“Yeah. Maybe. It’s pretty . . . Well, I put some stuff in there I don’t know about. I want to ask Nye about it.”

“Is it sex stuff? Nye doesn’t care about that.”

“Not sex,” Madeline said. “Just . . . Well, I think I want it back before he reads it. I might change it. Maybe write something different. Something less . . . real, I guess. I’m afraid Nye will think the wrong things about me. And other professors might get the wrong impression of me.”

“Really? He’s pretty chill.”

“Professors tend to stick together,” she said. “They’re like cops. You know? The blue wall?”

“They do that in the Mafia too. They call it omorta.”

“You mean omertà. That’s the code of silence. I read a book about it once.”

Isaac glanced at Nye. “Well, he looks pretty sad,” Isaac said.

“Wouldn’t you if Hannah was babbling in your face?”

The music seemed to get louder. The TV showed the university’s basketball team running up and down the court, shooting and passing. It looked kind of pointless to Madeline, all the back and forth, back and forth. But it was Kentucky, and everyone in the damn state talked about basketball all year round. Even Isaac watched it, his face deadly serious, like he was viewing a documentary about World War II or some other major historical event. Had she heard someone say it was an important tournament? Something called the NIT? Was that a big deal?

“It’s not that,” Isaac said, eyes on the TV. “He’s sad because his wife and kid died. Tragically.”

Madeline wanted to sigh, but she held it in. She’d been corrected by professors before because she sighed when her classmates said something particularly stupid. The rumor had been going around as long as she’d been an English major that Dr. Nye’s wife and teenage son had died a few years earlier. Sometimes the story said they’d died in a car accident. Sometimes people said they’d been murdered. Once Madeline heard they’d both died when a neighbor’s dog went mad and attacked them in the backyard. When Nye had come home from work that day, so the story went, he found the dog standing over their mauled bodies, licking his bloody chops.

“That’s all bullshit, Isaac,” she said. “He looks sad because he wants to spend more time writing novels, and he can’t because he has to teach. He’s into the tortured-artist thing. It’s kind of appealing to be all sad and broody.”