It’s an understatement to say you’re a different kind of teacher. You were—are?—a rare kind of teacher. After just two weeks of the semester, it seemed the entire campus was talking about you. You, Professor Eliza Moore, the new hire in the English department. It wasn’t all complimentary. Some people, like my friend Trace Waller, who was in your Humanities class, basically hated you. Trace always complained that Humanities was a basic requirement at Grace, even for students pursuing a physical education degree. I’d guess that usually the history and English professors who teach it accept their students need a slower pace. Not you. You taught Humanities with the same intensity you taught our American Canon senior seminar, which was filled with English majors. Trace hated that you wanted them to think and that you expected them to write so much. But you couldn’t have been otherwise. It’s who you are.

  I don’t know why I’m writing this in second person, as if you’ll read this someday. As if suddenly everything will be okay, and you’ll rap loudly on my door, and I’ll open it and run into your arms, and we’ll drive away together into the sunset. What did you say again and again in American Canon? The story of American literature is the dream deferred: the dream people pursue and then watch explode. We’re another one of those stories, aren’t we? And I’m writing it alone here, and the ending is that our dream exploded like all the others. I can only talk to you in my writing, now.

  It’s dark tonight. I’m sitting in the corner on the floor with only the light from my laptop screen, and no moonlight is streaming through the window. It’s eerily quiet. I don’t think anyone knows I’m here. Does Grace allow students to stay here over winter break? It seems the rules might be different for Amundson Village, since it’s all seniors. But it’s so quiet I’m sure everyone is gone. Everyone except me.

  I have to keep writing. Every time I stop to wonder where you are, I feel myself spiraling down into sadness again. I have to keep telling our story. Maybe I can write us a different ending. But that may be up to you.

  Last night, after I closed my laptop, I must have checked my email a hundred times, holding my phone under the covers, pushing the refresh button and then waiting for the little blue line to zip across the screen and show me . . . you still hadn’t written. I set a rule for myself: I wouldn’t check again until fifteen minutes had passed. Still nothing. I decided to wait for twenty-nine minutes (your age). Still nothing.

  I fell asleep with my phone in my hand, and I dreamed I was standing on a mountain summit where the wind whistled and screeched in icy darkness, and I shouted your name again and again, but you didn’t answer, and I was afraid to run in any direction for fear of falling.

  When I woke this morning, I glanced at my phone first. A text from my sister, a missed call from Trace. I checked my email. The registrar wanted to confirm I planned to graduate this spring. But there was nothing from you.

  I refuse to call you. If you don’t want to talk to me on email or in texts, I’m not going to be the pathetic girl who calls and begs you communicate. You’re the one who left. You’re supposed to call or email. Something.

  My powerlessness overwhelms me. I don’t know where to find you, how to reach you, how to understand you. All I can do is write to you here. If I keep talking to you here, you’re not gone. I can imagine you’re listening.

  I was talking about the beginning of us.

  The entire campus seemed to be talking about you this fall. Many of the professors at Grace have been here for twenty, thirty years; someone as young as you, just out of graduate school, was bound to be noticed. But your teaching style—your effect on students—also captured people’s attention. So did your progressive views.

  The first week of September, some anonymous group of students covered every sidewalk on campus with hate speech about homosexuals. This was in direct response to a gay Lutheran pastor who was due to speak on campus the following day. It was a big deal: the pastor was from Des Moines, and his congregation had voted to leave the Lutheran synod instead of firing him as their pastor, and a progressive student group had invited him to speak at Grace.

  The sidewalk-chalk messages were horrifying: Fags stay out of Grace. God does not love gay. No to gay. Something about the pastel colors—pink, orange, green—imbued the messages with even more hatred. The campus maintenance crew washed the words from the sidewalks by midmorning, so the pastor never saw them, but the messages cast a pall over the student body. People whispered about them all day, shared them like shameful family secrets.

  Except you. You didn’t have any patience for secrecy. That day, a Tuesday, the whiteboard in your classroom was shockingly blank, and you stared us down for a long moment before you spoke. You said, “We can’t talk about Civil War literature today with those sidewalk messages on our minds. We have to talk about them.” No one spoke. I wonder if my classmates felt as embarrassed as I did. By then, you’d told us you’d grown up in Washington, DC, and I knew from the syllabus that you’d done your undergrad in New York City, your graduate degree in England. You were worldly, and you were liberal. Somehow, you had gotten a job in rural northeast Iowa at a college whose students couldn’t even show tolerance to homosexuality. I thought you must hate Iowa, hate our college, hate us. I couldn’t look at you.

  Later, you would tell me how you woke early on that Tuesday morning to prepare your lessons and arrived on campus only to find those desecrated sidewalks. You were probably the first person to see them; the dew was probably still on the lawn in front of the library. Later, you would tell me you impulsively considered submitting your resignation right then and driving back to the East Coast. You’d never lived in a place as socially conservative as Green River, Iowa, and that morning, you just wanted out. Of course, leaving would have forever endangered your future as an English professor. You wouldn’t actually have left. Right? Now—I wonder.

  Anyway, that Tuesday in class, you didn’t reveal any of your dismay that you had moved your life to Iowa. On that Tuesday, I saw only a brave, progressive professor intent on instigating dialogue. For an hour and a half, you led an impromptu discussion on the issue, on bigotry, on the history of religion, on the rights of people. Because you are you, you wove literary references throughout the discussion: we were supposed to study Walt Whitman that day, and you brought him into the conversation effortlessly. Some people started crying in class. That guy, Frank, came out to all of us. I’ve known I was gay since I was twelve. It’s so hard to go to school here. I didn’t know many gay or lesbian people, except I thought Trace was probably lesbian and I’d wondered about that guy. But the whole discussion floored me. I’d known the sidewalk-chalk messages were wrong, but I really hadn’t considered how they were impacting individual people. I’d never considered actual gay and lesbian people before.

  Your class inspired Frank to organize a student forum several days after the pastor’s talk. The auditorium was packed with students and professors, and Frank mediated it all beautifully, with two microphones in the front where people could line up to speak. You attended—I saw you, sitting toward the back with your chin on one fist—but you didn’t stand up to speak. You just listened. What were you thinking? We’ve never talked about that forum.

  Many, many students stood up in support of GLBT issues, but just as many stood up to expound their religious beliefs and to decry the morality of a college that would support gay and lesbian relationships. A blonde girl who lived on my floor stood up to say she loved the sinner, because she had been called to do so by God, but she had to hate the sin. I remember how my stomach churned the entire time. I sat between Trace and Jacob and shuddered to think how our college must have sounded to you: backwards, bigoted, intolerant. A professor from the business department stood up and said he didn’t want to work at a college where guys walked around kissing each other and holding hands.

  It was my awareness of you that made me stand up then, I think, though Jacob grabbed my arm and tried to pull me back into my seat. I didn’t go up to the microphone. I just shouted from where I stood. “This is wrong! We should tolerate and support every person’s right to love who they want to love.” Many people clapped and cheered, and some booed, and then I burst into tears. Jacob succeeded in pulling me down. I never told you what he said to me next—for some reason, I always wanted you to have a positive opinion of Jacob. He said, “They’re all going to assume you’re a lesbian now. What have you done?” I caught Trace’s eye, and she shrugged and said, “It’s true. They’ll think that.”

  I need to tell you more about Trace. You only really knew her as the PE major who sat in the back of your Humanities class with her arms crossed; I remember you were surprised when I told you she’s one of my closest friends. It’s strange that I hadn’t really thought of her as a lesbian until the sidewalk-chalk incident and its aftermath because she’s the stereotype: short-cropped sandy hair, thick stocky build, husky voice, androgynous clothes, PE major. Trace’s greatest aspiration is to be a high school girls’ basketball coach. She’s not academic, and she’s definitely not literary; she approaches life pragmatically with an easy sense of humor. Once, you said about Trace, “There’s not much there,” and I bristled, got up, and left the room. One of the ways you’re blind, I’d tell you later, is that you can’t see the value in a good, solid person—a true friend. Maybe I also bristled a little, though, because I’d sometimes thought the same about Trace. I’d been just as blind. Just as arrogant.

  That night after the forum, Trace and I walked back to Amundson together in a heavy silence. Trace’s room is in the same cluster as mine: our rooms are two of the nine that radiate from the central living space. I’d wanted to live off campus this year, like Jacob, but my family couldn’t afford it. Normally, it’s fine to live at Amundson, but that night Grace College made me angry, angry at the world for being so closed-minded, angry at Jacob for reasons I couldn’t even identify. I wanted to talk, but Trace mumbled good night and disappeared into her room.

  I put on my pajamas, brushed my teeth, and then crossed our cluster’s central space to knock on Trace’s closed door.

  When she opened the door, she looked like she’d already been asleep for hours, though it was only nine. Her hair stood on end and she wore a Green Bay Packers jersey for pajamas. She nodded at me and waved me into the room.

  Once, you and I got into an argument because you wanted to know if I’d ever felt attracted to Trace. The question was as strange as if you’d asked me whether I’d ever felt attracted to my sister or my aunt.

  I’ve never been attracted to Trace; she’s merely my good friend. On this night, when I couldn’t explain my restlessness and angst to myself, for some reason I thought Trace could help me understand, though Trace has never been interested in doing much analysis. She did flip off the tiny television above her refrigerator and leaned back on her couch, watching me expectantly.

  “What’s up?”

  “I can’t sleep,” I told her, flopping down onto her single bed, which was across the room from the couch where she was lounging. I stared up at the ceiling.

  “Need a shot?” Trace grinned. She knows I don’t drink much, but she’s famous at Grace—has been famous since freshman year—for possessing a dependable supply of hard alcohol.

  “Yeah,” I said, partly to see her surprised expression. It’s difficult to shock Trace. I watched as she stood, stretched, and then reached to open the refrigerator. She pulled out a bottle of Baileys, poured and handed me a generous shot, before collapsing back onto her couch.

  We were silent a long time while I sipped the Baileys, allowing the thick, creamy sweetness to coat my tongue before it warmed my throat and stomach. Finally, I inhaled deeply, holding my breath, tense.

  Trace raised an eyebrow at me. “Out with it.”

  “Are you a lesbian?”

  “Of course I am.”

  I chugged the rest of the Baileys and then took another deep breath that was more like a sigh. “Why didn’t I know that?”

  Trace just shrugged. “Wasn’t on your radar.” She grinned. “Did you come here to sleep with me?”

  See, if I’d told you that story, you’d have wondered, jealously, if there was more between me and Trace, and if there wasn’t, why she was flirting with me. But she’s just like that—with everyone, male or female. I know now that if she’s legitimately interested in a girl, she clams up, turns bright red, forgets how to communicate. If she’s just joking, she’s flirtatious. I’ve known Trace since basically the first day of freshman year, when our rooms were next door to each other. But I knew you wouldn’t understand if I told you this story, especially if I told you that my response to Trace’s question was to cross the room and lie down beside her, my head in her lap. She stroked my hair gently until I fell asleep.

  I woke up in her room the next morning.

  I sat up with a jolt, realizing I’d left the door to my room open, since I’d only planned to visit Trace for a little while. In a panic, I sprang from Trace’s warm embrace and the couch, muttering a guilty good-bye.

  “Hey, Tara—nothing happened,” she said drowsily, still sprawled across the couch.

  “I know.” I did know, but as I rushed out of the room into the hallway, my face must’ve shown guilt because when I saw Jacob standing in the doorway to my room, his face paled and his jaw dropped.

  It didn’t help that Trace stood just behind me, running her fingers through her unkempt, sandy hair, squinting sleepily at us both.

  I stuttered an explanation. “Nothing happened. I fell asleep in Trace’s room, and—”

  Secrets are hard to keep in Amundson Village. Several doors opened at once: some just a crack, some much wider. In the middle of the common area, I stood between Jacob, who leaned against the wall for support, and Trace.

  “Jacob!” Trace exclaimed, suddenly registering the problem. “Man, she just fell asleep in my room!” The silence persisted. “She’s not even my type!”

  The eavesdroppers snickered, and Jacob, because he is classy, forced himself to grin. “Well, just don’t steal my girl, Trace.”

  Trace had turned bright red. “She’s not my type,” she repeated weakly. She nodded at us both and edged away, disappearing into her room.

  A few moments later, in the privacy of my own room, Jacob closed the door behind him and said stiffly that we needed to talk.

  See, this was all well before anything happened between you and me. I think I was bound to discover all of this eventually, but you—just the fact of you—were the catalyst.

  You would like that word: catalyst. As in the catalyst for a chemical reaction, the matter that changes other matter irrevocably. You love to alter others’ worlds.

  You altered mine when you didn’t even intend to. Later that day, Jacob told me tearfully over a picnic from SUBWAY that he thought he was losing me. I reassured him he wasn’t, though I knew he was. We both cried, and only Jacob ate his lunch. In the silence, I thought about Trace’s fingers playing tenderly with my hair, and I wondered if you’d been proud of how I’d stood up at the student forum.

  But no, professor, I didn’t wonder if I was a lesbian. Not yet.

  Later, you would tell me that you didn’t go directly back to your house after the student forum, but walked for two hours along Green River’s quiet streets. You said that something almost itched beneath your skin, that your blood seemed to simmer. After your walk, you lay awake staring at the star patterns in the plaster on your ceiling.

  Maybe you thought someone had cast a spell on you, too.

  The next week you assigned Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I fell in love with that book, argued vehemently with those classmates who agreed with Richard Wright that the book imitated blackface humor, minstrel foolery. To me, the book celebrated a woman’s right to pursue true living—and true love—and it seemed to shout the sentiments of Emerson to “trust thyself.” I loved that book so much, I read it twice. In class, as we discussed the ending, I quoted Janie’s closing thoughts: She called in her soul to come and see. Later, you would tell me I looked so breathtakingly beautiful when I closed my eyes and recited those words that you forgot the point you were trying to make in the discussion. A strange silence enveloped our class—until you broke it with some question about whether Janie’s development showed the achievement of her slave grandmother’s dream.

  After class, you asked me to stay.

  I remember how my heart fluttered and my skin grew hot, and I remember how confusing that was. No man’s attentions had ever made me react that way. Maybe that’s why I didn’t identify it, then, as a physical attraction. I’d thought I was just flattered that a professor had asked to talk to me after class. As I said, I’d never been that kind of student. Normally, I was merely an A student who participated regularly but was otherwise unremarkable. It makes sense that I assumed my physical symptoms were merely from the thrill of being noticed. You told me later that your stomach churned as the other students gathered their belongings and wandered out of the classroom. You, who had shared cigarettes with famous poets in the New York City scene, who had dined comfortably at Oxford with well-known scholars—you were surprised to find an undergraduate senior could provoke this angst of anticipation in you. Surprised . . . and disturbed. You couldn’t understand it, and so you masked your discomfort with sharp humor.

  “In love with Janie, I noticed.”

  I was horrified. I’d wanted you to note my scholarly critique or my significant contributions to class, not a schoolgirl infatuation with a fictional character. And I suppose I was horrified at the implication that I had lesbian feelings. “I just appreciate the book. It’s an important work.”