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Rafe: Be proud, baby. Nobody called me selfish tonight.

I laugh.

Me: So proud of you.

January goes.

Rafe and I have a class together this semester. Marketing, Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten, in a lecture room on the second floor of the business building.

The first day, I walk in and Rafe’s sitting on the right side. I walk to the left and take a seat by the windows, three rows from the front where I can see the board.

I’m pretending not to notice, but his head turns, and he sees me.

I can feel the heat of his stare as I open my notebook to a clean page and write the date at the top, very neatly.

My phone buzzes.

Rafe: Why are you over there?

Me: Because I’m taking the class.

Rafe: Are you serious?

Me: Yes.

I look up and across the room. He’s staring at his phone with absolutely no expression. Then he looks up at me.

I glance back at the board.

I don’t sit with him. Not that day, and not after. I like the class. I want to hear the professor. I want to take notes without somebody’s knee against mine under the desk making it impossible to think. And I don’t want to be Rafe Waleska’s girlfriend in every room I walk into. I want one room where I’m just the girl by the windows who asks too many questions.

And I like pretending I don’t know him, then catching him staring.

He lasts until the second Thursday of February.

I’m early because there’s a quiz, and I’m going over my notes on segmentation when somebody drops into the seat next to mine hard enough to rattle the whole row. He smells like the rink. He doesn’t say anything. He puts his feet up on the chair in front of him, gets out a pen, and settles in like he’s been sitting by the windows all semester.

“No,” I say.

“It’s a free country.”

“Go back to your side of it.”

He doesn’t.

It takes about four minutes for him to prove my whole point. His knee finds mine under the desk and stays there while the professor puts up a slide about psychographics. Then his pen dies, or he says it does, and he takes mine right out of my hand mid-word and doesn’t give it back. I have to dig out a pencil. When I look down at my notes ten minutes later, there’s something written in the margin in his square, leaning handwriting, next to my very neat definition of brand loyalty.

He has said synergy 4 times.

I cross it out. He leans over and writes 5 underneath.

He whispers once about the professor’s tie, which has tiny ducks on it, and I miss the entire second half of a sentence about customer acquisition cost because I’m trying not to laugh. Then my phone buzzes in my lap. I look down.

Rafe: You’re beautiful.

He’s eight inches away. He’s looking at the board with a completely straight face.

I get a seventy-eight on the quiz. It’s the lowest grade I’ve gotten all year.