By seven in the morning, the heat had already settled over Northern Marianas College like something patient and familiar.
It was not the blinding, punishing kind of heat that arrived closer to noon, when the concrete paths began to glow and every patch of shade turned valuable. This was gentler. Heavy, but not yet hostile. The kind that clung to skin and shirt collars and made the air feel slow before the day had properly started.
Daniel Jayden Noah crossed the campus with a paper coffee cup in one hand and three books pressed against his ribs with the other. His backpack hung from one shoulder instead of both, more out of habit than comfort, and the strap kept slipping just enough to be annoying. He adjusted it without looking up.
The campus was awake, though only halfway. Doors were open, but not all the way. Windows were lit in some rooms and dark in others. A maintenance cart rolled somewhere out of sight, its rattling metal tray announcing itself before it came into view and long after it disappeared again. The breeze coming in from beyond the buildings carried salt under the smell of old concrete and damp leaves.
Dan liked mornings like this because they were the only time the college looked honest.
By midday, Northern Marianas College became louder, flatter, more social. People filled the walkways in loose clusters. Laughter bounced between the buildings. Professors moved from room to room with tired energy. Student organizations unfolded folding tables and hand lettered signs and acted as if the campus were larger than it really was. But in the early morning, before conversations thickened and obligations multiplied, the place showed its bones. Hairline cracks in the pavement. Faded paint on stair rails. Notice boards layered with curled paper and old tape. The fluorescent glow behind classroom blinds. A place built to serve more people than its budget had probably intended.
He noticed things like that automatically.
He noticed the way one gutter on the administration building always leaked after rain, leaving a stain that darkened the same patch of wall over and over. He noticed that someone had taped a printed notice over an older printed notice on the student affairs board, and the crooked edge of the new paper no longer fully covered the old one beneath it. He noticed that the bench near the courtyard had a split in one slat that had gone unfixed long enough for the wood to gray around it.
Most people did not notice. Or if they did, they did not hold onto it.
Dan held onto almost everything.
A pair of students stood ahead near the shaded overhang outside one of the office corridors, talking with the weary sharpness of people who had been inconvenienced too early in the day.
"I'm telling you, that's not what they told me yesterday."
"That's what they told my cousin too. Different thing every time."
Dan did not turn his head, but he slowed just enough to hear the rest without making it obvious.
"I already paid part of it," the first girl said. "Now they're saying I can't finalize until the whole thing clears, but that wasn't the process before."
"Maybe they changed it."
"They changed it in the middle of registration?"
The second student gave a short laugh, humorless. "Apparently."
Dan walked past them with his eyes on the path ahead, but the conversation came with him.
He knew that tone. Not outrage. Not surprise. Just the thin edged exhaustion of people who had expected trouble and were still annoyed when it arrived on schedule.
A flyer taped to a nearby post caught his eye. REGISTRATION COMPLIANCE NOTICE, the top read in bold, followed by a block of smaller text dense enough to discourage anyone who needed the information most. He skimmed it in passing and felt a familiar irritation, quiet and immediate.
The problem was rarely the existence of rules. Rules had reasons. Deadlines had reasons. Even fees, unfair as they often felt, usually belonged to some larger practical need. What bothered him was how often those rules landed hardest on the people least equipped to absorb them. A student with money in the bank, a family on island, a car, free time, and parents who knew how institutional paperwork worked could survive confusion. A student who had to catch rides, juggle shifts, and pray financial aid cleared on time could not.
Same rule. Different weight.
He took a sip of coffee. It had gone from hot to merely warm.
Another group passed him heading the opposite direction, laughing at something on one of their phones. A girl from one of his literature classes gave him a polite nod of recognition. Dan returned it and kept walking. His pace never changed. He had spent enough of his first few weeks on campus learning how social movement worked here to understand that if he drifted too close to a conversation, he would either have to join it or visibly avoid it. Both required energy.
So he stayed in the spaces between other people's lives and moved cleanly through them.
It suited him.
The irony, if there was one, was that he was not lonely. Not exactly. Lonely implied absence, and his life was not empty enough to qualify. He called his father when he could. He texted Koa more than he texted anyone else. He had classmates who knew he was reliable in the quiet way that mattered for group projects and missed notes and answered readings. It was just that attention seemed to slide off him unless someone had a specific reason to pin him down.
Dan did not mind that as much as he probably should have.
He reached the wide path that split the center of campus and shifted the books in his arm. Two were for class. One wasn't. The non class book had a folded receipt marking his place three chapters in, and he had already caught himself reading it between lectures twice that week. He liked carrying more reading than he strictly needed. It made the day feel arranged. Contained. As if enough pages could shield a person from being caught unprepared by the world.
Ahead, the student affairs office had already drawn a line.
It wasn't a long line. Only six or seven students, most of them standing with folders clutched close, but there was a stiffness to it that made the whole thing feel longer. Nobody in line looked relaxed. One guy in a faded gray shirt kept checking his phone with the desperate repetition of someone hoping a bank balance might improve by force of attention.
Dan glanced at the office window.
Closed.
A paper sign had been taped there from the inside.
TEMPORARY DELAY. PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.
No explanation under it. No estimated time. No alternate contact. Just a polite command to remain suspended.
One of the students in line exhaled sharply through his nose. "Of course."
Dan kept moving, but the image lodged itself where details like that always lodged. Not at the front of his mind. Somewhere deeper. Somewhere they would remain until something else connected to them later.
That was how his thinking worked. He rarely reached conclusions all at once. He collected things. A sign. A complaint. A look on someone's face. The language of an email. The awkward way an office door stayed shut five minutes longer than it should have. By themselves, the pieces felt small enough to ignore. Together, they made patterns.
And once he saw a pattern, it became harder to forgive it.
He crossed into the shadow of the humanities building and finally felt the air cool by a degree or two. Someone had left one of the classroom doors open ahead of schedule, and fluorescent light spilled into the corridor in a flat white rectangle. Dan checked the time on his phone. Early enough.
Good.
He preferred classrooms before they filled. Preferred the order of empty desks and untouched whiteboards and the temporary fiction that a room could still be cleanly arranged before other people brought themselves into it. Class itself he could handle. Lectures were manageable. Discussion was manageable if he had prepared enough. Hallway drift and casual social gravity were harder. They demanded a flexibility he never seemed to possess in the moment, only afterward.
As he approached the door, voices carried from behind him again.
"Did you hear they might push some people to late registration?"
"No, they can't do that now."
"They can if they do it badly enough."
A few people laughed.
Dan paused just short of the doorway, not long enough for anyone to notice, and looked down at the coffee ring forming on the cardboard seam of his cup.
Someone should fix that, he thought.
Not the sign. Not the line. The pattern under it.
Then, almost automatically, the second thought came after it.
Someone who actually knew what they were doing.
He stepped into the classroom and let the cold air swallow the heat off his skin.
The classroom smelled faintly of dry erase marker, old paper, and the overworked air conditioning that kept half the campus from dissolving by noon. Dan moved to his usual seat without thinking about it, second row from the left, close enough to hear clearly, far enough from the center to avoid becoming part of the room's natural traffic.
He set his books down in a neat stack, slid the non class book beneath the others, and took out a notebook already lined with precise dates in the top corners of previous pages. The routine settled him. Backpack on the floor by the chair leg. Coffee to the right. Pen uncapped. Phone face down.
Outside, the corridor was beginning to fill. Footsteps passed in uneven bursts. Someone laughed too loudly at something not especially funny. A chair scraped somewhere in the room behind him. Dan glanced at the whiteboard at the front of the class, where the professor had already written the day's topic in neat blue handwriting:
INSTITUTIONS, RESPONSIBILITY, AND PUBLIC TRUST
He looked at it for a second longer than he meant to.
Then a familiar voice came from the doorway.
"There he is. The scholar of the century."
Dan did not turn immediately. "Morning, Koa."
Koa dropped into the seat behind him with the unearned ease of someone who treated every room as if it had been waiting for him specifically. He was carrying one spiral notebook, no textbook, and enough casual confidence to make the lack of preparation look intentional.
Dan turned halfway in his chair. "You know this class has readings."
Koa leaned back. "I know you read them."
"That is not the same thing."
"It becomes the same thing if we're friends."
Dan looked at him for a beat, then shook his head once and faced forward again. Behind him, Koa laughed softly in satisfaction, like he had won something small.
Koa had the kind of social presence Dan could not understand from the inside. He was not the loudest person in a room, or the funniest, or even necessarily the most charismatic in any theatrical sense. He just moved through people cleanly. Conversations opened around him. Strangers answered him more easily. Professors tolerated him in a way that suggested he was on the edge of troublesome but not over it. If Dan was someone others noticed only when they needed something specific, Koa was someone they noticed even when they didn't.
It would have been irritating if he were less decent.
Koa leaned forward enough for his voice to reach Dan without carrying. "You see the line outside student affairs?"
Dan nodded.
"People are already mad."
"They were mad twenty minutes ago."
"That's because nothing at this school can ever just happen normally."
Dan flipped open his notebook. "You say that like it's a surprise."
"It's not a surprise. It's a tradition."
The room was steadily filling now. A girl from the back row set down a bag and began talking to her friend about a payment hold on her account. Two guys by the windows were arguing quietly about whether the office would stay open past lunch if the line got long enough. Even here, in a classroom that had not started yet, the same problem had followed everyone in.
Dan uncapped his pen but didn't write anything. He could feel the issue pressing against the edges of his attention, asking to be sorted.
Koa tapped the back of Dan's chair lightly. "You already have a face."
"I don't have a face."
"You do. It's the face you make when the world is being inefficient at you."
Dan almost smiled despite himself. "That's not a face."
"It is. You make it every time somebody explains a stupid policy."
"I do not."
"You absolutely do."
Dan glanced back just enough to give him a flat look. Koa raised both hands in surrender.
"Fine. Keep your secrets."
The professor entered a minute later, carrying a canvas bag heavy enough to tilt his shoulder. He was a compact man in his late fifties with a patient expression that somehow always made the room quieter without him having to ask. Professor Toves taught like he expected students to be more serious than they were and was disappointed only about half the time.
He set the bag down on the desk, adjusted his glasses, and looked once around the room.
"Good morning."
The class answered with the uneven murmur of people still deciding whether they were fully awake.
Professor Toves set a folder on the desk. "Before we begin, I assume many of you have discovered that student administration has once again chosen to make registration season memorable."
A few laughs moved through the room, tired and immediate.
He nodded as if confirming his own hypothesis. "Yes. I thought so."
Dan's pen hovered over the page.
The professor rested one hand on the desk. "I am not going to spend class time fixing what another office has failed to do efficiently. I say that not because it doesn't matter, but because we could easily lose an hour to justified frustration. What I will say is this: institutions reveal themselves most clearly when people rely on them."
The room quieted in a different way at that.
Professor Toves gestured toward the board. "That is one of the reasons today's topic is useful. Public trust is not built through slogans. It is built, or destroyed, through repeated encounters with competence, fairness, and accountability."
Dan wrote that down word for word.
Not because he needed the note. He knew he would remember it. He wrote it because some lines were worth holding still on paper for a moment.
Professor Toves began the lecture in the measured, unshowy style Dan appreciated. No dramatic pacing. No theatrical passion. Just steady construction: what an institution was, what people expected from it, why trust eroded faster than it was built, why fairness and predictability mattered even in minor administrative functions. Especially in minor administrative functions.
"Most citizens," he said, "do not encounter the state at its best or worst through speeches. They encounter it through offices, forms, waiting rooms, fees, responses, delays, and whether someone behind a desk treats their problem as real."
A student in the back muttered, "That's rough timing."
Some scattered laughter followed, but the line stayed in the room after the laughter faded.
Dan kept writing.
He always felt slightly relieved in classes like this, when the world organized itself into definitions, frameworks, examples, causes and effects. In rooms built for thinking, things behaved. A bad system could be analyzed. A pattern could be named. A contradiction could be pinned down and examined from different sides until it made sense.
People did not behave that way.
That was the part he was less good at, though he seldom admitted it to anyone. He could understand an idea before most people finished explaining it. He could follow an argument to its weak point and trace a policy to the type of person it would quietly punish. But put him in front of three irritated strangers and ask him to persuade them in real time, and something in him tightened. His thoughts stayed sharp; his presence did not.
He could already hear Koa's voice in his head calling that the wrong kind of smart.
Professor Toves moved into a discussion prompt fifteen minutes later.
"All right," he said, looking up from his notes. "Small question before we continue. When does inconvenience become injustice?"
A few students shifted in their seats.
Professor Toves pointed toward the right side of the room. "Ms. Cabrera?"
She sat up slightly. "When it only affects certain people, I guess."
"Only affects them, or affects them more heavily?"
"More heavily."
"Good. Why?"
"Because then it's not really equal. Even if the rule is technically the same."
Professor Toves nodded. "Technically equal is a phrase with an alarming amount of political mileage behind it."
The room laughed, and he allowed it this time.
Another student raised a hand. "Sometimes inconvenience becomes injustice when the people making the rule don't have to deal with the consequences of it."
"Also good," the professor said.
Koa, to Dan's mild surprise, lifted his chin toward the front. "And when nobody can get a straight answer."
Professor Toves pointed at him. "Yes. Uncertainty is not neutral. Uncertainty costs time, money, energy, and dignity, though not equally."
Dan wrote that down too.
He could feel the shape of the morning's frustration becoming clearer in his head. Not just a line outside an office. Not just a bad sign taped to a window. A pattern of distance. A system designed or maintained by people insulated from the exact form of harm it produced. Not grand corruption. Not cinematic evil. Something more ordinary and, in some ways, more difficult to fight: a structure that asked the wrong people to be endlessly flexible.
Professor Toves opened the floor more broadly.
"Give me an example," he said. "Not abstractly. A real one."
The room hesitated.
Someone in the back mentioned permit processing delays. Another student brought up bus reliability. Then, inevitably, the issue outside the classroom reached the surface.
"The registration office," said the girl two seats over from Dan. "Right now."
A few people made sounds of immediate agreement.
Professor Toves folded his arms. "All right. Explain it."
She frowned. "They changed the process, but not clearly, and now people are getting told different things depending on who they ask."
"And the harm?"
"If you have time to go back and forth, maybe nothing. If you don't…" She shrugged, but the frustration in it was sharp. "Then maybe you lose a class. Or miss a payment window. Or get dropped."
"Good," the professor said. "Specific. Anyone else?"
This was the kind of moment Dan usually preferred to avoid. Open discussion. Unscripted timing. Too many variables moving at once. He could already hear three more useful things to add to the conversation, how procedural uncertainty always multiplied burden downward, how systems often disguised unequal outcomes behind formally neutral language, how predictability itself was a form of fairness.
He said none of them.
A student by the window jumped in first, louder and less precise. "Honestly, it feels like they don't care unless your parents know somebody."
That got a stronger reaction. Heads turned. More students nodded than not.
Professor Toves did not endorse the statement, but neither did he dismiss it. "Perception matters," he said. "Especially in small communities. Whether or not favoritism exists in a given case, distrust grows very quickly where access appears uneven."
Dan looked down at his notebook, then back up at the board.
Small communities.
That phrase landed differently here than it would have somewhere else. In a large city, a bad office was a bad office. In a place like Saipan, where names repeated and families overlapped and memory had a longer social half life, every institutional failure carried a face with it. Every unfairness attached itself to somebody's aunt, somebody's older brother, somebody's daughter trying to stay enrolled, somebody's neighbor who would mention it at dinner and church and in line at the store.
Problems did not disappear into scale here. They circulated.
Professor Toves let the discussion move for another few minutes, guiding it just enough to keep it from collapsing into complaint. Dan contributed nothing. He listened, tracked the logic, sorted the useful comments from the emotional noise, and made margin notes in handwriting that grew smaller whenever he was thinking too hard.
At one point Koa leaned forward and murmured just above a whisper, "You have three opinions right now, don't you?"
Dan kept his eyes on the page. "No."
"You're a terrible liar."
"I'm taking notes."
"You take notes when you're annoyed."
Dan put a line under the last sentence he'd written, more sharply than necessary.
At the front of the room, Professor Toves said, "The danger in weak institutions is not only that they fail. It's that people begin to expect failure, and expectation becomes a kind of surrender."
This time Dan did not write it down immediately.
He just sat there with the line for a second, feeling the morning settle around it.
Because that was the part that bothered him most, though he had never found a clean way to say it, not the single mistake, not the bad sign, not even the closed office door. It was the resignation. The way frustration had already hardened into routine outside before the day had properly begun. The way people adjusted themselves around dysfunction because they no longer believed the dysfunction would adjust around them.
Expectation becomes a kind of surrender.
He wrote that one down carefully.
When the professor finally paused the discussion and returned to the lecture, Dan was still thinking about the line outside student affairs. About the closed window. About the guy checking his phone like bad math might become good if he refreshed it enough times. About the fact that he had understood the problem before he reached the classroom and still done exactly what he always did.
Observed it.
Contained it.
Moved on.
The lecture ended with assigned reading and a reminder about response papers due the following week. Chairs scraped back. Conversations resumed in patches. Students stood, stretched, checked their phones, and drifted toward the door in loose currents of intention and delay.
Dan gathered his books with the same quiet efficiency he used for everything else. Koa was already on his feet before he finished packing.
"You look offended by society again," Koa said.
Dan slung his bag over his shoulder. "That's not a sentence normal people say."
"And yet it applies to you often."
Dan stood. "Maybe society should try harder."
Koa grinned. "There he is."
They moved with the rest of the class toward the door, and as they stepped back into the corridor, the heat returned at once, not violent, just immediate, like the campus reclaiming them from the colder logic of the room.
Down the hall, someone was arguing.
Not loudly enough to draw a crowd yet. Just sharply enough that the body recognized conflict before the mind sorted the words.
Dan looked up.
Near the turn toward student affairs, a girl stood clutching a folder to her chest while an older staff member on the other side of the counter window spoke through the glass with the flattened patience of somebody already exhausted by the day. Dan could not hear every word from where he stood, but he caught enough.
"…wasn't told that yesterday…"
"…policy is policy…"
"…I took time off work…"
The folder in the girl's hands shook once before she tightened her grip.
Koa clicked his tongue softly. "There it is."
Dan said nothing.
But he stopped walking.
Dan did not mean to stop.
His feet slowed first, then halted entirely, as if the decision had been made somewhere lower than thought. The hallway traffic moved around him without comment. Someone brushed past his shoulder with a quiet "sorry," already looking ahead to their own destination.
At the counter window, the girl shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Up close, she looked younger than he had thought at first glance, or maybe just more tired. The folder she held was thick with papers, corners bent, edges sticking out at uneven angles like the contents had been taken out and put back too many times in too many different orders.
"I was here yesterday," she said, trying to keep her voice level. "They told me I just needed the payment confirmation and I could finish today."
Behind the glass, the staff member shook her head, not unkindly, but with the practiced finality of someone who had already explained this several times.
"The system updated overnight. You need the full clearance before we can finalize the registration."
"But I already..." The girl stopped herself, swallowed, and tried again. "I already paid part of it. I just need to lock the classes before they fill."
"I understand," the woman said. "But I can't override the hold from here."
The line behind the girl shifted. A guy two places back leaned sideways, trying to see the counter. Another student checked the time on his phone and exhaled hard enough to be heard.
Dan could feel the shape of the situation before he understood all the details. He did not need the exact policy to recognize the pattern. The rule had changed, or been applied differently, or simply not explained the same way twice. The office had its procedure. The student had her schedule, her money, her work hours, her deadline. Both were real. Only one of them was flexible.
Koa leaned slightly closer, his voice low. "You see that, right?"
Dan did not answer.
The girl at the window tried once more. "Is there someone else I can talk to?"
"You can come back later when the supervisor returns."
"When is that?"
"I'm not sure."
That did it.
Not the rule itself. Not even the refusal. The uncertainty.
Dan felt the same quiet irritation tighten in his chest, the same one that had been building since he passed the flyer outside. He could almost hear Professor Toves' voice again in the back of his mind.
Uncertainty is not neutral.
It costs time. It costs money. It costs dignity.
He shifted the books in his arm, then realized he had no reason to still be standing there. This was not his problem. He was not in line. He was not trying to register. He did not even know the girl's name.
The correct thing to do, the normal thing, was to keep walking.
Koa nudged him lightly with the back of his hand. "You're doing the face again."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a face. It means you're about to say something you didn't plan to say."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You always say that first."
Dan exhaled slowly through his nose and looked at the counter again.
The girl had stepped aside, not because the issue was resolved, but because the next person in line had already moved forward. She stood off to the side now, flipping through her folder as if the right paper might appear if she searched hard enough. Her shoulders were tight. Not angry. Just strained in the way people got when they realized the day was going to be harder than it should have been.
He hated that look.
Not because it was dramatic. Because it was ordinary.
It would have been easier to ignore if the office staff had been rude. Easier if someone had yelled. Easier if the problem were loud enough to feel exceptional. But this was the kind of thing that happened quietly, one person at a time, until everyone involved started acting as if inconvenience was just the natural price of existing.
Same rule. Different weight.
Dan's fingers tightened slightly around the spine of the book he was holding.
He could see the problem. He could even see where the explanation had probably gone wrong. Someone had updated the system without updating the instructions, or the instructions had been updated without being communicated clearly, or the communication had been clear but only to people who already knew how to read it. None of that required bad intentions. It only required distance.
Distance between the people who made the rule and the people who had to live inside it.
Koa watched him for another second, then said quietly, "You're thinking about it like it's a math problem."
"It is a math problem."
"No," Koa said. "It's a people problem. That's why you hate it."
Dan glanced at him, then back at the counter.
The staff member had already moved on to the next student. The girl with the folder stood off to the side, trying to call someone, her voice low and tight.
"…I know, but they said I need the full amount now… I don't have it yet… I thought, yeah, I know what they said, but they changed it…"
She turned away from the counter as she spoke, like the glass itself made the conversation harder.
Dan felt the familiar push in the back of his mind, the one that always came when he watched something like this happen. The impulse to step forward, to explain the problem more clearly than anyone else had, to ask the right question in the right order until the confusion straightened itself out into something manageable.
He also felt the other impulse, just as strong.
Don't.
Not your business.
Not your place.
He knew how this went. He had seen it enough times in smaller ways. He would speak. He would say it too formally, or at the wrong moment, or in the wrong tone. The staff member would get defensive. The student would get embarrassed. The room would shift around him, and suddenly he would be the problem instead of the policy.
Understanding something was not the same as being able to fix it.
He adjusted the strap of his backpack again, buying himself a second.
"Come on," Koa said, already turning down the hall. "You're going to be late to your next class."
Dan didn't move right away.
He watched the girl hang up her phone and stare down at the folder in her hands like she was trying to calculate how much of the day she had just lost.
Someone should fix that, he thought.
The idea came so easily it almost felt automatic, the same way it always did when something small and unfair happened in front of him. Not a dramatic thought. Not a heroic one. Just a quiet, stubborn recognition that things did not have to be this inefficient, this confusing, this careless.
Someone should make it work the way it's supposed to.
He shifted his weight, finally turning away from the counter.
Behind the thought, as reliably as ever, came the second one.
Someone who actually knows how to do it.
He started down the hallway after Koa, the sound of the argument fading behind him, replaced by the ordinary noise of the campus settling into its late morning rhythm. Doors opening. Voices overlapping. A chair scraping across tile somewhere out of sight.
Outside, the heat had thickened another degree.
They stepped back into the sunlight, and the brightness made him squint for a second. Students crossed the courtyard in loose, familiar paths, each one moving toward their own class, their own problem, their own small piece of the day that needed to go right.
Koa glanced sideways at him. "You okay?"
"I'm fine."
"You get quiet when something annoys you."
"I'm always quiet."
"Not like that."
Dan didn't answer. He took another sip of his coffee, realized it had gone cold, and threw the cup into the trash beside the walkway without breaking stride.
They walked in silence for a few seconds.
On the bulletin board ahead, the same registration notice he had passed earlier hung slightly crooked, one corner peeling away from the tape that held it up. The bold letters looked official enough from a distance, but the smaller text underneath crowded itself into a block most people would never bother to read.
Dan slowed just enough to glance at it again.
Koa noticed. "You going to memorize the whole thing?"
"Probably."
"Why?"
Dan looked at the notice for a moment longer, then turned away.
Because if you don't understand the rules, you can't tell when they're wrong.
He didn't say it out loud.
Instead he adjusted the books in his arm and started walking again, falling back into the same steady pace he had crossed the campus with that morning.
Someone laughed near the courtyard.
A professor called a student's name from across the path.
The ocean breeze pushed faintly between the buildings, carrying salt and heat and the distant sound of traffic beyond the edge of campus.
Everything looked normal.
It always did.
Dan walked past the bulletin board, past the courtyard, past the line outside student affairs that had only grown longer since the first time he saw it, and headed toward his next class with the same quiet expression he wore most days.
Someone should do something, he thought.
The idea stayed with him longer than the sound of the voices behind him.
He tightened his grip on the books without realizing it.
Not me.
Not yet.