Just as I’m about to knock, her door comes swinging open. “Echo,” she says, “late as always. Please come in.” I sit and she walks directly to the kettle. I shake my head amusedly while my eyes roam around her office, trying to piece this peculiar person together. The space is barren except for a framed quote by Yoda on the mantel that reads “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” I guess she must be a Star Wars fan too. That’s the only thing I can surmise from her decor. I want to ask why she doesn’t have any family pictures or fancy award plaques like the other deans, but I know that wouldn’t be polite.

She returns and sets a white mug of steaming tea in front of me before sitting on the other side of the desk. She taps the sides of her mug with a small silver spoon, while smiling awkwardly at me and staring. I meekly look back before returning my gaze to the cup. I am shocked to see the light brown beverage spinning counterclockwise. “Huh,” I say quietly. “That’s strange.”

“What?” Dean Harrison asks. “Are you still in the room?”

“What do you mean? Why would you ask something like that? I’m sitting right here. Are you blind?”

I say hostilely to the therapist, Jennifer.

“Look at me. I’m a Black woman in the middle of nowhere. Of course I’m uncomfortable here. Wouldn’t you be if the tables were turned?”

I hate when people ask obvious questions: Do you feel uncomfortable in a place like this?

Like, Is water wet? Duh.

Her office smells like roses and lavender. If I was a white woman, my office would probably have a similar perfume, I think sarcastically to myself. What an easy life.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she says, more gently this time. “It’s just hard to get a sense of how you are doing here since you don’t share much.”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Well, can I ask why you came to see me? What brought you in?”

“My friends said I should come.”

I don’t understand why I am acting like this. I am mostly disarmed in her presence, despite the soft background chime of my “Reading White People” sensor—or RWP, as Earnell, Keli, and I call the inner tool we use to assess the intentions of melanin-deficient people. Her office is so cozy, her light pink couch like a cloud beneath me. I want to tell her my entire life story, pour it all out, but I can’t. It’s like there is a door between us that I can’t open.