An obscenely loud noise turned out to be the telephone on my desk.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello,” said a female voice. “This is Linda.”
“Linda,” I repeated, my mind a blank.
“In Professor Pindar’s office,” she said. “Are you free today? He’d like to see you.”
I struggled to grasp these new and unwelcome concepts. What could I possibly say? “Today?”
“Yes, today,” said Linda. “Would three work? That would be best for him.”
A long pause followed.
“Three will work,” I said finally.
“Perfect,” she said. I could hear her fingernails clickety-clacking on the keyboard through the line. “I’m putting you down now.”
I hung up the phone and held myself very still in the silence. Then I pushed a short burst of air out through my teeth. I no longer wanted to be in my office, I thought as I rose to my feet, at the mercy of whatever memorabilia and the telephone. If I wanted to be alone with my thoughts (and why Professor Pindar wanted to speak to me was one thought that, from the looks of things, circumstances behooved me to address), I would have to go elsewhere. That, and my coffee was now lukewarm. I would have to go and get another one, I thought, and then a movement outside my window caught my eye. It was a group of figures, heading back from the direction of the quad.
That group of graduate students, I thought, once again grateful not to have encountered them in the hallway.
But on second glance I saw that I was wrong. It was not, as I had previously imagined, a “group” of students, but two people walking side by side, and only one of them was a student. The second person was none other than the chair of my department, whom I was due to meet with at three: Professor Pindar. He was gesticulating wildly, his gray curls blowing in the wind. The other person—her substantial thighs clearly outlined in black running pants, her ponytail streaming behind her like a small, bright flag—was Kirstie.