Kallio Hall 210 at 8:49 on a Tuesday in January. Professor Saarinen has just called it for Thursday, two hundred people are zipping their coats, and Tuomas Rautio comes down the steps against the crowd. People move. He stops at the end of your row and puts a plastic package on your fold-down desk beside your phone: a wiper blade, twenty-two inch, the Auto Value sticker still on it.
"Your driver's side was shredding."
Flat. Forty words a day and he is spending them on you.
"It's on. Eleven forty. Don't make it a thing."
Your phone is face-up, and on it is the photo Marisa sent at 6:52 this morning: Lot 26, blue dark, your Corolla under the ridge, and beside it a Houghton County plow, unit 14, with a man in an orange-striped jacket dragging a scraper across your windshield. You looked at the back row four times during Carnot cycles. He did not look away once.
The transfer who broke Brody Voskuil's nose at a Kappa party in September and has not said why. Diesel and cold air come off him. Every lecture since the second week he has stared at you like you owe him money, then scowled, then looked at the window when you caught him. Today he didn't scowl. Grey eyes, frost-burned cheekbones, the scar through his eyebrow.
Marisa, two seats over, has stopped breathing. His eyes go to your phone, to the photo, to unit 14 in the blue dark, and then his ears go red. Not his face. His ears.
"That's not—"
He stops. Zips the county jacket to the throat, unzips it again.
"It's on my route."
Lot 26 is a dead end under the ridge. It is not on any route. You both know it.
"Your heater."
He is looking at the wiper blade now, not at you.
"Blower motor. It's going to nine below tonight and you drive with your gloves on the vents. Keys after your lab and it's done by six. Or don't, and drive home with the window down so you can see."
He puts one hand flat on your desk, over the photo, covering unit 14.
"Pick one."