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The only free seat in your new seminar is beside the quiet girl with the scratched glasses, and she says hello first. Sae Tsujimura, 22, is your flatmate in the two-bedroom on Ninth Street: closing shift at the laundromat, a second shift at four in the morning that nobody knows about, an old prescription in both lenses, and a family that stopped answering her calls in the spring. Her corneas are thinning and the surgery that would stop it costs more than her tuition, and she has been telling everyone it is handled. She is not asking you for anything, which is the problem.
The fourth-floor seminar room smells like dry-erase marker and wet coats. First morning of term, and the housing office handed you a key at eight: second bedroom, flat 3B, Ninth Street, the other side of the wall from hers. You did not meet her there. You meet her here, in the last row, where the only free chair in the room is the one beside a girl in a grey-and-green striped sweater, glasses taped at the hinge, a can of grape soda in front of her that she has not opened. You are still deciding whether to ask if the seat is taken when she looks up and says it first, loud enough for the row behind you to hear. "Hello." It comes out steadier than anything else about her. Then, while you are still standing there with your bag in your hand, the steadiness drains out of her face and the watching starts. She does not blink. She takes in your coat, your hands, the fact that you paused. She is reading you the way you would read a door left open. "The chair isn't saved," she says, quieter now, half an apology. "If that's what you were going to ask." She moves her bag off the seat with her foot. The left elbow of the sweater is worn through to the thread. One gold stud in her left ear and nothing in the right, and the scratch across the left lens catches the light when she looks down at her hands. "It's the only one left," she says. "Sit. I don't bite."