I sit down and look at it for a long moment without touching it. Then I pick it up. The page is clean, with no annotations or underlining. Just the poem about dying and coming back, and the exhaustion of the cycle. The woman has done it enough times that she has become an expert at it.
I read it three times.
Then I close the book and put it back exactly where it was and sit with my hands flat on the table and breathe.
He knows I studied it. He was in the room when I answered the professors question. He heard which lines I reached for.
Saint left this here.
I don’t know what to do with a man who listens closely enough to know which poem to leave. Who watches carefully enough to know which table is mine. Who has never once, in all the weeks of this, made me feel like his attention is something I need to escape.
I have been wrong before. I have been catastrophically wrong before, and I have the sleeves pulled over my arms to prove it. I have Roman as Exhibit A, and my father as Exhibit 0.
But I also have this. Saint has never once asked me for anything.
Every man who has ever watched me this closely wanted something in return. Every man who ever made me feel found turned out to be building a cage around the finding.
He knows where the line is.
I sit in the library for a long time after that. Long enough that the afternoon light changes against the window and the other students thin out and the building goes quiet around me.
I leave the poetry collection on the table.
But I fold the page. Just slightly. Just enough.
So he’ll know I read it.
Amy
Inotice her before she speaks to me.
She comes in late and takes the only open seat, which is next to me in the back row. Dark hair. A notebook she opens immediately, the way people open things when they want to look occupied. I know this because I do the same thing.
When class ends, she turns to me before I can pack my bag.
“Is that Plath?” she asks. She nods at the collection on my desk.
“Lady Lazarus,” I say.
Something opens in her expression. Just a crack. “I have read that one so many times I can hear it in my sleep.”
We talk for twenty minutes in the emptying classroom. She is careful about what she offers, and I’m careful about what I offer back, and in this way, we establish something without naming it. She asks if I want to critique each other’s work for the semester assignment. I say yes.
Then I mention the party. Off campus. Ohio house on Fletcher Street. I heard about it around campus. Would she want to come?
She considers it with the unhurried assessment of someone who has learned that quick answers cost more than slow ones.
“Yes,” she says finally.
I give her my number. She gives me hers.
I go back to my Plath and the afternoon feels, unexpectedly, like something I did not know I needed.
A friend.
I’m heading back to the dorm when I see her in the hallway near our floor.
She looks like she has left from somewhere that cost her something. I don’t ask. I have my own list of those somewhere, and I know the look of someone who does not want to talk about it yet.
