Crazy Pleasure

The campus is a ghost town.

I stand at the window of my dorm room and take it in , the empty walkways, the locked lecture halls, the trees dropping leaves onto pavement that nobody's walking on. Two weeks into the strike and the university looks like a movie set after the crew packed up and left. No voices bouncing off brick walls. No bikes cutting across the quad. Just wind moving through branches and somewhere, far off, the hollow call of a crow.

It's the kind of quiet that should feel peaceful. It doesn't.

The afternoon light cuts low across the empty courtyard below, throwing long shadows from benches that haven't been sat on in days. A single plastic bag skips down the path between the science building and the arts block, and there's no one around to care. The classroom windows stare back at me like dead eyes. Locked doors. Chain-link tape across the main entrance to the admin building. Even the vending machine outside the student union is powered down, its little LED screen dark.

Beautiful, part of me thinks. Empty and perfect.

I know that's wrong. I know it.

My phone buzzes on the desk for the third time in twenty minutes.

Jake: dude are you seriously still there Jake: my mom made a roast, get on the 4pm bus Jake: LEO

I set the phone face-down.

I'm nineteen years old and I'm spending my strike break alone in a single dorm room with a pile of unread books and a view of nothing. My parents think I went home with Jake last Thursday. Jake thinks I'm about to. I'm not going anywhere.

I could explain it, if someone asked. The part about not wanting to sit through two weeks of my mom asking if I've "made friends" and my dad suggesting I switch to business. I could sell that easily enough. What I can't explain , what I won't be explaining to anyone , is the real reason I haven't left.

I move to the window and lean my shoulder against the frame.

She might still be here.

Her name is Professor Clara Reeves. She teaches Contemporary Critical Theory, third floor of the Humanities building, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I've been in her class since September.

I don't pick up the textbook off my desk so much as I find myself holding it , my copy of The Archaeology of Knowledge, cover creased from the number of times I've carried it. I open it to a random page and read nothing. My mind has already gone back there. To that first Tuesday in September when I walked in late and had to take the one empty seat up front.

She was mid-sentence when I came in. She didn't stop.

The classroom was full then , thirty students crammed into tiered seats, laptops open, pens moving. She stood at the board with a blue marker, writing in quick, fluid strokes, her handwriting almost architectural in its precision. She was talking about epistemic rupture, about how the assumptions buried inside a piece of language can tell you more than its surface meaning ever will. She talked about it like it was the most alive thing in the world.

I remember putting my bag down and just , stopping.

She had this way of pausing mid-thought to glance up at the room, checking whether we were with her, not in the nervous way some lecturers do but in the way a musician checks the audience. Measuring. Adjusting. When she wrote on the board she angled her body slightly outward, so she was always still facing the room, still connected to it. When Marcus in the second row pushed back on her interpretation of Foucault, she didn't shut him down. She turned the whole thing around , That's worth sitting with, actually , and then dismantled his argument so cleanly he was nodding by the time she finished.

I stopped taking notes somewhere around the forty-minute mark. I just watched her.

That was twelve weeks ago. I've been watching her ever since.

You're obsessed, I tell myself.

Yeah. I know.

I set the book down.

By four o'clock I've been in my room too long and the walls are starting to press. I pull on a jacket, grab nothing else, and step out into the hollow corridors of the dorm building. My footsteps echo off linoleum. Every door is closed. The bulletin board at the end of the hall still has a flyer for a Halloween party that happened three weeks ago , FREE DRINKS, dress code strictly enforced. Someone drew a mustache on the skeleton illustration.

Outside, the air is cold and smells like wet leaves. I walk without direction.

That's not exactly true. I walk without admitting direction.

I circle the arts quad, hands in pockets, watching pigeons pick at something near the bike racks. I loop past the library's side entrance , closed, the little paper sign taped to the glass says REDUCED HOURS, KEYCARD ACCESS ONLY. Past the philosophy building with its peeling notice boards. Past the long low stretch of the Humanities block.

I'm not looking for anything.

Sure you're not.

The light shifts. That particular late-afternoon gold that makes everything look slightly more important than it is settles over the campus, and I end up at the east side of the library building without entirely meaning to, standing under an oak tree whose last stubborn leaves hang on in clusters of burnt copper.

I'm not sure what makes me look up at the window.

Third from the left, second floor. The reading room.

She's there.

My chest locks up.

Clara is seated at one of the long tables near the window, her back half-turned to the glass. She's working , papers spread in front of her, one hand moving across a page, the other holding what I'm pretty sure is a coffee cup. Her hair is down. She's in a dark sweater. She looks completely, utterly absorbed in whatever she's reading, like the rest of the world has already agreed to leave her alone.

I don't move.

I should move. I should absolutely not be standing under a tree staring up at my professor's silhouette through a library window like some nineteenth century gothic protagonist. I know this. The knowing doesn't do anything.

She shifts in her seat, tilts her head to one side, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She writes something down. Reaches for the coffee.

I watch until the light starts to go.

When I finally turn and walk back toward the dorm, my shadow stretches long behind me across the empty path, and there's something warm sitting low in my chest that has no business being there.

I'm not going home.