Muttering what sounds like, “Thanks, Pro-fes-sor. Ma’am.”

If this is mockery, you don’t acknowledge it. Truly you are feeling hopeful, optimistic about this conference.

Conference is the preferred term. Students drop by an office, make an appointment with a professor for a conference. Pointedly, Gavin Kroff requested a conference with you this afternoon, following an awkward exchange with him in class the previous week.

A faint, hairline pulse of a migraine has begun somewhere in the cerebellum of your brain, triggered by the ugly fluorescent lighting you’d been obliged to switch on a few minutes earlier. Otherwise you and Gavin Kroff would be conferring in a shadowy office in the sepulchral quiet of a university building at dusk.

Clutching his soiled backpack (which appears to contain something heavy), Kroff comes to sit in the chair beside your desk. He sighs, as if releasing a burden. His uneven, discolored teeth are bared in an inscrutable smile.

So suddenly, so close—only a few inches from you across the corner of the desk. Even as you shrink from seeing, you cannot help but see the young man’s blotched skin, stiff, dust-colored hair receding at his temples, unshaven jaws, and brash, tawny eyes, like cracked glass.

To the left of his mouth, a thick white worm of a scar. Hard not to stare at this scar, which seems to be staring back at you.

In one of Kroff’s prose pieces a child is mutilated and maimed by an elaborate piece of machinery into which he is pushed by an older sibling; especially, his face is mutilated. Though you know that you have no right to assume an autobiographical intent, you have assumed that this is more or less how Kroff’s face came to be scarred.

Unless it is a scar from a war injury.

In which case, you wonder if Gavin Kroff is scarred elsewhere, inside his clothes.

And what of the scars hidden from sight?—these are the ugliest.

If the basement office were larger, the aluminum desk would be positioned differently: you would be seated behind it and students would be seated in front of it. A discreet distance of several feet between you. But the office isn’t large, two bulky desks take up most of the space. Since you are a visiting professor, however distinguished the title a transient hire, your assigned desk is nearer the door; your students are obliged to sit in a chair perpendicular to the desk, facing you at a slant.