

It's familiar.

Like an old coat I forgot I was wearing until someone grabbed the collar and made me feel the weight of it again, the fabric suddenly too heavy, too tight across my shoulders.

I walk faster.

By the time I reach the bottom of the stairs, my sneakers are hitting the pavement too quickly, my steps completely out of sync with my thoughts, my breath shallow in a way that has nothing to do with the stairs.

It's nothing.

Nate Ferro is bitter. That's all.

He's probably still annoyed that he didn't get the fellowship he wanted. Maybe this is just what he does. Tosses out little comments and watches people react, feeding on whatever flicker of fear crosses their face.

Maybe he likes knowing he can make someone uncomfortable.

Maybe he collects reactions the way other people collect anything else, quietly, privately, for his own strange satisfaction.

I want to believe that.

I almost do.

But not quite.

Not enough to breathe normally, not enough to loosen the knot sitting just beneath my ribs.

Nate watches Lena leave.

The door swings shut behind her with a familiar wheeze, the same sound every department door makes when it closes, tired and reluctant on its hinges.

He waits, unmoving, his eyes fixed on the space she'd occupied only seconds before.

Then the smile disappears.

His face settles into something colder, something that looks nothing like the expression he wore moments ago.

He looks down the hallway.

Empty.

He checks again, methodical, patient.

Only then does he reach for his phone.

His thumb moves quickly across the screen. No hesitation. No need to think about what he's going to say. The motion is practiced, almost bored, like a man performing a task he's done a hundred times before.

He types one word.

*Progress.*

He sends it before he can change his mind, though there's no real doubt in the gesture, no flicker of conscience.

The checkmark appears.

Nate looks at it for a second, satisfied, something like pride flickering behind his eyes.

Then he slips the phone into his pocket, picks up his pen, and goes back to grading, as though nothing at all has happened.