And even though he thought she was amazing, she felt anything but. She missed the kind of passion for her work Jerome was still cultivating. She missed feeling like she was learning things that would help the people she cared about and the communities she lived in. She missed when she didn’t need a pot of coffee to feel as if her brain was firing on almost all cylinders. She missed not having to pay extra to thin her glasses lenses. She missed not feeling tired all the time. She missed feeling like herself, whoever that was these days. And if she only did one useful thing this academic year, she wanted to save him from a fate like hers, but he wasn’t making it easy. After months of trying to explain why he needed to dial back and make time to rest because those things were important — maybe even more important — than choosing the perfect combination of majors and minors, she was still struggling to get through to him.

“What do you want to do when you graduate?” Alejandro asked.

Jerome looked sheepishly at Deja and shrugged.

“He’s not sure yet,” Deja answered for him.

“Good,” Alejandro said, and Deja and Jerome turned to him in shock.

He smiled and shrugged. Jerome’s shrug had made Deja think of her nephew, the way he shrugged when his parents asked him if he understood why he was in trouble. But Alejandro’s was from a completely different realm; his movements were languid and unpretentious, and the smile on his face was effortlessly charming.

Oh, she thought to herself, this is way more than a crush.

Alejandro smiled at Jerome for a brief second before his entire demeanor shifted from affable colleague to professor.

“The minute you get here, we tell you that you have to have the next four years planned out, and two years after that would be even better. It’s not really fair, but if we’re being honest…”

He leaned across Deja toward Jerome, and she felt like a small child since they were both nearly half a foot taller than her. She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“You can’t tell anyone I said this,” Alejandro continued, “but it’s really not necessary to be that prepared. Take whatever classes you want. You can change your major as many times as you want to. There’s no penalty. But you want to have a plan. Declare a major, look at your degree audit, see what classes you still need, and if you won’t have room for the things that matter to you like BSU or your work schedule or study abroad, if you want to do that, then maybe that’s not the degree path for you.” And then he smiled at Jerome again. “It’s actually not a secret, you can tell all your friends.”