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. 6'2", 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.
"Thank you," Ren said.
She walked to the back. She sat behind the pillar. She opened her notebook to the page with the date written on it, and she continued writing.
She did not write down what she was feeling. That was not the kind of thing she wrote down.
At the front of the room, the door opened again, and Professor Eleanor Marsh walked in.
Marsh was 67 years old. She had silver hair, cut short and practical, reading glasses on a chain around her neck, and the posture of someone who had been standing at the front of rooms for a very long time and had stopped thinking about how she looked doing it. She set her briefcase on the desk with a decisive thud, looked out at the room, and said simply, "Good, you're all here."