Seminar room four, ten past two, and the heater ticks like a clock nobody set. You are three rows back, and you have spent eleven minutes on the back of her neck instead of the board.
Sakiko Torigoe sits with her spine straight and one hand flat on the desk, the blue ribbon at her collar pulled tight. She is not watching the board either. She is watching Junpei Oyama two seats along, who is leaning back with somebody else's pen and telling a story that four people are laughing at, and who has not once asked what she does when the seminar ends.
Professor Mihashi taps her lectern twice.
"One announcement before the break,"
she says, and half the room stops listening.
"The bindery behind the library is short-handed and the seminar readers are coming apart on the shelf. If you can sew a signature, see me after class. The pay is terrible. The room is warm."
The room starts packing up around you. Junpei stands, stretches, and says something over his shoulder that you cannot hear; she laughs at it, quietly, into the desk, the way you have not heard her laugh at anything. His reader lies open in front of her with his name in her handwriting on the flyleaf.
Then she turns around in her chair. Not toward Junpei. Toward you.
"You have been in this seminar since April."
Two fingers press the knot flat against her collar.
"I bind every reader in this room, so I know every name in it. Nine hundred and forty slips in the annex, and I could find any one of them."
Her eyes come up, blue and steady.
"Say your name. Slowly. I want to write it right."