That was a not particularly academic analysis of his work. But the criticism appeared to hit the guy hard. He winced, his mouth drawing tight, and went to sit back down with his arm tucked around his belly as if he had a stomachache.
The girl Hubert called up next shot her a look I could only call defiant before launching into a story about a time she’d skipped volleyball practice to hang out with a guy she liked and almost—but not actually—been cut from the team. After the first run-through, I wasn’t surprised to see the professor still frowning.
“Come on, people,” she said after she’d sent the girl back to her seat with similar remarks, clapping her hands. “I need to see you’re willing to put in the work here. We didn’t bring you into this program so you could simply coast through it.”
The girl who’d just read her piece hunched over her desk, looking as pained as the first boy had. She aimed another glare at the professor.
Hubert either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it. She turned to scan the room. “Miss Savas, what have you got for us?”
Delta stood up, her notebook clutched in both hands. She walked slowly but steadily up to the podium. Her lips parted with a shaky exhalation before she started to read.
“When I was in junior year, a new girl started at my school. Her father had transferred for work from another city. Right from her first day, she went around telling everyone she ran into how horribly allergic to shrimp she was. How we all had to be so careful not to poison her with it. As if a high school cafeteria is usually going to be serving seafood for lunch.
“The teachers all fawned over her and were constantly reassuring her that they’d watch out for her. She soaked up the attention so gleefully, I started thinking she probably wasn’t allergic at all. She’d picked something easy to avoid and talked it up everywhere to get special consideration. As far as I could tell, it was pathetic, wanting everyone to be focused on her because of something like that instead of anything she’d actually done.”
Delta drew herself straighter and dragged in a rough breath before continuing. The rest of us sat, frozen and silent, as she laid out the plan she’d made to “prove” that the new girl was faking, the stealth with which she’d sprinkled the crumbs of a crushed shrimp chip into the girl’s soup one lunch hour—and the horrifying colors the girl’s face had turned as her throat had closed up and her skin had broken out in massive hives.
“I could have killed her,” Delta finished, her voice wavering. “If the ambulance had gotten there even a minute later, it might not have been in time. That’s not what makes me most ashamed, though. What’s really shameful is that I didn’t regret it at the time. I told myself it was her own fault for flaunting her allergy in the first place. When I think back now to the way I thought then and the things I did because of it, it makes me feel sick. I want to shake myself, or slap my own face, but I’m not sure that would have made a difference.”
The last words faded out. Her tense posture faltered, her shoulders curling slightly as she stared down at the page as if she was bracing for the lash of a whip. I couldn’t help staring at her as the rawness of her confession and her current regret sank in.
I couldn’t say it made me like her more, but there was obviously more going on beneath that haughty surface than I’d have guessed.
Professor Hubert pushed herself off her desk and gave a light round of applause. She was beaming, as if she saw Delta’s wrenching story as something to celebrate.
“Now that’s what I want you all to aspire to,” she said, with an encouraging nod to my roommate. “Dig right to the heart of the matter and show us who you really are. Excellent, excellent. I hope our next speaker can follow Miss Savas up with similar honesty.”
That was her goal with this class? To bully her students into admitting to the most horrible moments in their lives? A shiver ran through my body as I watched her pick her next target while Delta slipped back into place beside me.
Just when I thought this school couldn’t get any more fucked up, it upped the ante. What the hell would the classes I hadn’t attended yet hold?
Chapter Five
Elias
Of course, Trix Corbyn would turn up in my class. Everyone ended up there eventually. I’d caught glimpses of her defiantly orange hair and her leather jacket in the halls over the past few days and heard disgruntled murmurs from some of the guys in the dorms. Now here she was, perched at her desk along with the eleven other students I wished I wasn’t teaching.
At least she’d opted for a seat at the back, where I could let my gaze skim over her without it being obvious I wasn’t letting myself so much as look at her.
The class was an hour of absurdity, stating it mildly. I knew that. All of the students in front of me knew that, except presumably Trix. Still, I’d had to go ahead and try to teach them today’s math problem, and they’d had to go ahead and do their best to learn it, because if we didn’t play our parts, the real staff of Roseborne College would crack the metaphorical whip.
The really sad thing, though, was that even after the years I’d spent here, as soon as I stepped in front of those watching faces, the urge to do this right gripped me. I had to prove I was up to the challenge, that I deserved the responsibility given. Elias DeLeon didn’t back down.
Never mind that it was more a torture device than a responsibility, or that as far as I’d been able to tell, the challenge was impossible.
“Well,” I said in my best professorial tone, managing not to glare at the traitorous numbers on the chalkboard beside me. “It seems we’re working with power substitutions now. As some of you probably remember, we bring that strategy to bear when dealing with antiderivatives…”
The faces in front of me went tense with uneasy concentration as I lectured. Maybe they picked up a little of the theory even if they never really got to apply it? Not that I could take any pride in that fact when the knowledge wasn’t going to do them any good anywhere else for the rest of their lives either.
Today’s calculus equation was one of the more complex ones we’d tackled. I hadn’t taken advanced mathematics on this scale before I’d come here, but I’d studied the textbook until I understood how it all came together. No one else will put the work in for you if you don’t, my grandfather would have said. I’d managed that much. I just couldn’t maintain whatever authority I’d taught myself while I had anyone else looking on.
Ryo Shibata leaned over to murmur something to Trix as I wrapped up my explanation. Part of me prickled at the disrespect, but that irritation rode on a wave of relief that he seemed to have redirected her from noticing the expected but eerie interference with our problem-solving.
“Who’s willing to take a stab at this next stage?” I asked.
One of the guys in the front row offered. He gripped the piece of chalk I handed him determinedly and grimaced at the chalkboard’s current display, and we continued on with our roles.
When the clock ticked over to ten to the hour, the problem was sprawled in a mess across the board, and we hadn’t yet come up with the answer. “Better luck next time,” I said, like I always did. The best part of the class was sweeping the eraser over that board to wipe the whole headache away. Until tomorrow.