Turn 7 of 26

Stay silent and watch the professor walk in, it’s a different women, The professor doesn’t say anything as she starts writing on the board and everyone including you start writing what’s on the board. During the class, you don’t notice your hair color turning ginger like everyone else and becoming fuzzy and unhealthy like them After 50 miuntes of silence, the class ends and you leave the class.

The door opens and a woman walks in — not Dr. Prewitt. Shorter, rounder, gray cardigan over a knit vest, hair pinned back in a gray bun, glasses nearly as thick as the first teacher's. She says nothing at all. She sets down her bag, takes the chalk, and begins writing on the board as though the class has been running for years and she has never needed a single word to run it.

Thirty pencils move. Yours moves. The notation streams across the board and streams onto the pages in front of you, and the only sound in room 123 is chalk and graphite, a soft dry whisper going on and on. Your hand copies what your eyes are given. There is no part of it you decide, and the strange thing — the thing you file away somewhere dark to look at later — is that it doesn't feel like being forced anymore. It just feels like what you do. A student sits in a class and takes notes. That is all.

Somewhere in the middle of it, your scalp prickles. A deep, creeping warmth at the roots, like sunburn in reverse, and your right hand rises to scratch it without breaking rhythm. What the hand finds is hair with a texture you don't remember — coarser, drier, kinking into fuzz at the ends where last week it slid like silk. The ginger has crept in from the roots, the same flat rust-orange as the twenty-nine heads around you, and your pigtails sit in your altered hair as if they were grown into it. You don't see any of it. Your eyes stay on the board.

The chalk stops. The woman caps it, erases nothing, and picks up her bag. No dismissal, no goodbye — she simply walks out, and the room rises in unison behind her, thirty chairs folding back in one scrape. You stand with them, notebook squared, pencil capped, and follow Ruth's cardigan out the door and up toward daylight.

Outside, the quad is blinding after the stairwell dimness, and students stream past in every direction — normal students, in every color and shape, laughing and checking phones. Ruth stops at the bottom of the steps and looks at you, patient, waiting to see if you'll walk off on your own or ask her something. Your phone sits heavy in your pocket, full of messages you haven't dared to open. It is barely past noon, and the day has only taken two classes from you so far.