The first time Declan Rowan ruined my life, there were four hundred people in the audience and a live stream.
This time, it’s just twenty grad students, a whiteboard, and the smell of burnt coffee.
I sit dead center in the front row of Seminar Room B, laptop open, back straight, every neuron sharpened to a blade. I told myself I’d sit in the second row, fade into the sea of neurotic overachievers. Then his name went up on the course schedule and my spine did this stupid thing where it locked and refused to bend.
Never again, I’d promised myself, standing in that conference hallway two years ago with my printed slides shaking in my hands.
Never again will he see me small.
The door at the back of the room opens on a gust of hallway noise. Conversations stutter, then reform around a new center of gravity.
He’s broader than I remember.
Black button-down, sleeves rolled to just below the elbow, dark grey trousers, no tie. The overhead fluorescents catch in the faint silver beginning at his temples, like the universe decided that of course his hair needed highlights of gravitas. He carries a stack of folders under one arm, a MacBook under the other, moves like he’s counting his own footsteps.
He doesn’t look at me. Of course he doesn’t. The great Declan Rowan doesn’t have to lower himself to acknowledge the girl whose paper he once eviscerated so thoroughly that three people in the audience gasped aloud.
Instead, he crosses to the podium, sets things down in neat, economical motions. The room hushes, that particular reverent silence people reserve for those whose citation counts they’ve memorized.
“Welcome to Computational Linguistics 702,” he says without preamble, voice low and even and unmistakable. “If you’re in the wrong room, you’ll figure it out in about five minutes and wish you’d left sooner.”
A ripple of nervous laughter. I don’t join it. My fingers lie flat on the keyboard, motionless. My chest feels tight in a way that has nothing to do with my too-heavy backpack.
He scans the room—left, right, back. When his eyes pass over me they snag for half a second that stretches itself out, elastic and mean. I watch recognition click, sharpen, then disappear behind something cooler.
“Attendance in this seminar is capped,” he continues. “You’re not here to be spoon-fed. You’re here because, in theory, you can already choke down the basics on your own time.”
Dry, a little cruel. The room eats it up.
I swallow and make my first decision of the semester: I am not going to flinch.
He opens his laptop. The projector wakes in a wash of fan noise and blue light. A title slide appears: PROBABILISTIC MODELS OF MEANING.
Beneath it, in smaller text: Rowan Lab Orientation Session.
That part feels like a punch.
So this is how I meet him as my supervisor. No handshake. No welcome meeting. Just a line of text on a slide and the weightless drop of my stomach.
“If you’ve made it into this room,” he says, “you’ve either been accepted into the Rowan Lab, are on the waiting list, or have wandered in here by sheer force of misdirected confidence.”
More laughter. I hear a whisper to my left.
“That’s him? He’s…younger than I thought.”
