Chapter 5 Not A Marriage Proposal

Star

I tried to get a different partner first.

The panel coordinator’s office was small and smelled like burnt coffee, tucked into a corner of the administration building I’d never had a reason to visit before this week. A line of flyers curled at the edges on the corkboard behind the desk, most of them advertising events that had already happened months ago. The woman behind the desk barely looked up from her screen when I asked.

“Pairings are final,” she said. “Set last week.”

“There has to be some flexibility.”

“There isn’t.” She finally looked at me, not unkindly, just tired in the specific way administrators get tired around midterm season. “Is there a problem with your partner?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t have a reason to change it.”

I left without saying anything else, because saying anything else would have meant explaining that the problem wasn’t a problem exactly, it was a feeling I couldn’t name and didn’t want to examine in front of a stranger with a stapler. I stood in the hallway for a moment before I left the building, going over the conversation in my head, looking for an angle I hadn’t tried. There wasn’t one. Some things you just had to live inside.

I texted him instead, because avoiding it would only make it worse later.

We need to discuss the panel topic. Library. Tomorrow. Fifteen minutes.

His response came back fast. Sure. Fifteen minutes.

I didn’t trust the agreeable tone of it for one second.

He showed up on time, which I hadn’t expected, with a printed copy of the assigned text already annotated in three different colors. I had my own copy, my own color system, my own argument fully built before I sat down across from him at the small table near the back of the second floor.

“What’s your read on the unreliable narrator angle,” I said, no preamble, because fifteen minutes didn’t allow for preamble.

“I think it’s a trap.”

“Excuse me?”

“Everyone’s going to write about the unreliable narrator. It’s the obvious angle. Chen’s going to be bored by the third presentation that does it.” He leaned back slightly, balancing his pen between two fingers. “I think the actual argument is in the silences. What the narrator doesn’t say is more interesting than what he lies about.”

I hadn’t expected that.

“That’s not nothing,” I said, which was as much credit as I was prepared to give in the first ninety seconds.

“High praise.”

“I didn’t say it was high praise.”

“You said it’s not nothing. From you that might be a parade.”

“You don’t know what I’m like when I’m impressed.”

“I’d like to.”

I ignored that and pulled my notes closer, partly because the comment had landed somewhere I didn’t want it to land and partly because I genuinely wanted to argue the point now that he’d raised it. We went back and forth for longer than fifteen minutes, considerably longer, the kind of argument that built on itself instead of repeating, where neither of us was trying to win so much as trying to be right, which were different things and he seemed to understand the difference instinctively.

He pushed back on my reading of the final chapter and I pushed back on his reading of the opening, and somewhere in the middle of it he pulled out a second highlighter and started marking up a passage I hadn’t even considered, muttering half to himself about pacing. I found myself leaning in instead of away, watching him work through it instead of waiting for him to finish so I could correct him.

At one point I said his framing missed the structural irony entirely and he said my framing assumed the narrator was self-aware in a way the text never confirmed, and we were both talking fast and a little too loud for a library, hands moving, books open between us like evidence in a trial neither of us had agreed to settle.

“Could you two keep it down,” the librarian said from the front desk, not looking up from her own work, the request so practiced it barely qualified as an interruption.

We both quieted. I realized I was breathing harder than a literature argument should make anyone breathe.

He leaned back, something almost like surprise on his face, like he’d noticed the same thing about himself.

“Same time tomorrow,” he said. “We’re not done.”

“We are done. Fifteen minutes was the deal.”

“You’ve been here forty.”

I checked my phone. He was right, which was its own small humiliation.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not done.”

“It means the deal already broke. Might as well make a new one.” He gathered his things slowly, in no rush at all, while I was already half standing. “Tomorrow. Same table. Bring the part about the unreliable narrator you didn’t say out loud because you were too busy arguing with me about silences.”

“There isn’t a part I didn’t say.”

“There’s always a part you don’t say, Star.”

I didn’t have an answer for that one either. The silence stretched a beat too long before I covered it by gathering my notes.

“Fine,” I said. “Tomorrow. But we’re not doing forty minutes.”

“Sure,” he said, in the exact tone that meant he didn’t believe that for one second, and walking away from the table I realized I didn’t fully believe it myself.

Mia was waiting outside when I came out, leaning against the wall scrolling her phone, and she looked up the second she saw my face.

“You were in there a long time.”

“It was a school assignment.”

“For forty minutes?”

“We had a lot to cover.”

“Uh huh.” She fell into step beside me, the particular bounce in her walk that meant she had something to say and was rationing it out for maximum effect. “And how was the literary debate, exactly?”

“Productive.”

“Just productive?”

“Mia.”

“I’m only asking because you have a very specific look on your face right now. I’ve seen it exactly twice before. Once when you got the highest grade on a practice exam in high school, and once when you found out your professor was wrong about a citation and got to correct him in front of the whole class.”

“Those are good comparisons.”

“They’re the look of someone who just had a very satisfying argument with somebody.”

“It was about an unreliable narrator, Mia. Not a marriage proposal.”

“I didn’t say it was a marriage proposal. I said you have a look.” She bumped her shoulder against mine as we walked. “I’ve known you for years. I know what your face does when something actually lands.”

“My face doesn’t do anything.”

“Your face is doing it right now.”

I didn’t confirm or deny it, because confirming it would mean admitting the argument was the best part of my entire day, and that admission felt like handing her something I wasn’t ready to give away yet, not even to my best friend, not even on a Tuesday that otherwise hadn’t asked anything of me at all.

Mia’s smile faded into something more careful as we reached the dorm steps.

“There’s a rumor going around the team,” she said. “Something about a bet. Nobody will say what it’s actually about.”

“People always have rumors about that team.”

“Maybe it’s stupid,” she said, not quite looking at me. “Maybe it isn’t. I just thought you should know.”

She said it the way you say something you’re not sure you should have, and I let it go because I didn’t want to ask which version she actually believed.