Professor Rashid began noticing the shift on a Tuesday, which is significant because Tuesdays are the least suspicious day of the week. Mondays carry the weight of the week already. Wednesdays have the hope of the weekend approaching. Thursdays are almost Friday. But Tuesdays are neutral ground, and it was on this neutral ground that the small changes became visible to her, the way a thermometer becomes visible only when you notice the level has moved.

The first change was in the mailbox. Professor Amira Rashid had lived in apartment 4B of the brick building on Elm Street for four years, and for four years her mailbox had contained three things: her syllabi, her departmental newsletter, and occasionally a package from Amazon. On this particular Tuesday, the mailbox contained a pamphlet titled Welcoming Our Troops Together and a flyer for a neighborhood watch meeting. Amira did not serve in the military. She was a professor of Middle Eastern literature at Midwest State University, which is a place that prides itself on being the sort of place where people think before they speak, which is often code for thinking about what to say without offending anyone, which is impossible when you have not considered that the act of choosing what not to say is itself a statement.

She put the pamphlet in the recycling bin and told herself it was harmless, which was the first of many times she would tell herself this exact thing. The second time came at the grocery store on Thursday, when she reached for the last carton of orange juice and found that Dr. Evans from the history department was already holding it. Dr. Evans was a pleasant man who had once praised her paper on Nabokov in the faculty lounge and offered to send his daughter to her for creative writing tutoring, which she had declined because he was sixty-eight and his daughter was twenty-four and the offer carried an unspoken assumption that she needed the money, which she did not, and also because she preferred not to spend her evenings correcting the prose of people who had never read a novel in their lives.

The orange juice stayed in Dr. Evans's cart. Amira put her cart back in its place and walked to the dairy section and bought milk instead, which was not what she wanted but was the kind of compromise that does not feel like compromise in the moment.

The shift accelerated in November, which was when the campus began decorating for what the student affairs office called the Holiday Season and what the local newspaper called the Festive Period and what nobody called Thanksgiving because calling it by its actual name would have required acknowledging that the holiday was about a harvest feast between colonizers and the people they had colonized, which was not the narrative the town wanted to project, and so the decorations appeared, and they were tasteful in the way that Midwestern tastefulness appears, which is to say they included evergreen garlands and LED lights and a welcome sign that said Supporting Those Who Serve in letters that could have been supportive or could have been an accusation depending on how you read them, which is exactly the problem with language that is designed to include everyone and therefore means nothing to anyone.

Amira's department chair, Professor William Hayes, called her into his office on a Friday afternoon in late November and spoke to her in the tone that people use when they are delivering something unpleasant but want her to understand that the unpleasantness was not their fault. He said there had been some concerns, plural, which is administrative code for more than one person had raised an issue. He said the student evaluations had shown a pattern, which was not true, her evaluations had been excellent, but the word pattern had been used before and it stuck, the way a burr sticks to a sock, and now it was part of the fabric of something that did not exist. He said some students had felt uncomfortable, which was the most useless complaint possible because every professor makes some students uncomfortable, that is the job, but he said it in a way that suggested the discomfort was about her presence rather than the material or the ideas, and Amira understood that she was being asked to make herself smaller, which in her case meant speaking less sharply, choosing her examples more carefully, avoiding texts that discussed the intersection of religion and violence even when the text was a novel that happened to contain those themes.

She left his office and walked to her classroom and taught a class on Kundera, which is a writer about forgetting and remembering and the violence that communities do to individuals in the name of belonging, and she taught it well, and she was good at her job, and that was the thing that made it worse, because if she had been bad at her job she could have accepted that, but she was not bad and the rejection was not about her competence, it was about the shape of her name and the color of her skin and the fact that she prayed in a room that the building management had gently suggested she might want to convert to a meditation space, which was offered as a compromise and received as a threat.

The winter came and the snow fell on Elm Street and the neighbors who had been friendly in September stopped making eye contact in January, which is when Midwestern friendliness typically retreats behind snow shovels and heated driveway cables and the belief that if you just stay indoors long enough the unpleasantness will melt away. Amira began to notice that when she walked to campus, people crossed the street, not dramatically, not with the theatrical avoidance of a horror movie, but with the small adjustment of someone who is walking slightly more briskly than usual and happens to shift toward the building side of the sidewalk for no identifiable reason.

Her neighbor Mrs. Gable, who had baked her cookies at Christmas and given her a candle that smelled like pine and reminded her of nothing good from her childhood, stopped waving from her porch. When Amira saw her, Mrs. Gable would offer a smile, but the smile did not reach her eyes, which is what you notice when you are watching for signs, and the smile stayed on her face like a mask that had been applied hastily and not blended at the edges.

The department sent out an email in March from the dean's office, written in the passive voice that hides responsibility, about a new initiative for campus climate improvement, which is code for making people who make other people uncomfortable feel less uncomfortable, and the email listed suggested readings, and the suggested readings included a chapter from a book that Amira had written, which was listed without her name, just the title, and she recognized her own argument about the politics of belonging in literature without recognizing the erasure of her authorship, which was the kind of theft that does not feel like theft when it is done by people who believe they are helping.

She attended the climate workshop on a Wednesday evening in the campus center, where people sat in circles and spoke about feeling and listening and creating space, and she sat in the circle and created no space and took up no more room than anyone else and spoke when she was spoken to and listened when others spoke and left at the end feeling as though she had been asked to perform a magic trick in which she was supposed to transform herself into someone who was not Muslim without actually saying that, because nobody says that, not anymore, not in polite society, not in the Midwest, where the rejection arrives wrapped in concern and delivered with a smile and a cup of coffee and the genuine belief that they are being kind.

The spring came and the students left for summer and Amira stayed in her apartment on Elm Street and read the emails from her colleagues that began with I hope this finds you well and ended with We value your contributions and she wondered if the immune response of a community is different from the immune response of a body, whether the body that rejects a transplant knows it is killing something that could have saved it, or whether the knowing is distributed across the cells, none of which are responsible for the decision but all of which participate in the outcome, and she wondered if the worst rejection is not the one that comes with anger and violence but the one that comes with understanding, or the belief that understanding, which is the version that says we are doing this for your own good, or at least for the good of everyone, and the good of everyone is always the cover for the good of some people, and those some people are never the ones being asked to leave.