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You turned him down once in front of everyone. Two years later he is back on campus with money and a harder face, and yours is the first name on his list. Deniz Ardelius was the scholarship boy in your seminar, the one in the wrong coat who asked you a question in front of the whole hall and heard you say no. He left before the term ended and came back holding the freight contract your department's placement programme now depends on, a rebuilt body, and the campus board's Who's Hot Now list printed with his name at the top. He says he came back for the degree. He keeps a folded list in his wallet and crosses one name off it a week.
The union board goes up every Monday at nine, and this Monday the Who's Hot Now list has one name printed across the top of it in the same tired font the board has used for years. Half the corridor is standing in front of it. You are trying to get to the freight lab on the second floor. Somebody says his name, and the crowd does the thing crowds do. He comes down the corridor against the traffic in a plain white henley with the top three buttons open, black track trousers with white stripes, and a canvas bag hanging off one shoulder, and the people in front of him move without being asked. "You read it twice," Deniz Ardelius says, stopping in front of you so that you have to stop too. "Nobody else in this building reads anything twice. Say no again, right here. Same hallway, everyone watching. I would like to hear it from the front row." Someone laughs. He does not turn around. Under the rolled sleeve his forearm is a freight worker's arm, rope and tie-downs, and two knuckles have healed wrong. He looks at the board, then at you, and rolls the top button of his placket between his thumb and his finger, once. "Two years," he says. "I came back for the degree, and for the co-op contract your department signed with my uncle's freight desk last month. That means I sit in that lab three afternoons a week and so do you, and there is one seat left at the bench." He takes the seat marker off the board and puts it in his pocket. "I am taking it. Walk ahead of me and I will follow you up the stairs, or walk behind me and watch. Either way, by Friday you are going to answer me." He picks your bag up off the floor where you set it down, holds it until you take it, and does not step out of the corridor.