The guy next to him says, “I thought I’d never have to see him again. I don’t even care if he does cancel class every time he’s hungover.”

“Excuse me,” White says, looking over at them.

Rebecca stiffens in her seat. She hates to think she’d be lumped in with the guys who can’t keep their mouths shut.

But she knew Hoffman. Just a little. She’d been to that party at his house a couple of years ago, the one where she first met Madeline. The one with the thing that happened in the alley. And she remembers Hoffman having too much to drink and insulting her home county.

He did kind of seem like a jerk. But now he’s teaching her class.

Where the hell is Nye?

“If you have any questions,” White says, “feel free to ask, and I’ll try to answer them.”

Rebecca hates to have a one-track mind. She hates that her first thought isn’t about what might be wrong with Dr. Nye—illness, injury, accident—but instead goes right to her own problems. Who is going to direct her thesis if Nye isn’t here?

But she can’t help it.

She starts to lift her hand and ask, but White barely takes a breath between asking for questions and cutting them off. He doesn’t even look at Rebecca.

“Okay, then,” he says. “I’ll hand this over to Dr. Hoffman.”

And White breezes out of the room so fast, it looks like his shirt is on fire.

And then Hoffman steps forward and sits on the desk. Despite the cold he wears a short-sleeve button-down Hawaiian shirt and lightweight blue pants made for summer.

“I took a cursory glance at Dr. Nye’s syllabus before I came down here,” Hoffman says, “and I found the whole document to be both prescriptive and restrictive, so I thought we’d branch out in some other directions. Which reminds me of the professor I had at Yale who refused to assign letter grades. Let me tell you a little story about her. . . .”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Hoffman starts to talk, and the student on Rebecca’s left, a woman she sometimes talks to before class and who always smells like patchouli and has an elaborate tattoo on her right hand, leans over and says, “He’s an amazing professor. I learned so much about writing from him. I think he’s a mad genius. He gave me so many useful suggestions for my poems. He thinks I should go to graduate school.”

Hoffman has a deep, resonant voice. He sounds smart. And he has a big vocabulary, using words Rebecca has heard but isn’t sure she understands.

Rebecca isn’t sure who to believe—the students who hate him or the one who loves him.