The TA.

Impressing Teacher

His eyes climb my legs as I walk in, my chunky heeled boots loud on the carpet. The skirt was a good idea after all. I feel his gaze burning along the small side slit, up my thigh. 
I take my usual seat towards the corner opposite his and wheel my chair in close to the round table. I set my notebook out and scribble a nothing line about his long, slender fingers as the others start to file in.
The redheaded girl sits next to me again, gushes about my skirt and how she could never wear something like that to class.
"Honestly, never," she says. "I mean..."
"It's about having the right person to impress," I tell her.
The boys lift their heads, glance at me. Nathan meets my eyes for a moment, smiling. He traps his bottom lip between his teeth for a second, then goes right back to scrolling on his computer.
"I didn't get your name last time," I tell the redhead.
"Cal," she says.
"We should study sometime," I tell her. "Girls night or something."
She smiles and says she'd like that as she digs around in her bag and pulls out her Mac.
Prof Smith sits relaxed and complacent behind the desk in the far corner, eyes on his laptop. 
"Nathan is starting this session, kids. Nath, take it away." 
Nathan nods to himself and sets his laptop aside on the windowsill. He leans forward, toward all of us around the round table.
"How many of you have felt fireworks with a romantic partner?"
Everyone shakes their heads.
Nathan reaches into his bag and pulls out a stack of paper.
"So how come," he counts quietly, thumbing through the pages, "seven of you have used that tired dried-up piece of imagery?"
"It's shorthand," one of the girls mumbles. "Everyone knows what it means."
"But do they know how it feels? Let's try something. Complete the sentence: fireworks are not what I feel but blank is."
"A tightrope walk is," I blurt out.
He smiles and gestures to me, "Can anyone beat that?"
"That's what I mean," he says. "You've got to be original and big and absurd. You've got to make them work it out."
Professor Smith frowns across at Nathan.
Professor Smith suggests, "Shall we make a list of clichés to avoid before we write today."
Nathan glances to the clock.
"Sure."
Nathan squeezes around the table, moves behind my chair, hips tilted back as he squeezes through the gap between me and the wall. He stands large before the whiteboard, poised with a marker.
He writes up Fireworks.
"Anything about burning with love or lust," I say to start the ball rolling.
One of the boys raises his arm halfway and asks, "What's wrong with that?"
"It's been done."
The boy glares at me.
"Oooh there's a fire in my loins," I make the words dumb and dramatic.
Some of the class laughs with me.
Nathan scrawls the words onto the board, exactly as I said them.
Cal pipes up, "Anything about suffocating. That's just plain unhealthy."
"No, no I've felt that. I like that. It's about the lover being an overwhelming presence."
Nathan looks between us.
"We'll vote on it."
The class is split almost evenly, tipping slightly in Cal's favour.
Not being able to breathe goes up on the board.
"More with like or as, come on guys."
"Like home," someone says, then adds, "Like a hurricane."
"If people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane," the professor mumbles.
We all turn to him, surprised.
"My kid loves Looking for Alaska."
"Tell them to get over it," one of the girls says. "John Green is so 2010s."
And then she realises what she's said and mumbles an apology. Prof Smith tells her not to worry.
"Anything about girls and roses."
"Such as?"
"Rosy cheeks."
"That'll do," Nathan says, swivelling to the board.
Cheeks/skin red as roses.
He leans a shoulder against the board.
"Yo prof, what's that Shakespeare sonnet, my mistress' eyes?"
"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Sonnet 130. A classic."
"It turns clichés on their heads," Nathan explains. "You should all read it sometime."
"Okay kids, let's write."
"Write what?"
"Anything," Prof says. "Let's see what you've got on the brain."
I look down at the last line I wrote: And as hours and minutes and seasons tick by, I gaze across the room at his zipper and shake and sigh.
Nathan prowls around as we write. 
I start lines, huff at them, draw arrows off them to point at half-formed ideas. 
And I bite back a gasp.
I feel him behind me.
He leans over my chair and tugs my pen out of my hand. As he draws arrows between my lines of poetry, he says, "Consider ending that line here and breaking up the thought."
And then without another word, and with his face giving nothing away, he scrawls his phone number right in the crease of my page's margin. He puts an X after his name.
I hold my breath until he walks away and struggle to focus for the rest of the class.