9. Sasha

Sasha had been at school all day. It was kind of depressing to be at school all day, but there was nothing better at home. She had ventured to the other side of campus for the first time, and it seemed like it was a completely different place. Perhaps it was the distance from the Business and Math buildings, or the Administration buildings, but this side of campus seemed to attract the artsy hipster crowd.
She found her way to the mini food court and spread her things out on a table just outside the half wall separating the corporate coffee joint from the rest of the area. She was looking over a piece she was supposed to be learning for her cello lessons. She wasn’t really interested in playing it, but she was willing to give it a fair shot. She laid the music out in front of her, and started at the beginning. She tried to hear the notes in her head, and transferred the note on the page to the place that it lived in her fingers. It was a strange sort of telegraph she had developed, but over the years she had found it to be the easiest way to memorize music. It wasn’t just about remembering what note came next, but about memorizing what the music felt like inside her. Then it would become more like second nature, like driving a car.
She went through the piece quickly a couple of times, then started over again, studying each black dot or squiggle as carefully as possible. It was like deciphering ancient code; she had to figure out why each note was there, and why notes had been left to silence elsewhere. The noise around her faded as she became more and more immersed in the intricacies of the work. She stared hard at the page as the notes moved around on the page, when she suddenly noticed a foreign pair of shoes below her table.
Her attention shifted sharply towards them as she realized they were pointed towards her, waiting patiently for notice. She jerked her head up, and Professor Wolf, her literature professor stood before her; a mischievous smirk smeared across his face.
“Hi!” she said in a too loud, too startled voice. She wondered how long he had been standing there, and was embarrassed that she hadn’t noticed him sooner. She felt her face flush and combed her physical memory to see if she had been doing anything stupid in the last few minutes. From the look on his face, she was sure she had, but she had no idea what.
“Hi. How are you?” he said between chuckles.
“I’m fine. You scared me.”
“Sorry. I know you were really into whatever you were doing. I just wanted to come and say hi since I saw you.”
She knew her face must have turned a telling shade of pink, and she forgot herself for a moment. She allowed an awkward pause to insert itself, then jerked it away. “Would you like to sit down?”
He bobbled in a way she couldn’t quite place, then said, “Are you sure you don’t mind? It looked like you were busy doing something.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I can get to it later.” She could feel her mother’s manners welling up inside her; the woman who would put off childbirth for a guest. She was secretly ecstatic though; this was the first person at the university to even attempt a conversation with her. It didn’t matter to her that he was her professor; she’d had an illustrious career as a teacher’s pet in junior high and high school, and she relished the idea of conversation that didn’t involve the amount of liquor one could consume on any given Friday night.
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat. She hadn’t really looked at him closely in the first two weeks of class, but now she regarded him more carefully. He had a casual air about him, as if he had wandered onto campus and someone handed him a job. Even his clothes exuded relaxation. He wore faded jeans and a sweatshirt, with a t-shirt poking out from under it. His hair seemed to be swimming on his head, as though he had run his hands through it a couple of times and left it like that. She remembered his shoes, too. They were plain, white tennis shoes, with no logos, colors, or extras. They seemed like the most uptight piece of him, with their stark blankness contrasting the soft disarray that covered the rest of him.
He was kind of gangly as he sat in the rigid wooden chair, and Sasha realized she didn’t know what to say to him. She jerkily grabbed her papers and shoved everything into a pile so he could lay his small stack of papers on the table.
“So how are you?” she started.
“I’m good. You?”
“Good.” He smiled at her, putting her more at ease. She wondered where this conversation would go. What do you say to a professor? Should she talk about class? Would that be too obvious and boring? What else was there? She didn’t know anything about this man, and he didn’t know anything about her. There weren’t very many starts made from scratch in life, but this was definitely one of them.
“So how’ve you been lately? You seemed kind of listless in class the other day. Not your usual talkative self.”
Well, there went the clean slate. She smiled and lowered her eyes. She inwardly cursed this shyness that overtook her at the most inopportune moments.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I get that way a lot when it rains. Sorry. At least someone else got the chance to talk that day. You usually can’t shut me up.” She looked up at him, hoping she had succeeded in steering the conversation away from the subject of her periodic melancholy. She didn’t want him to know what a sad case she was.
“Actually, it’s a lot better when you talk. Sometimes it’s really hard to get things rolling unless you get started.”
“Well, I’m sure most of those people wish I would just shut up. I have this ugly tendency to run people over when they say stupid things. I don’t mean to; it just sort of happens.” She was smiling while she talked. This was the self-deprecating humor she had become so skilled at over the past several years, and it was working.
He was laughing.
“So, what’s your story?” he asked pointedly. She looked at him blankly, surprised by the question and unable to find a starting point in her mind.
“What do you want to know?” She’d always found the best way to avoid questions was to counter with one of her own.
“Well, like where are you from, how did you get here, what are you studying, stuff like that.” He said it as if telling one’s “life story” had a specific format, and it was common knowledge.
“Um,” she started hesitantly, “well I grew up in the Midwest, but I went to college in Georgia. I moved out here about a month ago to get a master’s degree in music composition.”
She halted. Goodbye clean slate. She hated telling people about herself. It always felt like bragging for some reason, even thought she didn’t feel as if her life had been all that special. Or interesting.
“And?” he said insistently. “That can’t be all. Where in the Midwest? What instrument do you play? Why did you come all the way to California? There’s all kinds of stuff you’re leaving out.”
She laughed at her own stubbornness and resigned herself to tell him all that stuff. She didn’t mind telling him. She just worried about boring him. But he seemed to really want to know. So she told him about her family in Wyoming, about her fun times in Georgia, her music, and her initial disappointment with Southern California.
He looked at her in a way that made her feel funny, not because it was uncomfortable, but because no one else ever had. It was like he was actually listening to her, rather than waiting for her to stop so he could talk. And he kept coming back with more questions whenever she stopped. It felt like a lighting round of “Getting To Know You”. But Sasha was enjoying it. She looked at the clock and realized her time was up.
“Sorry, I’ve got to get going.” She stood to go as she shoved her things into her backpack.
“We’ll continue this conversation later,” he said. “See you in class tomorrow.”
“Ok. See ya.” She walked away feeling better than she had in weeks. It felt a little weird that the only person she could connect with was her teacher, but she didn’t care. It was nice to actually talk to someone for a change.