“What do you know about her?”
The question lands differently than she intends it to. What do I know about her? A small container for everything I could say.
I know she sits in the sixth row with her pen gripped too tightly and takes notes like she’s afraid that stopping will let the walls move. I know she waits until the floor above is quiet before she showers. I know she has a history with a man that she hasn’ttold anyone here and carries like a stone in a coat pocket, always present, always weighing. I know the sound of her at three in the morning. I know she answered a question about Plath in a way that suggested she has lived inside the poem rather than read it.
I know she is sharper than anyone on this campus gives her credit for.
I know that when she walked out of the library last week after I told her I had been thinking about something else, she didn’t run. She walked. Evenly. With her spine straight and her bag strap in her fist, and she didn’t look back, which took more composure than most people would have managed.
I know a great deal about Amy Torres.
But I say none of this.
“She’s a student,” I say. “We share a literature class.”
“The observation report also notes that you were seen together in the library.”
I look at Dr. Ward for a long moment.
“We were in the same library at the same time,” I say. “That’s not studying together. That’s both being in a building.”
“The report suggests?—”
“The report suggests that whoever is writing the Order’s observation logs has a very exciting life if a shared library constitutes a noteworthy event.” I lean back in the chair. “It’s not unusual to study in a library, Doctor. That’s traditionally what they’re for.”
Dr. Ward regards me with the expression of someone who has noticed that the room temperature changed when she said a certain name and is now cataloguing everything that follows. She is good at her job. I find this mildly inconvenient.
“You went quiet,” she says.
“I’m quiet often. You’ve noted it in three previous sessions.”
“Not like that. Not?—”
“Not like what?”
“She pauses. Chooses her words with the care of a person who knows she’s on uneven ground. “Pensive. You went pensive, Saint. There’s a difference between your baseline quiet and the kind of quiet that means you’re somewhere else entirely.”‘
I say nothing. Which proves her point, and we both know it.
“She’s Azriel’s charge,” Dr. Ward says carefully. “His assignment. You understand the distinction that’s supposed to maintain.”
“I understand every distinction the Order has drawn,” I say. “I find them interesting from an academic perspective.”
“That is not the reassurance you think it is.”
“It wasn’t meant to be a reassurance.”
She writes something. A longer note than usual. I watch the pen and wait for her to finish.
“I want to try something different today,” she says, setting the pen down. “I’d like to do a physical baseline assessment. Blood pressure, resting heart rate. Part of the new protocol the Order approved last week.” She stands and moves toward the small medical cabinet on the far wall. “If you don’t mind removing your shirt.”
I stand. I pull the hoodie over my head and drop it on the chair. The t-shirt follows. I stand in the center of the office in the afternoon light from the window and wait.
Dr. Ward turns from the cabinet with the blood pressure cuff in her hand.
She stops.
It is a brief stop, a fraction of a second, the pause of a person whose professional composure has been interrupted by something that was not in the briefing notes. Her eyes move across my chest, my shoulders, the topography of three years of a body that had nothing to do but be itself in a contained space. The scars. The muscle. The evidence of everything the ward couldn’t actually strip out of me.
