Palindrome

But when I’d been twenty and drinking every day, late for classes, absent for weeks, he had been my only friend at school. I’d sit on the couch in his office with the naked female mannequin and wall-sized collage of models from magazines, and be calmed. He was fond of me like a troubled character in a novel, pulling for me, But I’d dropped out, gone to work at a health food store, where the owner would say, You may be book smart, but you sure are stupid, and for years my teacher would come in, buy vitamins, say, Come back to school. So, I did. He’d rented me the apartment.

Kelle Groom, Palindrome

I love Groom’s telling of this story, of the relationship between professor and lost student. She artfully meanders through his past and her present  – and all of the points where their stories meet – with a subtle vagueness that culminates with a seemingly unrelated anecdote about the professor’s dalmatian. But, it’s the final question – “How could this happen?” - that anchors the story to the underlying examination of human connection.