After a second pass to check my work, I nudge the pages aside and start drawing a flower on one of my scratch sheets. A daisy, probably.
Doesn’t look like a daisy, Amalia.
There are thirty minutes left, and I know if I walk up to submit my exam right now, every person in this room will stamp NERD on my forehead, and that’s something I’d rather put off as long as I can. My grades always end up doing the talking anyway.
I’m on my second flower when a shadow falls across my page.
I push my glasses up my nose as I look up and find Professor Vaughn staring at my scratch sheet with an odd expression.
“If you’re finished and bored, Miss Sanchez, I’d suggest turning in your exam rather than testing Frida Kahlo’s patience from beyond the grave with those sketches.”
My head instantly fills with about a thousand colorful words, and I physically bite the tip of my tongue to keep them all in.
How dare he make fun of my drawings? Isn’t there some law against professors bullying their students? Sure, they’re simple, and they were never meant to be art.
They’re just meant to keep me occupied for another fifteen minutes until it’s socially acceptable to turn this in.
But since I can’t say what I’m actually thinking, I put on the sweetest smile I own, slide him the exam, and whisper low enough that only he can hear, “Euclid and Cantor would be proud of the problems I just solved in one-fifth of the allotted time.”
Technically it took me two-fifths, but he doesn’t need to know that, anday Diosito, I just challenged him. Indirectly, but still.
I close my eyes and swallow. What’s worse, I dragged two of my favorite mathematicians into it.
Señor Euclid, Señor Cantor, forgive me for the blasphemy. Honestly.
The corner of his mouth lifts, and with a glint in his eye, he whispers back, “I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”
No. No.
I nearly call after him to forget I said anything. What on earth is wrong with me, talking back to a professor who teaches a subject where I can’t afford anything less than a perfect score?
Does anyone know a formula for wiping someone’s memory?
Icheck my watch as I rush toward my operating systems class, and for a second I genuinely consider not going.
I can’t stand Professor Javier.
He’s a man somewhere around forty-five, always wearing the same blue wool sweater, smelling of cigarette smoke and way too much cologne that’s clearly meant to mask the smoke but only ends up making it worse. At the last seminar, I watched his eyes linger on the legs of a girl in a short leather skirt, and my stomach churned.
When I reach the lecture hall, there are only a handful of us in the room, and even though I’d normally plant myself in the front row, I go six rows back instead.
The distance is a small mercy, at least.
That same seminar, he spent half the lecture standing directly in front of me, touching my hand under the pretense of checking whether I’d copied everything off the board.
He walks in with a thermos in one hand and a laptop in the other, and after a few minutes of fumbling with the projector, he starts the lecture.
Unlike other professors, he moves constantly through the room, and every time he drifts near my seat, I want to make myself invisible so he’ll keep walking.
I hear him explaining something about Linux file permissions, but my mind seizes up the moment I feel him pull one of the clips out of my hair and turn it between his fingers.
My hand flies to the spot where the strands I’d pinned back now fall across my forehead, and without thinking, I look straight at him.
“Could you please give that back?”
There aren’t many of us in the room, it’s nearly dark outside, and I can feel everyone’s eyes on us, but what he just did is not okay. I try to channel Lupe’s energy right now because she would have already taken him apart in three sentences flat.
His eyes narrow, and with a greasy smile, he leans in closer.
