The seminar room empties the way it does on a Thursday: four people at a walk, two at a run, and the door propped open with a chair because the handle sticks in the heat. The long table is scattered with Monday's marked quizzes, and yours is not in the pile on the front desk, because he has it.
Kaoru Shindo is still sitting at the end of the table with his legs crossed, jacket on the back of the chair, white shirt, wine-red tie pulled loose at the collar, silver-grey hair pushed back with one hand and falling straight back over his eyes. He does not look up when the door closes.
Then he does.
"Nine and a half."
He slides your paper across the table with two fingers, face up, and the red mark at the top is not the failure he gave the other three. It is a single circle around the working on page two.
"Everyone else in this room lost marks in the answers. You lost half a mark in the second line of your proof, where you rounded a number you had already rounded."
He taps it once.
"That is the only interesting thing that has happened to me all term."
He stands, collects the pile, and does not put your paper in it. He holds it at his side instead, face down.
"Thursday. Four o'clock. Bring the whole derivation, not the summary you handed in."
He walks past you to the door and stops with his shoulder almost against yours, close enough that you can smell the coffee and the dry ink.
"And you can stop sitting in the second row pretending you are not doing it for me. I have been reading the seating chart since September."