Ren liked it immediately. She was studying mechanical engineering, third year. She had transferred from a smaller school in western Pennsylvania, the kind of place where everyone knew your name and your business and your mother’s maiden name and what you had done in ninth grade that one time. She had chosen Harwick specifically because nobody knew her here. Nobody knew what she had done. Nobody knew who she had been.
She wanted to start clean. She wanted to just be a student, to sit in a classroom and raise her hand when she had a question and eat lunch by herself if she felt like it, without any of the weight that came with being known. That was the plan.
The first morning of classes, she got lost. Not badly lost. She had the map. She knew the building. But the engineering complex at Harwick had been renovated over the summer, and the main entrance had moved about forty feet to the left, and the new signage had not yet been installed properly. So she went around the building once, found the side entrance, took the wrong staircase, and arrived at Professor Eleanor Marsh’s materials mechanics class exactly three minutes after it was supposed to begin.
She pushed open the door quietly. The lecture hall held about sixty students arranged in tiered rows that rose toward the back. Every head turned when the door opened because every head always turns when a door opens late. It is one of those small unkind reflexes that classrooms produce. Ren did not look at the heads. She scanned the room for an open seat.
There was one second row left side on the aisle. She moved to it quickly and sat down, settling her backpack by her feet, pulling out her notebook and her pen, uncapping it, writing the date at the top of the first clean page. She was already forming the opening of a thought when she noticed the backpack on the floor beside the chair. She noticed the lacrosse jacket draped over the back of it. She had sat in someone else’s seat.
“That’s my seat.” The voice came from the aisle. Not loud the way someone surprised is loud. Loud the way someone who wants the room to register their inconvenience is loud, calculated, pointed. Ren looked up.
He was tall. Six-two, maybe taller in the way that some people stand, like they are always trying to remind you of it. Wide in the shoulders, the kind of wide that comes from years of athletics, and the certainty that the world would make room for it. Dark hair, a jaw that looked like it had never had a difficult Tuesday, and the particular expression of someone who had organized his entire personality around the fact that people rarely told him no.
She did not know his name yet. She would learn it soon enough. “I’m sorry,” Ren said. Her voice was level, polite. “I didn’t see your things. I can move.” She was already beginning to stand. “No kidding you can move,” he said. A few people nearby laughed. The low, uncertain laugh of people who are not sure if something is funny, but have decided it is safer to be on the side that laughs.
Ren stood. She picked up her notebook and her pen. She looked around the room for another available seat. There was one in the far back corner behind a structural pillar, the kind of seat where you spend the entire semester looking at a column of concrete and taking notes based on what you can hear rather than what you can see. “There’s a seat in the back,” the young man said. He pointed as though she could not locate it herself, as though she needed to be shown.