The Never List

angled script, number after number, symbol after symbol, sine after cosine.
    In my room, I kept all my class notebooks within arm’s length on the shelf by my bed. If I couldn’t sleep at night, I could pull one out and pass my eyes slowly over their ordered magnificence, admiring how these problems at least yielded the same answers every time.
    Staying true to Jennifer in my own way, my concentration was in statistics. I finished a master’s degree in a year. The professors had begged me to get my Ph.D., but I’d had enough of sitting in classes with other students by then. At that point, the sheer volume of people I had to interact with every day had started to wear on me. My phobias had started to mount. Even the largest lecture halls felt claustrophobic. I could hear, with penetrating clarity, every cough or whisper or pencil dropped in the room, making me jump as the sound echoed in my head.
    And when classes ended, there were suddenly too many bodies in motion, bumping into one another needlessly as they put on coats and scarves. I would always sit perfectly still after everyone else left, alone in the auditorium, as I waited for the hallways to clear enough to afford me a wide berth. So my body could float through space and time, untouchable, untouched.
    Pulling myself out of the past, I looked down the long corridorof the psychology department. It was dotted with students, standing in groups or pairs, with a few lone stragglers at the margins. They looked so carefree, so alive. Some chatted, while others were wrapped up in their own heads, maybe thinking about their course work or the date they had last night. You couldn’t see behind the happiness to the traumas that must have loomed there. I knew statistically they had to exist, but you would never know it just by looking.
    But there, with the sun streaming through the skylight in the renovated portion of the building, it didn’t seem as though trouble could have ever touched these students with their smooth skin and full-throated laughs. Here they were, almost at the end of the school year, preparing to go on to their internships, summer jobs, grad school. I would never know what they were getting over. Maybe no one would ever know, and maybe that was the way it should be. Maybe that’s what well-adjusted people do—they actually adjust. And that’s what it means to be young and poised for life—you put your past behind you, whatever it is, and you force yourself to be free.
    I wiped a tear from my eye and walked by them all. The security guard at the front desk didn’t look up from his newspaper. I shook my head, thinking of all the dangers he could be missing, all the while grateful to be ignored. This time I noticed a small sign with neat type pointing out the direction of the faculty offices, and I followed it back to the hallway I’d been down earlier.
    I passed the row of traditional oak doors, the upper half of each a panel of frosted glass marked with a name in black letters. Next to Adele’s, as she had said, was Professor David Stiller’s. His door was open just slightly, and as I pushed it gently, I could see no one was in there.
    It was a large office, with tall windows facing the quad. An enormous oak desk stood in front of the window, and a bookcasecovered the wall facing it, filled up and overflowing. I fingered the volumes, mostly psychology books on various arcane topics, and a few standard statistics manuals I recognized.
    Then my eye happened to catch a low shelf behind the desk on the floor. The works there looked different, unlike textbooks. I leaned over to get a closer look and read the titles quickly. 100 Days of Sodom, Juliette, Story of the Eye, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle . This was Tracy’s territory.
    Just as I pulled out my notebook to write down the names to show her, the door opened behind me.
    “Excuse me? Can I help you?” came a deep voice.
    I jumped, dropped my pen, and watched it clatter to the floor and roll under the heavy desk. I turned to face David Stiller. He was tall, one might even say handsome, with brown hair and eyes so black, their pupils were indistinguishable within them. It had a disconcerting effect.
    He looked at me expectantly, waiting for an explanation for who I was and what I was doing. Startled, I was having trouble collecting my thoughts, so I dropped to my hands and knees and awkwardly reached for my pen under the desk.
    “Oh, hi …” I said, stalling as best I could.