Chapter 3:

I am, for the record, an extraordinarily ordinary person.

I want to establish this early. I want to put it on the record before anything else happens in this room, before Ms. Reyes finishes writing whatever she's writing on the board which I'm not looking at, before the girl two seats ahead of me stops clicking her pen which she has been doing for four minutes at an irregular interval that suggests she's not aware she's doing it rather than doing it deliberately which I've confirmed by watching her shoulder, not her hand, the shoulder tells you whether something is conscious or automatic and hers is loose, she's somewhere else entirely, the clicking is just her body running on standby —

I'm doing it again.

Ordinary. I am ordinary. Evidence, submitted for your consideration, in no particular order:

I use the same route to school every morning with one exception which is the long way around the east corridor which I've already told you about and which I'm not going to relitigate here because the point is that I have a route, ordinary people have routes, I have one, it varies by exactly one deviation which is consistent and predictable and therefore also ordinary.

I have a preferred seat. Third from the back, left side, wall adjacent. Ordinary people have preferred seats. Studies probably confirm this. I haven't looked up the studies but I'm confident they exist because it is the kind of thing that gets studied and the kind of thing that always confirms what common sense already suggested which is that humans are creatures of low-grade habit operating under the comfortable illusion of choice.

I have a food preference that borders on the theological.

Donuts.

Specifically — and I need you to understand that I am about to be very specific, that the specificity is not a personality quirk but simply accuracy, simply the correct and honest way to discuss something that deserves discussion — specifically glazed donuts, the kind where the glaze has been applied at the precise temperature that allows it to set into a thin, almost translucent shell that shatters very slightly when your teeth go through it before giving way to the bread underneath, the contrast between that micro-resistance and the softness beneath it, between the sweet crystalline surface and the doughy interior, is — I'm going to use the word perfect and I'm going to mean it in the most literal possible sense, not as hyperbole, not as casual enthusiasm, I mean that the structural and sensory experience of a well-glazed donut represents a kind of optimization that most human endeavors fail to achieve, a thing that does exactly what it is supposed to do and nothing else and does it without apology or complication.

Bad glaze is a moral failure.

I want to be clear about that too. Bad glaze — the kind that's applied too thick, that sits on top of the donut like a layer of hardened sugar paste that has no relationship with the bread beneath it, that doesn't integrate, that just — sits there, opaque, gummy, texturally offensive — bad glaze is not just an inferior product, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what a donut is trying to be, which is a unified thing, a thing where the parts exist in service of each other, and when the glaze becomes its own separate entity sitting on top of the bread like a uninvited guest who has taken over the couch and refuses to acknowledge the social contract —

I have strong feelings.

I'm aware.

Second: filled. Jelly specifically. The jelly donut is an act of faith — you cannot see what's inside, you commit to the bite before you have confirmation, and then either you are rewarded or you are given lemon curd which is not what was agreed upon and represents a kind of low-level betrayal that I try not to read too much into because I understand intellectually that lemon curd is a legitimate filling that other people enjoy and my feelings about it are my own responsibility and not the donut's fault —

But it's the donut's fault.

The best jelly donut I have ever eaten was from a maid cafe in the commercial district that I will not name because I intend to keep going there and I don't want the information becoming general knowledge because the line is already long enough and I have limited time there as it is which I will explain in a moment.

The maid cafe.

I'm including this as evidence of my ordinariness because a teenage boy who finds the maid cafe pleasant is — this is just a demographic reality, I'm not going to over-explain it, the establishment exists because of people like me, I am squarely within the target population, there is nothing unusual about my patronage, I go, I order, I sit, this is a normal sequence of events undertaken by ordinary people.

I rate it 9.5 out of 10.

The maids are beautiful. I want to be precise about this too — not beautiful in a general sense, not beautiful as a social nicety, beautiful in the specific way that people are beautiful when they are comfortable in a particular space, when the environment has been arranged to allow a kind of ease that doesn't always exist in ordinary settings, there's a quality to that ease, a — I'm not going to say radiance because that's the kind of word that sounds like I've been reading bad poetry but the word I would use if I weren't concerned about how it sounds is radiance, so we'll leave that there.

The costumes.

The maid costumes are — look, the design is deliberate, I understand the design is deliberate, whoever made these aesthetic choices understood exactly what they were doing and I have nothing but respect for that level of intentionality, the particular cut of the sleeve, the way the apron sits, the — I'm going to talk about the armpits and I need you to not make a face at me, or make a face if you want, I've been made faces at before, I have a high tolerance for faces —

The armpits.

Specifically the glimpse of armpit when they reach up to write the greeting on the chalkboard at the front, which they do at the beginning of each visit, the particular curve of the raised arm, the way the sleeve falls, the small exposed — it is a completely normal thing to notice, armpits are a part of the human body, I am noting the existence of a body part, this is not unusual, the Greeks put armpits in sculptures, I'm not going to look this up right now but I'm fairly confident the Greeks put armpits in sculptures and nobody called them strange for it —

Here is what I do.

I say something slightly stupid to the maid who is serving me. Not cruel — I want to be specific about the distinction, I am not cruel to service workers, I have things I feel bad about and being cruel to service workers is not one of them — I say something slightly stupid, slightly odd, the kind of thing that produces a particular expression on the face of a person who is professionally required to be pleasant but has been caught genuinely off guard by the stupidity of what you've just said, and for approximately 0.8 seconds before the professional pleasantness reassembles itself there is a real expression, an involuntary one, a small flash of genuine human reaction unmediated by social management —

I am not a masochist.

I know what masochism is. I've looked it up. Masochism is the derivation of pleasure from one's own pain or humiliation, and what I am describing is not that because what I experience is not pain or humiliation, it is — I'm going to be precise — it is the specific and acute pleasure of seeing a genuine human expression on a face that is otherwise performing pleasantness, of locating the actual person behind the professional presentation, of making contact, however briefly and however stupidly, with something real and unmanaged, and if you think that sounds like a distinction without a difference then I'd ask you to consider the possibility that you're not listening carefully enough and also that you've possibly never spent extended time surrounded by people whose expressions you can no longer trust and who can no longer —

My rating.

9.5 out of 10. The 0.5 deduction is as follows: I do not have enough money to stay for an indefinite amount of time, the financial constraint is a structural problem that I've tried to solve through budgeting and failed, and also my sister will be left alone in the house, so I have a departure time, a fixed one, which means I never have enough time to —

"Michael."

—which means I never have — 

"Michael."

The room.

Right.

I'm in the room.

Ms. Reyes is looking at me from the front of the class with the particular expression of a person who has said a name more than once. Behind her on the board is written a passage I recognize from last night's assigned reading. Raskolnikov. Part Two. The morning after.

The question, which I have apparently missed the first iteration of, is written beside the passage.

Is Raskolnikov's guilt genuine — or is it a performance he has constructed to feel like a person who has a conscience? Is there a difference?

I know the answer.

The answer is in my mouth before the question finishes registering, before the room has fully reassembled itself around me, before I've properly returned from the maid cafe and the armpits and the sister and the 0.5 and the —

I know the answer.

The correct answer is that the question is the point. That Dostoevsky is not interested in resolving whether the guilt is real or performed because the more terrifying possibility is that after a certain point Raskolnikov himself cannot tell, that genuine guilt and performed guilt begin to look identical from the inside, that the performance becomes so practiced and so total that it colonizes the real thing, that you can hollow out an authentic response by observing it too closely, that the act of watching yourself feel something changes the feeling into a demonstration of the feeling —

I know this answer.

I know it in the way I know the glaze-to-bread ratio of a well-made donut. In the way I know the walk time saved by the main corridor versus the cost of the east stairwell deviation. In the way I know exactly what a face looks like in the 0.4 seconds before it decides not to know you.

I know it the way you know things you've lived in.

Which is to say I'm not going to say it.

The options present themselves with the efficiency of something I've done many times, a familiar inventory:

Correct answer. Full answer. Specific, supported, draws from both the passage and the broader text. Ms. Reyes would — I know what she would do, I don't know her yet, but I know what that answer produces in a room, I know the particular quality of attention it generates, heads turning, the recalibration, who is that, and then after class the questions, the expectations, the slow accumulation of a reputation as a person worth speaking to, worth including, worth —

No.

Wrong answer. Clearly wrong. The kind of wrong that produces pity or the particular gentle expression of a teacher deciding to move on without making an example. That expression stays with you in a room. People catalog it. He got that wrong. Not a data point I need attached to my name in this specific classroom.

Close.

Close-but-not-quite. Defensible. A partial answer, the kind that contains enough to suggest engagement without revealing the depth of what's underneath, that lands in the specific register of fine, adequate, present — the register where teachers nod and say good, anyone want to add to that and the room moves on and you become, for the rest of the period, an answered question, a resolved variable, background.

"The guilt is genuine," I say. "At least at first. He needs it to be real because if it's performed then he has to ask what that makes him."

Not wrong.

Not right either. Not fully. It touches the edge of the real answer without going in.

Ms. Reyes looks at me for a moment.

"Good," she says. "Who wants to extend that?"

The room shifts. Someone raises a hand. The attention moves like water finding a new container, filling the available space, leaving me dry.

I look at the passage on the board.

Is there a difference.

The rest of class happens around me. I take notes in the margin of my book, small ones, not about the lesson. I write the real answer in handwriting small enough that it looks like annotation, like notation, like nothing. I write it because it exists and it needs somewhere to go and the inside of my head is already too full of things with nowhere to go and one more might —

The bell.

Chairs. Bags. The specific sounds of a room becoming a corridor.

I take the long way.

Before I leave I look back once at Ms. Reyes, the way you check a room before you exit it, the way you confirm you've left nothing behind.

She's looking at the passage on the board.

Not at where I was sitting.

At the passage.

With an expression I don't have a name for yet.