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Dwayne didn’t seem to listen. “It’s just that I’ve got this Math test on Monday and—”
“Then you should be studying,” Ali told him as he came up to her outside the computer lab.
“I was, but, you know, sometimes it doesn’t click when I’m by myself.”
It doesn’t because you’re an oral learner, even when it comes to math. You process everything by spoken means, not literate.Ali knew this not because she read Dwayne’s file, but because she spent much of last spring with him in her office talking through problem sets and essays. “Take a look at it again.”
“Can I work in your office with you? And you just help me with the stuff I can’t get? I’ve been at it for an hour, and my brain hurts. I can’t fail this. It’s a big exam.”
Here? In my office, on a Saturday with no one around?
Ali stopped in front of her door. “You’re tougher than that, Dwayne,” she said coldly. “Put your big boy pants on and just work through the questions on your own.”
Dwayne stood back, and Ali tried not to read too much into the look on his face. Was it hurt? Disappointment? It doesn’t matter. I’m not being paid to handhold. They’ve got to figure it out on their own. She unlocked her office and rushed inside, slamming the door shut.
Across the room, behind her desk, Ali focused on the dozens of faces that held the heart of the memories making the room so much more than an office. Miles Judge. Greg Matthewson. Alex Whitman. Marvin Shaw. And so many more. Ali could hear each and every one of them—their laughter, jokes, tears. She could feel the hugs goodbye as they took their photos with her. But the sadness of the farewells were good memories. They meant that each of them left Hopperville better than when they first came to it, more than the reputations that brought them there in the first place.
Except for Graham. He only left her staring at the wall thinking, did I know any of them at all?
Ali banged her head repeatedly against the door as anger stirred within her. Because Graham shouldn’t have a place in her head. His voice and his energy were embedded in her office, in the couch he had sat on, in the carpet that he trudged across the day he returned to campus drunk after being kicked out.
It reeks of him in here.
He had taken it all that night—her relationships with the most important people in her life, the trust she had in herself. And Ali’s work, her drive and ability to care—Graham had ripped that from her and thrown it right back in her face.
Quickly, she crossed her office, pushing her chair against the wall and standing on it. Her hand reached to a photo just in front of her eyes—one of her and Marvin. Carefully, she peeled it off the wall and held it in her shaking hand.
How did I get here?Ali wondered as tears clouded her eyes, not understanding how her office once held so much happiness, pride, enthusiasm, and energy and now only felt like a room filled to the brim with grimness and regret. There wasn’t space anymore for Ali and the work that was still left to be done. There was only room for her tears, anger, and resentment.
Marvin’s photo slipped from her fingers. But before it even reached the ground, Ali’s hands slapped at the wall and began tearing. Photo by photo, piece by piece, Ali’s nails scraped at the stone wall. Tape bunched up and stuck to her hands, and sharp corners of the pictures bit at her skin. Ali didn’t stop when she nearly slipped off the chair. She kept tearing, yanking, and pulling until all she saw was a bare wall.
Her fingers reached out and traced the small crack. Ali remembered seeing it on her first day, wondering if it was just a crack in the paint. But as she traced over it, Ali realized it was a crack in the stone that she had merely been covering up for all those years.
This place is broken. It broke me too.
Ali stumbled off the chair, the photos crunching beneath her sneakers. She slid to the floor behind her desk, pulling her knees to her chest. Her right hand slipped underneath the sleeve of her hoodie, and she began to rub, wondering if it was possible to ever fix a crack that couldn’t be seen, one that was buried so deep it was like a fracture in the middle of the bone.
