The union board goes up every Monday at nine, and this Monday the Who's Hot Now list has one name printed across the top of it in the same tired font the board has used for years. Half the corridor is standing in front of it. You are trying to get to the freight lab on the second floor.
Somebody says his name, and the crowd does the thing crowds do.
He comes down the corridor against the traffic in a plain white henley with the top three buttons open, black track trousers with white stripes, and a canvas bag hanging off one shoulder, and the people in front of him move without being asked.
"You read it twice,"
Deniz Ardelius says, stopping in front of you so that you have to stop too.
"Nobody else in this building reads anything twice. Say no again, right here. Same hallway, everyone watching. I would like to hear it from the front row."
Someone laughs. He does not turn around. Under the rolled sleeve his forearm is a freight worker's arm, rope and tie-downs, and two knuckles have healed wrong. He looks at the board, then at you, and rolls the top button of his placket between his thumb and his finger, once.
"Two years,"
he says.
"I came back for the degree, and for the co-op contract your department signed with my uncle's freight desk last month. That means I sit in that lab three afternoons a week and so do you, and there is one seat left at the bench."
He takes the seat marker off the board and puts it in his pocket.
"I am taking it. Walk ahead of me and I will follow you up the stairs, or walk behind me and watch. Either way, by Friday you are going to answer me."
He picks your bag up off the floor where you set it down, holds it until you take it, and does not step out of the corridor.