She was so thrilled for that split second.

But she couldn’t ignore the hand on her knee. The lingering hand.

As she drove home from Troy’s, she tried to cast the interaction in a different light. Maybe Hoffman touched all his students that way, male and female. Maybe he was trying to be encouraging, like her female soccer coach, who used to smack all the players on the butt as they ran laps around the field.

Maybe Hoffman saw through to who she really was—a smart kid, dreaming of a life as a writer, but who was scared to death the dream would disappear like a puff of smoke. Like all the things her mother talked about doing but never did. And maybe Hoffman wanted to reassure her.

Madeline sat in her shitty chair in her apartment, the one with the sheet over the ugly stains, staring at the wall. She looked at the chipped plaster, the dirty paint. No, she thought. I know what he wants. It’s what Zach wanted at the party.

It’s what Mom says all men want. All the time.

Madeline weighed her options. Hoffman wasn’t even her thesis director—Nye was. So did she even have to keep meeting with him? But Nye was so hard to pin down, so hard to get to pay attention. When they met and discussed her plans, his eyes wandered off away from her face. He’d stare at the rows of books on the shelves in his office, or out the window at the people walking by. She knew he’d lost his family somehow, knew the guy was in some kind of excruciating emotional pain, but he needed to do his job just a little, right?

Should she ask Dr. White, the head of the department, for advice?

She’d heard from other students that he was approachable, that they could talk to him, and he’d be understanding, nodding along as the students shared their problems and then giving them a few reasonable options to make things better. He seemed a little full of himself. He liked to roll up his shirtsleeves and show off his muscular arms. He was in good shape, obviously went to the gym a lot.

White and Hoffman and Nye were all friends. They hung out together sometimes, and if she complained to White, wouldn’t it get back to Hoffman like a spreading virus? And hadn’t Hoffman asked her to be discreet about letting Nye know he was helping with the thesis?