Office Hours

Arjun did not go to The Hollow. He did the problem set, finished it by ten, and then sat at his desk until midnight not starting the next one, which was new, and which he did not enjoy. On Monday he found Theo at the chemistry building's office hours, which was the last place Arjun expected him — Theo treated office hours the way other people treated dental work — and Theo was not asking Professor Mensah about chemistry. He was leaning in the doorway of the TA room with a midterm in his hand, and his face was doing something Arjun had not seen it do before. It had stopped grinning. "Sixty-one," Theo said, when he saw Arjun. He held up the paper like evidence. "Out of a hundred. In case you were curious how your partner's doing." "That's —" Arjun did the math reflexively. "That's recoverable. The practical's worth thirty, the final's worth —" "Yeah, I know, I can do the percentages, I'm not —" Theo stopped. Pushed a hand through his hair. The setlist on his hand had faded to a gray smear; he hadn't written a new one. "Scholarship needs a C in the sequence. A flat C. I'm under it. If I lose the scholarship I lose the housing and if I lose the housing I'm not here in the spring, so." He laughed, and it was not the free laugh, it was a thin and borrowed one. "Turns out the curve is a person who wronged me. You were right to be scared of it. My mistake was thinking it was funny." Arjun stood in the corridor and felt the five-year plan rearrange itself, quietly, without his permission, the way a room looks different when someone finally opens the blinds. "You ask good questions," Arjun said. Theo blinked. "What?" "In lab. You ask the questions Mensah actually has to think about. You're not bad at chemistry, Theo, you're bad at the procedure, and the procedure is the part that's teachable." Arjun heard himself, the flatness gone out of his voice, something more careful in its place. "I can teach you the procedure. I've done every problem in that book twice. I could do them with you. Thursdays after lab. Sundays if you need it." Theo looked at him for a long moment, and the corridor was very quiet, and Arjun became aware that he had just rewritten his Thursdays and his Sundays for someone, which was a thing the August version of him would not have recognized as possible. "You'd do that," Theo said slowly. "For your partner's grade. Because the practical's worth thirty percent of *yours.*" "No." Arjun surprised himself with how fast it came. "Not for the thirty percent. I —" He stopped. Started again, more honest, the way Theo's questions always eventually forced him. "You asked me on Friday why I never ask you anything. So. Here's one. What does Saltwater sound like. I want to know. I should have come." Something moved across Theo's face — the thin borrowed laugh falling away, and under it, slowly, the real grin trying to come back, exothermic, a slow reaction finally finding its heat. "Thursdays," Theo said. "After lab. You teach me the procedure." He tucked the sixty-one into his bag, out of sight. "And Friday, the band plays again, and this time you come, and I'll tell you what Saltwater sounds like. Deal, partner?" "Deal," Arjun said, and meant it, and somewhere in his color-coded planner a Friday quietly stopped belonging to the problem set.