The faculty lounge incident was on a Thursday in late September, at eight-seventeen in the morning.

The journalism building's fourth floor faculty lounge had a coffee machine that no one locked and a general policy of not asking questions if you walked in looking like you had somewhere to be. Genevieve had used it for two years. She went to the fourth floor because the second-floor machine had a permanent line and she didn't have the patience for lines before nine AM, and she'd developed the habit of walking in with her travel mug and her notebook and filling up and leaving in under five minutes, which was how she'd done it for two years and which was how she'd intended to do it that Thursday morning.

She was filling her mug when she heard him.

She'd clocked the shape at the table in her peripheral vision-a person, facing the window, phone to his ear-and had categorized him as background and moved on. She was not paying attention.

Then the voice registered.

"Marcus." Patient. A little flat. "I can see the Canvas timestamp. The submission came through at twelve-oh-three AM. The deadline was eleven-fifty-nine PM." A pause, listening. "I hear you. I also hear you saying the same thing you said in week three and week six, and each of those times the situation involved your roommate." Another pause, and then something in the voice shifted-quieter, a little more direct. "I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm trying to understand whether your roommate knows how central he is to your academic experience this semester, because from the outside it seems like a significant ongoing impact."

She looked up.

He was at the table by the window. Feet up on the chair across from him. Collar open at the throat. Glasses pushed up onto his forehead, slightly askew, in the position they sometimes ended up in during the last fifteen minutes of his lecture when he was moving fast between ideas. He had a laptop open in front of him and was reading something on it with half his focus while he held the phone with the other half, and he looked approximately nothing like the person who stood at the front of Hamilton 303 twice a week and commanded three hundred people's attention without appearing to try.

He looked tired. Specifically, genuinely tired-week six of a fall semester tired, the way people look when they're doing too many things and most of them matter.

"Here's what I'll do," he said. "Send me what you have by nine AM Friday. This Friday, not the other one. That's the real deadline, not the extension. The extension already passed." A pause. "I'm telling you this because you can still pass this course, and I'd like that to happen. I'm not telling you this to give you a hard time." The voice went a little drier. "I have no information about what your roommate is doing Friday night, Marcus. I have actively avoided acquiring that information."

He ended the call and set the phone face-down on the table.

He picked up his coffee. He looked over at the machine.