Teaser for my newest Rizzles fic! Working title: What Is Asked of Us
Voices. Jane hears voices, boisterous and jarring, and she snorts herself awake. She vaguely knows where she is— one of the buildings on campus— and she blinks, trying to clear her mind. She’s in this building, on one of the couches, taking a nap, because—
Fuck. Because she has class. She jolts up from the couch, barely remembering to grab her bag, and charges down the first hallway she sees. What number was it? Something with a four and an eight. And a one. Right. All of the doors have numbers, they all start with one, so is it forty-eight? Or eighty-four? She darts past forty-eight, all the way to the end, but the numbers end at fifty-something. Jane wheels back and bursts into one-forty-eight, breathless from her run.
And look, it’s not her fault that whoever works facilities here is really obsessed with hinges and oil, and not obsessed enough with doorstops. They have to be, because the door flies so smoothly open that it crashes against the wall with a resounding thud that fills the hundred-person lecture hall in an instant. Heads whip around, and the professor freezes mid-sentence.
“Are the British coming?” the professor asks mildly, after a pause. “Or perhaps the beacons have been lit.”
“Uh..” Jane says, heart beating doubly fast, from the attention and the run. “No, ma’am. Sorry.”
The professor eyes Jane for a moment more, as though waiting for something. Jane stands there, staring back. Then, she feels a hand wrap around her wrist, and she’s being tugged sideways into the end seat of the back row. She half-collapses, just managing to hold onto her bag.
The professor finally resumes, and heads finally turn back. “Thanks,” Jane says, then turns to look at the person who’d saved her from her own idiocy. It’s a girl about her age, blonde and smooth-skinned and pretty, with interesting light brown eyes.
“Hey,” Jane whispers. “Is this Intro to Environmental Science?”
The girl gives her an odd look. “Of course,” she says quietly.
Jane lets her shoulders drop. “Okay, good. Is there a PowerPoint online?”
The girl beside her gives her a pitying look. “The website is in the syllabus,” she says, with a note that tells Jane she’s doing her best to be patient. “There are extra copies down there.” She points toward the professor and the podium.
Jane winces. She definitely can’t go get one now, and the thought of being near the professor even after class is over is mortifying. “Yeah, thanks,” she whispers, and digs in her bag for a notebook and a pen. She’ll just have to struggle along without the syllabus forever. It’ll be fine.
“You missed the introduction,” the girl whispers as the professor continues. “It was very interesting. Did you know this campus was built on a former landfill? Professor Leslie was just telling us how—“
“Hey,” Jane says quickly, putting pen to paper. “I just got embarrassed for interrupting, so maybe you should be quiet.”
Jane’s eyes are on the large screen and the notes there, but she hears the small sigh from beside her. “I was just trying to help.”
Jane flicks her eyes over; the girl has her eyes cast down at her own notebook. “Sorry,” Jane whispers, feeling a little bad. “Maybe you can tell me later?”
The girl looks up from her notebook and gives Jane a tentative smile. Jane smiles a little back before turning back to the lecture. She wonders, as the professor talks, if the first part had actually been as interesting as her savior claimed, because the rest is boring. They’re dipping into biology concepts, which Jane had hoped to avoid by not picking biology as her class, but oh well. At least they quickly move on to the wider implications, but then, it gets quickly overwhelming with terms that Jane has no context for, even though the professor acts like she should.
By the end, Jane’s head hurts, and she eyes the podium and its stack of paper warily. The way she feels right now, if she wants to pass this class, she really needs that syllabus. She stands from her seat as the rest of the class shuffles out, staring down the aisle, feeling helpless.
Before she knows what’s happening, the blonde girl is walking against the tide of students down to the podium. She scoops up the top copy and brings it back to Jane. “Here.”
“Thanks,” Jane says faintly, taking the copy.
“Maura,” the girl says. “If you wanted to know.”
It takes Jane a second— that nap really hadn’t helped— but she catches on. “Jane,” she says, holding out her free hand.
The girl— Maura— takes it and shakes it firmly. “You really shouldn’t be late next time,” she says as she releases Jane’s hand. “My research suggests that this professor builds her lectures very carefully, so that later sections require a solid understanding of the concepts already covered.”
Is that why Jane had felt so lost? Also, who researches their professors before they’ve even started taking their classes? “Right,” Jane says after a pause. “Thanks. See you next time.”
Jane exits the classroom, checking her schedule: No more classes today, so she’s got a couple hours before practice. She scans the common area of the building and finds an empty bench, pulling out her laptop to find and bookmark the right website for class. Her textbook is back at the softball house, tucked in its box in an alcove of the living room, so she does her best to scan the PowerPoint for the things she doesn’t understand and note those down to look at later. It’s… a long list. She sighs.
jbbartram-illu
origamiaround
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
areudirty
kianamaiart
