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At least I hope.
On Tuesday—the first lecture since the phone incident—my assigned seat isn’t where it’s supposed to be. When I walk into class, I hesitate, wondering for a moment if Professor Barclay might have forgotten about his edict or perhaps not truly have meant it. But then his gaze finds mine, and one of his eyebrows lifts almost imperceptibly before he takes the chair and moves it right where he wants it. I sigh, break off from Annette and Sonya, and make my way to the front to take my place.
There’re a few minutes before class. Behind me, the room is filled with quiet chatter, but from where I am, I can only see Professor Barclay as he stands to the side of the podium, reading something on his phone. He wears fitted navy slacks and a white button-down. His watch glints in the light, and I follow the smooth line of muscle from his wrist up to his cuffed shirtsleeve. I don’t know why I care to look at him. He’s already morphed into some kind of beast in my mind, an angry asshole who no doubt gets off on my humiliation.
I’ve stared too long, I realize, when he looks up from his phone and catches me.
I want to be strong and maintain eye contact, challenge him in this small, subtle way, but like the easy prey I am, my eyes immediately shift to the ground. In this position on my chair, I’m practically bowing before his feet.
Thursday is somehow worse. When getting dressed in the morning, I’m not thinking about Professor Barclay or his class. When I slip on a baby-doll dress with three-quarter-length sleeves, a square neckline, and a short hem, it’s for no other reason than that it makes me happy to wear. The white and blue floral fabric reminds me of a dress my mother used to have, something that might still be inside the chest of her belongings I couldn’t bear to part with a few years ago.
When I arrive in class, however, it strikes me almost immediately that the garment is inappropriate given my seating situation. Under normal circumstances, lost in one of the middle rows, my dress and I would go unnoticed. I’d be tucked safely among my peers, my legs and hemline hidden. But sitting on that chair, there is no way to hide the fact that most of my upper thighs are showing.
Professor Barclay isn’t there when I arrive, thank god.
I dip low to the ground, careful to squat rather than bend at the waist, so I can retrieve my textbook, a pen, and my lecture slides. Then I hurriedly take a seat, dropping my textbook on my lap with my slides and pen in place. I look down and try to adjust the sides of my dress, tugging ever so gently and praying the entire class isn’t watching me fidget—and I’m still grabbing hold of the hem when Professor Barclay pulls open the side door and walks inside with the sun pouring in behind him.
The time for attempting to fix my dress is over. I don’t want to further call attention to my outfit, so I press my legs together, cross my ankles, and let my nude ballet flats fall to the side.
I feel his gaze like a heavy weight around my neck. It could be imagined—my mind twisting reality into my worst possible nightmare—or it could be my body’s sixth sense, but Iknowhe’s taken notice of my outfit. I imagine his eyes surreptitiously sliding up the length of my legs, along my calves and the sensitive groove behind my knees, up along the sides of my thighs that aren’t hidden beneath my textbook. I shift and mask a shiver, keeping my eyes glued to the floor. If he’s looking, if he sees me like this, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to consider the possibility that he thinks I’ve done this on purpose, that I might have dressed like this to elicit some sort of reaction from him.
I just want to survive another day in this class. That’s all I can hope for.
The following week, Tuesday before class, I’m sitting outside the lecture hall, reading ahead in Mayer’sA Richer HeritagewhenSonya plops down in front of me on the ground, ready to pick up the conversation we’ve been having off and on since the start of the semester.
“Busy?” Sonya asks, a ball of nervous energy.
“Yes.”
“Well too bad because I’ve got something to show you.” She unzips her backpack and tugs out her laptop, already booting it up. “You’re not going to believe what I’ve done.”
I’m already scowling, having learned to trust Sonya about as far as I can throw her. She’s definitely not my most levelheaded friend. She’s spontaneous and fun and, I’m only now realizing, rather persistent.
“It’s a work of art.”
I don’t look up. “I’m trying to read before class, Sonya.”
“That’s good. What a dutiful student you are. Now look.”
She turns her laptop to face me, and there on the screen is a blown-up, high-resolution photo of Professor Barclay and me with our arms wrapped around one another. We’re dressed to the nines, him in a black suit and tie and me in a silver slinky gown. We look like we’re attending some fancy awards show together.
My stomach drops.
“Where did you get this?” I hiss.
“I MADE it!” Sonya exclaims, drawing the attention of a group of nearby students who turn and see her computer screen before I can quickly turn it away. “Isn’t it brilliant?!” she adds. “A sort of real-life rendering of what could be if only you’d stop being such a bore!”
“That is seriously…creepy.” I squint, trying to focus on all the details. My face is barely blended onto the photo, and same goes for Professor Barclay. It’s the work of a toddler, at best. “Sonya, that’s…really bad.”
“Well, right. Okay. I did it in this dumb app. You just upload two headshots and it does the rest for you. I was at it all morning, saving pictures of me with young DiCaprio—you know, during hisTitanicera—when I had the brilliant idea to show you how good you and Professor Barclay would look together.”
Professor Barclay’s face—which she must have taken from a photo she pulled from the university’s website—is comically large in proportion to mine, and his skin tone is a shade tanner than the person she’s stuck him on.
“Whose body is that?” I ask, pointing to the screen.
“Blake Lively, and I put Professor Barclay on Ryan Reynolds. I thought it was close enough.”
“We look nothing like them. My hair isn’t blonde.”
