Chapter One

The Last Seminar

Leonie Serrano was halfway through dismantling a classmate’s argument about institutional neutrality when she realized she had not actually heard the last thirty seconds of what she herself had been saying.

Her voice kept moving anyway.

“That only works,” she said, leaning back in her chair with the careful ease of someone who knew exactly how she looked when she spoke, “if neutrality is real in the first place, which it is not. Neutrality is usually just power that has become comfortable enough to describe itself as natural. The institution does not step outside ideology. It just gets to rename its own values as objectivity.”

Around the seminar table, three people nodded. One person started typing more aggressively. Someone else gave the little tight smile people used when they wished they had said it first.

Professor Baird, who always looked faintly amused by everything, tapped the end of his pen against a yellow legal pad. “So you would say the problem is not the institution’s failure to achieve neutrality, but the fiction that neutrality was ever available to it.”

Leonie turned toward him. Her posture sharpened. The fluorescent lights above the seminar table made everyone look a little washed out, but somehow she always managed to remain composed under them. She had on a black ribbed sweater, silver hoops, and the expression that had carried her through two and a half years of being the student everyone expected to have something incisive to say.

“I would say,” she replied, “that calling it a failure already gives the institution too much innocence.”

There it was.

The room shifted toward her in that small, electric way it always did when she landed a sentence cleanly. Not because she was loud. Leonie never needed to be loud. She knew how to phrase things so people felt slightly rearranged afterward, even when they were irritated. Especially when they were irritated.

Across from her, Priya uncrossed one leg and smiled into her coffee cup. “Okay, but where does that leave people actually working inside those institutions? Faculty, organizers, social workers, anyone trying to change things from within. Are they all just reinforcing the problem by participating?”

Leonie knew that tone. Not hostile. Interested, but careful. Priya was one of the only people in the seminar who could push back without making it feel like a territorial dispute.

Leonie folded her hands in front of her notebook. The page beneath them was almost blank except for the date, written in neat dark ink, and a sentence fragment that said “administrative language = moral deodorant.”

She had copied that down twenty minutes ago and nothing since.

“It leaves them compromised,” Leonie said. “Which is not the same as useless. But I think a lot of people confuse proximity to harm with authority over it. They think because they can name the violence, or moderate it, or write a better mission statement around it, they are no longer participating in it.”

A few heads nodded again.

Priya tilted hers. “That sounds right, but also a little impossible.”

“Most honest things do.”

There was a low ripple of laughter. Professor Baird smiled, the pleased kind this time, not the amused one.

Leonie lowered her eyes just long enough to make it look like modesty.

Inside, she felt almost nothing.

Not triumph. Not relief. Not even adrenaline, really. Just the familiar dim sensation of watching herself perform competence from a small distance away. Like she had built a version of herself sturdy enough to keep speaking even when the person inside it had gone thin and tired and difficult to locate.

Professor Baird shifted the discussion toward a passage in the week’s reading, a dense article on the rhetoric of care inside university equity offices. Priya raised a point about administrative absorption. A boy named Ethan said something uncertain and overlong about reform language. Leonie nodded at the right moments, jumped in twice, and let her mouth do what it had learned to do.

Quote a line from the reading.

Connect it to a broader pattern.

Name a hidden power structure.

Phrase the conclusion in a way that sounded both elegant and a little dangerous.

She could do this with four hours of sleep. She could do it with a headache. She could do it half numb, half dissociated, and hungry enough to feel sick.

That had once made her proud.

Now it just made her tired.

By the time class ended, the windows along the far wall had gone silver with late afternoon glare. Students began packing up with the usual soft violence of zippers, laptop sleeves, water bottles knocking against chair legs. Professor Baird reminded everyone about response papers due Friday.

Leonie felt the words land somewhere outside her body.

Friday.

Right.

Her response paper.

She slid her notebook into her bag with a practiced calm that fooled even her hands. She had not started it. She had not even finished the reading for next week. She had opened the article the night before, stared at the first paragraph for ten minutes, and then spent an hour and a half lying on her bed in the dark with her phone lighting up her face while she scrolled through other people’s certainty.

Priya caught up to her near the door. “You were on fire today.”

Leonie gave a small smile. “That is one way to describe it.”

“I mean it.” Priya adjusted the canvas strap of her tote higher on her shoulder. “That thing you said about neutrality becoming naturalized power. I wrote that down word for word.”

“That is either flattering or incriminating.”

Priya laughed. “Coffee before the department thing on Thursday?”

The department thing.

Leonie’s mind reached blankly for context, found none, and then recovered fast enough to make it look deliberate. “Thursday might be weird for me.”

“Weird how?”

“Just life.” She shrugged, light and unreadable. “You know.”

Priya looked like she might ask another question. Instead she nodded. “Text me?”

“Yeah.”

Leonie stepped into the hallway and immediately wished she had not. The building was overheated, and the corridor smelled faintly of old carpet and wet coats. Bulletin boards lined the walls, crowded with flyers for speaker events, mutual aid drives, reading groups, campus coalition meetings, workshops on restorative practice, art shows, emergency teach-ins. The paper edges curled slightly under the dry blast of indoor air.

She used to stop and read them all.

Now the layers of announcements made her feel tired before she even looked closely. Every flyer seemed to carry the same exhausted insistence. Urgent. Critical. Collective. Necessary. A different font for the same plea to become the kind of person who kept showing up.

Her phone buzzed in her tote bag.

Then again.

Then a third time.

She already knew, before pulling it out, that none of the notifications would be from anyone she wanted to answer.

The screen lit up with three emails and one text.

USF Bursar’s Office

Final Notice: Account Balance

Professor Baird

Checking in re: missing response paper

Housing Portal

Payment reminder

And from her mother:

Did you call your aunt back? She keeps asking how school is going.

Leonie stared at the screen until it dimmed.

Then she locked it without opening anything.

A group of undergrads brushed past her in a burst of perfume, laughter, and jangling keychains. One of them was talking loudly about a protest planning meeting that night. Another complained about a professor using outdated terminology in lecture. The conversation floated behind them like smoke.

Leonie stood still long enough to become an obstacle in the middle of the hall.

A week ago, she had told herself she just needed one good stretch of sleep. Two finished assignments. One clean reset. After that, the feeling would pass. The lateness, the fatigue, the strange brittle distance she felt from her own life. She would wake up and become herself again.

Instead, things had continued quietly rotting.

One missed response paper had become two. One skipped reading had become several. Her inbox had developed the vaguely hostile density of a place she no longer had the courage to enter. She had stopped going to one of her lectures altogether and only realized yesterday that no one had followed up, which somehow felt worse than if they had.

The worst part was that nothing had exploded.

There had been no dramatic failure. No catastrophic scene. No single public humiliation dramatic enough to reorganize her life around. Just accumulation. Little absences. Small evasions. Deadlines sliding past. The slow humiliating realization that she was becoming someone whose intelligence could no longer compensate for her inability to function.

Her stomach tightened.

She started walking.

Outside, the air was cooler than she expected, with a thin edge of January wind that slipped under her coat. Students crossed the central lawn in clusters. Someone was playing music too loudly near the student center. The sky had that pale winter brightness that made everything feel overexposed, as if the whole campus had been flattened into a brochure for a life Leonie was no longer sure she belonged to.

She should have gone to the library.

She should have found a table, opened her laptop, and forced herself through at least one reading before dinner. She should have answered Professor Baird’s email. She should have checked her account balance even if the number made her nauseous. She should have texted Priya something normal and unalarming.

Instead she kept walking until she reached the older humanities building where the gender studies department had its offices on the second floor.

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

Someone had taped a flyer to the wall beside the directory.

BEYOND RESISTANCE: BUILDING LIBERATORY FUTURES

Graduate panel and community discussion

Thursday, 6:00 p.m.

Underneath were the names of the speakers. Leonie recognized most of them. One of them used to mentor her. Another had once told her, with warm seriousness, that she should consider doctoral work because her mind was “unusually agile.”

For a second she let herself imagine going upstairs, knocking on an office door, and confessing everything to someone who would understand. Not the edited version. Not the polished one. The real one.

I am behind on everything.

I cannot think when I am alone.

I keep pretending I am still in motion because I do not know what happens if I admit I have stalled.

I do not know whether I am burned out or lazy or depressed or just finally discovering that being articulate is not the same thing as being built for a life.

The fantasy lasted maybe five seconds.

Then she turned away from the stairs and kept walking.

By the time she reached her apartment, the light had thinned into early evening. The building was a converted house split into units that looked charming from a distance and flimsy from up close. The front steps leaned slightly to one side. Someone’s bike was chained to the railing with two different locks. A package had been left in the entryway on top of a radiator that probably had not worked consistently in years.

Leonie climbed the stairs to the second floor, unlocked her door, and stepped into the one bedroom apartment she could not afford.

Silence greeted her first.

Then the familiar inventory of things she had been not quite looking at for weeks.

A mug with old coffee in it on the windowsill.

Three books open face down on the floor.

A laundry basket full of clean clothes she had never put away.

A plant on the kitchen counter with one yellowing leaf she had meant to remove.

A stack of mail she had turned upside down so she would not have to see the envelopes.

Her backpack slid from her shoulder and landed harder than she intended.

She stood in the middle of the apartment with her coat still on.

Then, very slowly, as if the movement belonged to someone else, she sat down on the floor beside the couch.

Not because she was crying. She was not. That would have almost been useful. Crying implied a kind of release, a discernible weather system passing through. This felt flatter than that. More embarrassing.

She pulled her laptop from her bag and opened it.

The screen came to life, illuminating the room in a cold blue wash. Tabs from three different weeks stared back at her. The learning portal. An article PDF. Two half written documents. Her email, with the unread count rising like an accusation in the corner.

She clicked the bursar email first because it felt most dangerous.

The balance loaded.

Leonie looked away before the full number had even settled on the screen, then looked back because not looking was becoming a kind of disease.

She inhaled once through her nose. Slow. Controlled.

Then she opened the housing portal reminder.

Rent due in six days.

She laughed.

It was not a happy sound, or even an angry one. Just short and dry and unfamiliar enough to make her glance up, as if someone else in the apartment might have made it.

Her phone buzzed again on the rug beside her. This time it was Maya, one of her oldest friends from high school.

You alive?

Leonie stared at the message.

Maya had a way of asking simple things that made honesty feel dangerously available. She typed back yeah just tired lol and deleted it. Typed in class and deleted that too, even though she was no longer in class. Finally she locked the phone and set it facedown without replying.

The laptop screen blurred.

Not from tears. Just from how long she had been staring.

A response paper. She could still do a response paper. Six hundred words. Eight hundred, if she stretched it. She had written brilliant things in worse conditions than this. She had pulled arguments out of exhaustion before. She had turned panic into polish so many times it had become a private form of magic.

She opened a blank document.

Typed the title.

Response Paper 4

Then nothing.

She sat like that for several minutes, fingers resting on the keys, waiting for the first sentence to arrive.

Usually they came in clusters. Phrases first. Then a frame. Then the argument assembling itself with satisfying speed, as if thought were a surface she could skim her hand across and pull structure from.

Tonight her mind felt like a dark room full of overturned furniture.

Finally she typed:

The university’s language of care often functions as

She stopped.

Deleted the line.

Tried again.

Institutional care is frequently less about repair than about

Deleted that too.

A pressure began building behind her eyes.