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At first glance, she seemed like just a regular student.

Well, inasmuch as there was such a thing as a “regular” student at Indiana’s intensive summer language program, where I was currently teaching. The students there tended to be a pretty heterogenous bunch. You had the flamboyant, and frequently gay, arts and drama students who were taking Russian because of their love for Dostoevsky or Chekhov. Next to them were the earnest, well-intentioned grad students who were trying to get their Russian up to professional speed before embarking on ambitious research projects in Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan or whatever corner of the former USSR their advisors had told them was hot on the job market right now. There was the crew-cut contingent, prepping for a career in intelligence or special forces or NASA by squeezing in a little Russian on the side. And then there was the occasional homemaker or retiree who was taking Russian as an unusual kind of hobby. All of them were smarter or tougher or something more than average, and they were all slightly—or very—weird. As I frequently reassured my students, in Slavic Studies we fly our freak flags high.

So in that group, Ruth Brown didn’t stand out. At least not this first week. She was medium height, slightly plump, with dark wavy hair that skimmed her shoulders a little more closely than my own dark wavy hair skimmed mine. She was just plain enough to not qualify as pretty, and she wore comfortable below-the-knee skirts and a series of off-the-rack ruffled blouses that were modest rather than flattering, one for each day of the week, in neutral colors. When she leaned forward, sometimes a small gold cross and a slender gold ring, both on the same gold chain, would peek out from behind her collar, which was always buttoned up to her collarbones. Other than that, she wore no jewelry or anything that might catch the eye at all.

Her behavior was slightly more remarkable than her appearance, mainly from her unwillingness to stand out. She sat in the back and only spoke when called upon, and then only in short sentences, whispered at a range barely within human hearing. She didn’t laugh at jokes. She didn’t frown when the class troublemaker—there’s always one—dropped to the floor and did twenty pushups in the middle of our review of case endings. She didn’t argue with me when I said everyone had to attend all the extracurricular lectures, films, and language tables. She didn’t talk on at rapturous length about her research. In fact, by Friday of our first week together, I still didn’t know what her research was about, or if she was even doing any. She looked a little too old to be an undergrad, but young for a grad student. Why she was studying Russian I didn’t know. The only really positive statement I could make about her was that she got perfect grades on the daily quizzes.

I mentally classed her with the other grad students, who tended once you scratched the surface to be the biggest social misfits, and assumed she wouldn’t be causing me much trouble. Shyness was an irritating attribute in a student, but she seemed too self-contained to burst into tears in the middle of class, and I hoped that if I just let her do her thing, she would float silently through the entire summer session, disappearing at the end without a trace. Only she disappeared a little faster than that.

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