There’s nothing I can do about my thickening five o’clock shadow, my wrinkled clothes, a neck stiff from sleeping against a car window.
I quietly make my way back to the classroom where Melody had taught just moments earlier, except she and all of her students have disappeared, their replacements now getting situated in the desk chairs. Melody’s equations have been erased, nothing left but a white smear of chalk dust, no proof she ever stood at the front of the room and instructed the class, that she ever took a portion of the brilliance inside her and transferred it to those young minds. No proof. Vanished.
I walk down the hall, check each successive classroom to see if Melody is teaching another course elsewhere: nothing. At the end of the corridor, I open the door to the stairwell. Echoes of voices and lazy footsteps bounce about the cement walls, float their way down to me. I begin quietly walking up to the next floor while two males discuss the solution to a math problem. I hear their words but can make no sense of them, like strangers speaking in a foreign tongue.
But then Melody’s unmistakable voice reverberates throughout the concrete spiral: “Your methodology is sound, but you’re missing the gist. The infinite sum of terms calculated from the values of the derivatives is at a single point. If that single point was centered at zero then, yes, you would have a Maclaurin series—except in your case the center is not zero. Which means?”
No response, only footsteps and the opening of a door.
Finally, one of the boys answers, “A Taylor series?”
Melody says, “Bingo,” and the door slams shut, leaves me alone in the wake of its boom.
I run up the remaining steps and gently open the door to the top floor, know she must be on the other side. I take a deep breath and hold it, move so slowly I’d be able to avoid triggering a motion detector. From behind and to the side I see Melody leisurely stroll down the far end of the hallway, flanked on each side by the students, two textbooks pressed against her chest. Near the end of the corridor three more students wait on a bench between two large wooden office doors. They look at Melody as she heads toward them.
I can no longer hear her voice, but I can see her lips move as she turns and unlocks the door to the first office, the boys nodding every now and again as she speaks. She struggles with the door, leverages her weight against it with a shoulder, and as it opens in a burst she disappears out of view. One boy follows her in, the other sits down on the bench.
I step into the hallway, close the door behind me, hold it back so the sound of the latch is nothing more than the tick of a clock hand. Then I lumber down the hall, pretend like I’m supposed to be here, that I’m one of them, though nothing would indicate such a thing. I have no texts, no book bag, no clue where I am or what I’m doing, hope I somehow appear to be a graduate student. I’m at least ten years older than every kid on the bench, yet as I approach with obvious hesitation, the girl at the end picks up her book bag and puts it on the floor, slides over a few inches so I can sit.
She looks like she could be my brother Jimmy’s daughter—long midnight hair in a ponytail, pudgy tanned skin, large nose and eyes—right down to the faded sweatshirt and black Chucks. As I sit next to her, she turns and addresses my apparent awkwardness.
She nods and says, “You here to see Ms. Emerson?”
I stare at her. Felicia Emerson. “Yes,” I say, but the lack of moisture in my mouth makes it come out as a whisper. I clear my throat and say it again. “Yes.”
She nods some more, says, “She’s awesome. I don’t understand a thing Dr. Ames says when I attend the main lecture. But Ms. Emerson… I’d be failing this class—again—if it weren’t for her.”
I smile a little and look beyond her, at the closed door to the office.
The girl nods again, appears to be a tic that accompanies every word she says. “I really love her.”
I lean forward, rest my elbows on my knees, and drop my chin between the knuckles of my fist. “Yeah,” I say, “I love her,