He uncapped a blue pen and laid it along the folder's top edge, parallel to nothing in particular. The room filled from the back first, students dropping into seats the way water finds low ground, and a girl in a yellow sweatshirt took the chair directly in front of him without looking up from her phone. When she unzipped her bag a mechanical pencil rolled out and stopped against his shoe, and he picked it up and set it on her desk while she was still looking at her screen - and she never noticed.
He found the reading list on a photocopied syllabus someone had left on a chair and copied it onto a yellow legal pad in block letters, pressing hard enough that the pen left grooves in the page beneath. The campus bookstore had five of the six; he bought the Didion and the one with the cracked spine they'd marked down to four dollars, and carried them out in a bag that said BOOKS ARE MAGIC in red. Thursday evenings he cleared the kitchen table of the pepper grinder and the pile of rubber-banded mail and laid the books open, face-down, in the order Dr. Fenn had circled on the board.
Dr. Fenn had written *civil disobedience* on the whiteboard in green marker and was waiting - hands in his pockets, when Priya turned around in her chair and looked directly at Dennis with her chin resting on her forearm. Dennis opened his mouth. He looked at the whiteboard, then at Dr.
Fenn stopped him at the door with a hand not quite touching his elbow and said the word *policy* the way people say *unfortunately*, and handed him a slip of white paper with a number printed in the center - $1,140 - in a font that looked like it had come from an invoice for toner cartridges. Dennis folded it once along the middle - crease pressed flat with his thumbnail, and slid it into the manila folder behind the permission email, which had gone soft at the corners from being opened too many times. He carried the folder down the hall past the bulletin board where someone had pinned a flyer for a study group that met Tuesdays at seven, the same time, the same room. The blue pen was still uncapped when he got home - and he set it on the kitchen table next to the pepper grinder, and didn't pick it up again.
The Didion was on top, its cover warped where it had gotten damp, and he opened it to page forty-one where he'd pressed too hard with the pencil and the question mark had gone through to forty-two. He read the underlined sentence once, then again - moving his lips a little the way he did when he was alone. Outside, a car alarm went on for thirty seconds and then stopped, and the pepper grinder was still there where he'd set it, and the rubber-banded mail had grown another inch.
He wrote *Contemporary Moral Philosuphy* on the folder's cover tab in the same block letters from the legal pad, the ink having gone a little dry - and left the *u* where it was. The folder sat on the table between the pepper grinder and the rubber-banded mail, and he didn't move it to the counter or the drawer or the shelf by the door where things went when they were finished. The Didion was underneath it now, face-down, spine up, holding the folder's left edge off the table by maybe a quarter inch.
He called the number on the slip three weeks later from the kitchen - standing up, and a woman read him back his address to confirm it and then said the word *installment* and then said the word *plan* and he wrote both words on the back of an envelope from the rubber-banded pile, under a return address for someone named Weiss who he didn't know. The books were still on the table. He put the envelope under the Didion, where the question mark had gone through to forty-two, and then he moved the pepper grinder six inches to the left for no reason he could have named.
He found the permission email in the folder one morning and read the part where Dr. Fenn had typed *happy to have you* and then he closed the folder and set the pepper grinder back on top of it. The first installment check was for $285 and he wrote it in the register in the same block letters - the ink running thin at the end of the five, and put it in an envelope he had to lick twice because the strip was dry. He addressed it to a P.
O. Box number that was eight digits long, and he counted them twice with his finger moving under each one. The stamp was a flag stamp left from a birthday card last year, the adhesive gone uneven, and he pressed it down with the heel of his hand and it still lifted at the corner. He set the envelope on the shelf by the door where things went when they were finished - next to his keys, and in the morning it was the first thing he saw, the corner of the stamp still up, the flag tilted like something that hadn't decided yet.
He went back once, a Tuesday - and stood in the hall outside the room with his hand not quite on the door and listened to Dr. Fenn say something about Rawls that he couldn't fully hear, just the shape of the word through the wood. A boy came out with his backpack half-zipped and held the door for a second and Dennis said he was just leaving, which wasn't what he meant. He walked to the parking lot and sat in his car with the engine off until the lights in the building went to half, and then he drove home the long way, past the campus bookstore - which had already pulled the course texts and filled the window with sweatshirts in school colors, folded in stacks by size.
He found the legal pad under the Didion one afternoon and saw that the block letters had pressed through to the next sheet, so the reading list existed twice - once in ink, once in grooves - and he tore the second one out carefully along the perforation and folded it into quarters and put it in his shirt pocket without knowing why. The woman who had said *installment* sent a receipt that came in a window envelope, and he opened it at the kitchen table and saw that the amount remaining was printed in bold - $855, in the same toner-cartridge font as the first number, and he set it next to the pepper grinder and it stayed there through dinner. He took the folded sheet out of his pocket that night and pressed it flat on the table and looked at the ghost letters - Didion, Rawls, *civil disobedience* - the way you look at something in a language you almost speak.
