Jake and Jim are already inside. Jake is at the counter furthest from the door, arms crossed, looking at the behavioral survey in front of him like it tried to bite him. Jim is beside him, already halfway through his own, pen moving steadily. They look upwhen we come in — Jake with his usual economy of expression, Jim with the quality of attention I'm still getting used to. He doesn't just look at people. He reads them.
He reads me for a moment. I look away first.
Cal comes in from the back room with a stack of folders. He sets them down and looks at the four of us arranged around his lab and something in his face does a quiet, careful thing.
"Good," he says. Like our presence confirmed something.
***
Cal reviews Jake and Jim's behavioral surveys — standard new arrival protocol, the kind that establishes baselines for everything that comes after. He hands them cognitive surveys and Jake picks up his pen and puts it down and picks it up again. Jim reads through the first page, flips to the second, and starts writing without fanfare.
Cal pulls Leo's coursework folder and a new one for me.
"We're starting fresh," he says. "The reclassification changed your baseline completely. Everything I had before is comparison data now, not a starting point."
"Lucky me," I say.
"Lucky us," he says. No irony. He means it.
Leo opens his folder, scans the first page, and immediately has opinions. He expresses them. Cal listens without reacting and explains the same thing he already explained in slightly different words. Leo finds new objections. This is apparently how their coursework always goes and I find it oddly comforting.
I work through my module. The material is different now — Cal has adjusted it. The questions are more specific. Some of them I can't answer because I don't have the framework yet, and I writedon't know yetin the margins and Cal, passing behind me, sees it and nods.
"That's the right answer," he says quietly.
Across the lab, Jim has finished his survey. He sets the pen down and sits back and his eyes find me.
I focus on my coursework.
Jim's pull has been getting steadily less ignorable. It's not loud the way Jake's was loud. It doesn't insist. It just accumulates, the way water accumulates, until you notice how much of it there is. In a room this size, with him ten feet away and staring, it is a presence.
I turn a page I haven't finished reading.
Jake puts his pen down at the forty-minute mark. "Done."
Cal looks up. "Both sections?"
"Yes."
"The reflection portion at the end?"
A pause. "Most of it."
Cal crosses the room and picks up the survey without comment. He reads through it — Jake watching him with the expression of someone waiting for a verdict they've already decided not to care about — and then sets it back down.
"Good," Cal says. "Honest answers are more useful than complete ones."
Cal moves to Jim's survey. Reads it more slowly. His expression stays even but his pen comes out and he makes a note in the margin of his own copy, something small. He hands Jim's survey back without comment and Jim takes it and glances at what Cal wrote.
Jim looks at me.
I look at my coursework.
***
Something shifts in the room.
Not sound — a change in quality, the way air pressure changes before weather. I go still mid-sentence. My pen stops.
