This was why the multiverse was so unsatisfying, Aldo thought. He couldn’t step laterally into a version of himself who was prepared for rain, but maybe somewhere, in some other corner of time, he would’ve happened to plan this differently.
He was soaked through by the time he got to class.
“Exponential equations,” he said without preamble, his jeans clinging to the tops of his thighs. He turned to the board, picked up the marker, and shivered slightly.
THE NARRATOR, A STUDENT WHO HAS JUST ARRIVED: You can never prepare for weathering anything in Chicago.
* * *
“REGAN. YOU COMING?”
She looked up, reflexively obscuring her phone screen. “Where?”
Marc gestured over his shoulder. “Bathroom.”
It was too casual an invitation to be for sex. He must have meant drugs.
“You go ahead,” she said, and he nodded, leaning forward to kiss her forehead.
“What are you doing?” he asked, gesturing to her phone.
“Nothing. Instagram.”
He shrugged, giving her a wink and disappearing with one of his friends.
She waited until he was gone before unlocking her phone again, leaning back in the booth and glancing down at the Google results for Rinaldo Damiani. He didn’t have any form of social media as far as she could tell （there was a LinkedIn page that listed him as a student at the University of Chicago, which made sense given the textbook） but what had caught her attention had been the results on a page called ratemyprofessor.com.
Rinaldo—Aldo—had deplorably bad results. His overall rating was a 1.4 out of five, with a 7% “would take again” and a 4.8 level of difficulty. His tags were abysmal: “get ready to suffer,” “tough grader,” “impossible to understand,” “incredibly unsympathetic.”
The reviews were even more vitriolic: “Damiani is a dick,” said one student, describing how flippantly Aldo had dismissed his request for an extension.
“You’re better off with LITERALLY ANY OTHER T.A.,” said another.
One mildly flattering review said, “Damiani is really fucking smart and probably a lunatic. Good news is he grades strictly to the department-mandated curve, so statistically speaking someone will magically wind up with an A.”
The best of them, which had awarded him three stars, said, “Damiani likes argumentation, or at least seems to respect it in like, an ADHD kind of way. Even if your opinion is bullshit, he’ll like you more if it’s thoughtful enough.”
Regan took a sip from her drink, entranced. She hadn’t guessed Aldo was a teacher, though it was pretty obvious he wasn’t a very good one. Strangely, she found herself with a grudging sort of respect for him. It took someone painfully ambivalent or blissfully ignorant （or both） to be this out of touch with his students, and either way, she admired it. She found it interesting, which was certainly the highest praise she could offer anyone.
Eventually she ran out of material on the internet, finding herself somewhere between relieved Aldo didn’t have a Twitter and disappointed she hadn’t dug up anything particularly good. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, really. She just found the whole thing very strange, and he’d stuck in her brain a little bit, embedding himself there like a thorn. Like something on the tip of her tongue or hovering just at the edge of her periphery. She half expected him to be inside every room she entered, or to be the footsteps just behind her on every set of stairs. She kept turning him over and over, analyzing the angles she could see and wondering what else she might’ve missed.
If she ever saw him again, she thought, she’d have to ask him some questions. She started compiling a mental list, though she couldn’t quite get past: Who are you? and, perhaps less flatteringly: What are you?
In her experience, curiosity about a person was never a good sign. Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this. Sure, she thought about leaving Marc from time to time （Marc’s primary business partner was always about one beat-too-long glance away from proposing a sordid tryst） but certainly not for something serious. Not for something prolonged. Having been in relationships that failed （and failed, and failed, and failed）， Regan wasn’t looking for anything enduring. The only thing she’d be willing to leave Marc for was freedom, but that and curiosity about a man did not usually go hand in hand.
Still, he was intriguing.