She was young, timid and lonely, with hair that fell into her face and a slouching, although not shuffling gait that betrayed the habitually grim expression on her face even when it wasn't visible. It gave her smiles a rarefied and precious quality that would channel through groups of people when she displayed it, embarrassing her. In spite of her shame at receiving unwanted attention, evidenced by her prompt return to a state of aloof rigidity whenever she did grin, people resented her, claimed her sorrow was a ploy and her brief episodes of contentment artificial, and no excuse would mollify them. The highly vocal nature of this group's particular perspective, along with the riveting tone a voice obtains when it is loaded with contempt, gave her a widely-accepted pathetic and laughable public image. She was aware of it. A virtual walking stereotype of the girl that falls for the teacher, later, she would act out the implicit expectations of her public image. Moron! she would call herself, with some justification.
When she met him he was an old man already, but bristled at the adjective-noun pairing wherever it appeared in the texts he read in class and would rant about the lack of impact of this term on the reader for extended periods until distracted by another another offensive character description or dirt-common metaphor that he would excoriate because it was ineffective as literature. Rarely was he not griping, be it a lecture to his students or a discussion among his peers. The most positive outcome of his complaints would be a laugh that he encouraged and participated in with his own barely audible squeaky titter, but mostly his criticism was scalding. Pale complexioned and stern, he wore a halo of anger with the pride of a metrosexual in macho-brand apparel and threw the end of a brown cotton scarf over his shoulder when he entered the mini-mart a few blocks from the school or opened the door of the liberal arts department building in the wet cold weeks before spring. His rage dissipated in unexpected flights of praise that he would air in front of the pathetic girl. Hunched over in her chair, hugging her knees, she didn't appear to soften much, regardless of how much he pretended to appreciate the classwork she turned in or how often he allowed himself to deviate from his standard pessimism to declare that most of the movies one could see these days were pretty good. The semester was coming to a close. In the final class before the year finished, the old man came unglued. Lethargic and inattentive, the teacher let the last texts the class reviewed pass by unscathed, with only a weakly offered suggestion or two. That day, nothing got him mad. Finally her caution dropped, and she stopped guarding herself against the personal attack that never had come. She stopped writing for the class and let herself be motivated by sympathy, and she started writing for him.