“Would you like some tea?”

It was the first thing she’d ask when I came to her office, every time. I would walk past the bursar’s window and hover in the narrow hallway waiting for her door to open up. Eventually it would. Some older student would leave, and I would slip into that warm room, light low, air fragrant with cinnamon.

We talked about my writing. I crossed and uncrossed my legs uncomfortably. My jeans were too tight, my boots too big. I burnt my tongue on the hot tea. Good Earth, sweet and spicy. I wanted to gulp it down.

What did she think about those days when I showed her my stories? She marked up my pages with revisions. She told me how to spell asphalt. How could someone ever be prepared to be counselor to so many serious and conflicted eighteen-year-olds?

I told her when the stories were about someone else’s life, but I didn’t say when they were about mine. She never asked if there was something I wanted to tell her, not that I remember. I stayed for as long as I could, unable to tolerate the thought of going back to that sock-strewn room.

Sometime senior year I took some tea and sat down on the futon and screwed up my face and cried. On the night before commencement, I left dinner early. I’d eaten five cherry tomatoes. I drank a bottle of wine and walked back to my room and wept in the shower until it was late enough to sleep.

(Maggie wrote about tea the other day, and I remembered this.)