The Seam

Nora Ekholm saw the seam before she saw anything else. It ran along the left shoulder of Professor Adeline Marsh's charcoal blouse, a thin raised ridge of thread where no ridge should be. Once Nora had seen it, the lecture hall dissolved around it. The tiered rows, the two hundred other first-years, the projector humming its dull blue light onto the screen: all of it went soft, the way a word does when you stare at it until it stops being a word. The blouse was inside out. Not dramatically, no tag flapping at the nape of her neck, no pocket turned the wrong way. Only the seams: one along the shoulder, a faint line down each side where the fabric had been joined and finished with tiny overlocking stitches. From the fourth row, which Nora had chosen because it was neither eager nor hiding, the stitches caught the light every time the professor turned toward the board.

Nobody else seemed to notice. Nora checked. The girl beside her was writing the date in the corner of her notebook with a pink gel pen. The boy in front was slouched so low his head barely cleared the seat back. Across the aisle, two rows up, three rows down: nothing. Two hundred people, and only one of them could see it.

"Biochemistry," Professor Marsh said, "is not a subject you survive by being clever. It is a subject you survive by being precise." Her voice was low and even, and it reached the back wall without a microphone. Nora had heard about that voice before she ever heard it. Everyone had. On the student forums, in the queue at the bookshop, from the second-year who had shown her the way to the lecture halls that morning and then added, almost kindly, Oh, you've got Marsh first. Good luck. Marsh failed forty per cent of the cohort last year. Marsh once made a student leave for eating an apple too loudly. Marsh did not take questions during lectures, did not answer emails that the syllabus could answer, and did not, according to legend, smile.

Precise, Nora thought. And she's wearing her shirt inside out. She wrote the word precise in her notebook and underlined it. The line came out slightly crooked at the end, so she underlined it again, straighter, directly beneath the first. Then the two lines were uneven in thickness, and she had to physically stop her hand from adding a third. This was the thing people didn't understand about her OCD, when they understood anything at all. It wasn't that she liked things neat. Liking had nothing to do with it. Something wrong in the world lodged in her like a splinter, and her whole body organised itself around the splinter until it came out. A crooked picture frame. An odd number of steps to a door. A seam that belonged on the inside and was on the outside.

Tell her, said the splinter.

You cannot tell her, said the rest of Nora. It's your first lecture on your first day at university. She has two hundred students. She fails forty per cent of them. She threw someone out over an apple.

Professor Marsh clicked to the next slide: amino acids, their structures laid out in tidy rows. She turned to point at the side chains, and the seam flashed again. Nora's pen stopped moving.

She tried what her therapist had taught her. Name it: this is the urge, not an emergency. Let it sit. Don't argue with it, don't obey it. Notice five things in the room. She noticed the clock above the door, which ran four minutes fast. A crack in the ceiling tile above the third exit. A coffee stain on the carpet shaped roughly like Norway. The pink gel pen. The seam.

The seam. The seam. The seam.

She had copied perhaps a third of the slide. Looking down, she saw she had written glycine twice and skipped alanine entirely. A hot, prickling panic climbed the back of her neck. This was the course she had been warned about, the one where a single missed detail could cost you, and she was missing all of them because she could not stop looking at thread.

At 10:45, Professor Marsh set down her marker. "Fifteen minutes. Be back at eleven. Not eleven-oh-one."

The room exhaled. Chairs creaked, bags unzipped, conversations started like engines. Nora stayed in her seat, gripping her pen. The professor hadn't left. She stood by the lectern, scrolling through something on her laptop, completely alone. No one approached her. It was as though a force field surrounded her, a small cleared circle of carpet that no student would enter voluntarily. Now, said the splinter. While no one's listening. Walk down and say it quietly. Five words. Your blouse is inside out.

Nora stood up.

She got as far as the end of her row. From there the seams were even clearer, the tiny zigzag of stitching running down the professor's side like a zipper. Her heart was beating in her throat. She took one step down. And then she imagined it. Marsh looking up. That level gaze landing on her. The pause. The girl who noticed the shirt. The girl who, instead of learning the difference between polar and nonpolar side chains, had spent forty-five minutes staring at her professor's shoulder. What would that say about her? That she was petty. That she was strange. That she wasn't paying attention. All of which, right now, was true.

She turned around, climbed back up the stairs and out of the hall, and stood by the vending machine for eleven minutes, pressing her thumbnail into the pad of each finger in turn, left hand then right, left hand then right, until the pressure felt even.

She was back in her seat at 10:59. The professor began at exactly eleven.

The second half was worse. Now there was not only the seam but the failure, sitting on top of it like a stone on a stone. She'd had a chance and hadn't taken it. Every time Marsh turned, the urge surged up and broke against Nora's clenched jaw. She wrote enzyme kinetics and stared at it. She wrote Michaelis–Menten, misspelt it, and scribbled it out so hard the paper tore.

The girl with the gel pen glanced over. Nora gave her a small, stiff smile and looked back at the front.

She thought about what would happen if nobody said anything. Marsh would walk out of this hall to a faculty meeting, or lunch, or another lecture. Maybe someone would tell her. Maybe no one would. Maybe she would catch her reflection at four in the afternoon and realise she had been like this all day, in front of everyone, and not one person had said a word. Nora knew that feeling, the particular shame of discovering something everyone else must have seen. It was one of the worst feelings she knew.

So this wasn't only about her. The thought steadied her a little. It wasn't only the splinter talking.

At 12:28, Professor Marsh said, "Chapters two and three before Thursday. There will be a quiz. It will not be easy." She closed the laptop, and the hall broke apart into noise and movement.

Nora packed her bag slowly: pens in order of colour, notebook squared against the spine of the textbook. She let the crowd thin. She let the doorways clear. When only a few students were left, drifting out in twos and threes, she walked down the stairs. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight; an even number, good and stopped at the edge of the professor's circle of carpet.

Professor Marsh was winding her laptop charger into a tight coil. She looked up. "Yes?"

Up close, her eyes were grey and very tired. Nora hadn't been able to see that from the fourth row.

"I'm sorry," Nora said. It came out thin. She tried again. "I'm sorry, I just thought you'd want to know. Your blouse is inside out. The seams are showing. Only a little. I don't think anyone else noticed."

For a moment there was nothing. Nora felt her face burn and waited for whatever came next.

Professor Marsh looked down at her own shoulder and ran a finger along the seam. Then she let out a breath that was almost, very nearly, a laugh.

"I got dressed in the dark," she said. "My daughter was up at four with a fever. I've been wondering all morning why this felt strange." She paused. "Thank you. That was kind."

And then, for a second, as she tucked the coiled cable into her bag, Nora saw it: the corners of Professor Marsh's mouth lifting into a small, unguarded, entirely real smile. Not the kind you give a student. The kind you give when you forget, briefly, that anyone is watching.

It was gone almost at once. Marsh straightened, and the level gaze returned. "Chapters two and three," she said. "Thursday."

"Thursday," Nora said.

She walked out into the bright corridor with her heart still hammering, carrying that smile with her like something she had found on the ground and wasn't sure she was allowed to keep.