Sheila could not figure out George. He had a general disquieting unansweredness, a compelling handsomeness, a sharpness of thought, and a snappiness of speech surrounded by an air of chaos, dishevelment and downright sloppiness. The six pencils in front of him, for instance, an indication of preparation and readiness, yet splayed out all over the table with no sense of purpose or direction.

This was Sheila's first class as a teaching assistant, and even though she was mostly just observing, the ability of one student to distract her so completely, probably even without trying, was causing her to doubt her ability to run a classroom.

In an attempt to impose some order on her reality, Sheila arranged one of his pencils, admiring the perfection of the point. She appreciated a good sharpening job. For her, sharpening was a way to collect her thoughts, to picture the shavings as mental disturbances, to treat the turning of the handle as a physical mantra, an act of meditation. Upon returning home one afternoon from school, having just secretly watched her father fuck her first grade teacher, the teacher's skirt up around her waist, her blouse open, her heaving, sweating breasts pressed into and coated with the inherently messy chalk dust, she had sharpened twenty-four pencils in a row.

Returning to the present, Sheila realized that George had been paying attention to her instead of the professor, had watched her arrange the pencil, had turned slightly in surprise, had knocked a pencil clattering to the floor, was bending over to retrieve it. His head did not reemerge from beneath the table for several seconds and Sheila wondered what he was looking at, whether he was staring at her legs, looking up her skirt. For years boys had been doing that; they were children, really, and she could excuse them, could almost take amusement in it, was unsure how to react when she reached high school and the teachers started doing it, had started wearing even shorter skirts.

George emerged from under the table, handed the pencil to her, and smiled. Sheila arranged it next to the first as he watched her, gathered in the others, pointing now all in one direction, rolled her hand across the line of pencils, back and forth, forth and back, enjoying the hard wood against her palm, enjoyed the distraction she was causing in George, revenge for the distraction he had caused in her. Back and forth, forth and back. She watched him squirm in his chair, knew he was hard, knew where he wanted her hand. Back and forth, forth and back.

Casually, unconsciously, Sheila let one of the pencils roll out from under her hand, roll to the edge of the table, hang, for a split second, on the edge, as though reluctant to leave its mates, then fall with a sharp small clatter to the cold hard floor.

The professor turned to look at her, raising a quizzical eyebrow. Sheila shrugged, smiled, and stuck out her tongue a little, sure that nobody was watching. Except George was watching. Add extreme peripheral vision to his list of peculiarities. That and hyperactive eyebrows, an apparently seemingly standard trait among male intellectuals. She thought about sticking out her tongue at him too, decided against it, did it anyway.

Recovering from the interruption and the promise of Sheila's tongue after class, the professor continued. Sheila tried to concentrate, but the pencil was just laying there, somewhere, under the table, in an unknown location, leaving an incomplete set of five on the table, and George seemed to be in no hurry to rectify the problem. Finally, reluctantly, despite the obvious impropriety of doing it herself, Sheila leaned over between them, her head beneath the level of the table, to see where the pencil had gone. It was just beyond reach. She leaned over further, grasped the pencil and was about to sit back up when she felt George's hand on top of her head, holding her down. This would not do. As politely and forcefully as she could, she took his wrist and removed his hand from the top of her head, pulling it down in front of her face.

Holding George's hand in front of her, thinking about how complicated the semester had already gotten and how difficult it was to maintain a sense of professional decorum in the midst of all this human interaction, Sheila idlely licked his palm with quick small flicks of her tongue. She was the teaching assistant, and he was the student. Roles and protocols must be enforced. Sticking his thumb all the way into her mouth she sucked it hard, smiling with satisfaction as he moaned above her.