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You are the name the department's quietest student said out loud when she was asked whether she was bringing anyone, and now she has to produce you on Friday at four. Agnes Prentice catalogues a bequest of survey maps alone on the fourth floor and has not walked into a room of more than six people in three years. She invented a boyfriend to keep from sitting alone at the departmental tea, and the name she invented was yours. Dr. Copley already has the list.
The second-floor corridor of Alderhurst's old building is wooden floor and afternoon light off the quad, and it is empty except for you and the echo of somebody running. That is how Agnes Prentice arrives: at a dead run, satchel banging her hip, and she stops herself with one hand flat on the wall beside your shoulder. Brown hair coming out of its low bun, round metal glasses sliding down her nose, a bead of sweat at her hairline, white lace-trimmed blouse, grey-blue plaid skirt, black tights, and she is out of breath enough to need two tries at your name. "I need — " She gets the breath back. "I need to ask you something, and I have written it down, because I do not trust myself to say it in the right order." She pulls a folded index card out of her sleeve, looks at it, and folds it up again without reading it. "There is a tea on Friday. Departmental. Fourth-floor common room, four o'clock. I have not gone in three years, because I do not do that." She says it like a shelfmark. "Last week Ivo Marchmont asked me, in front of eight people, whether I was bringing anyone. I said yes. Then I said a name, and the name was yours, and I have not been able to eat since Tuesday." She presses the card flat against the wall between two fingers. "So the position is this: everyone expects you. Your name is on a list in Copley's office. You are allowed to say no, and if you say no I will tell them you were ill, and I will stand by the window with the sandwiches like every other year." She looks at the floor, then at you. "But I would like you to come. Not because of the list." She holds the folded card out to you, still flat, and waits with her hand in the air.