Sweet Little Nothing

“Did he pour his drink on you?” Stella asks as I rinse the shampoo from my hair.

“No. Um. That would’ve been... Melanie.”

“What?” my suitemate shrieks.

I’m nearly too tired to tell the whole sordid story, but I know Stella, and she won’t let me sleep until she knows it all.

“I guess they were there together. And she thought I was flirting with him and got really, really mad. She said some not nice things to me and then tossed her beer in my face.”

“And he let her believe that? That you were with him?”

I scoff out a laugh. “He encouraged the notion.”

“That little dick weasel!”

Even though she can’t see me, I shrug. “It is what it is.”

“No, ma’am. It is not.”

“Stella, I love that you want to help, but—”

“But nothing! Tonight, you sleep. And tomorrow?” She pauses for dramatic effect. “Tomorrow, we plot!”

Chapter Sixteen

Emmy

Stella didn’t leave my side for the rest of the weekend. And I mean that literally. We spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—which was blessedly a holiday—cozied up in our suite, binge-watching chick flicks, eating takeout, and plotting my payback.

Ultimately, we both decided the best form of revenge against Sterling was... nothing. He’s clearly after a reaction, and if I refuse to give him one, he can’t win.

However, we also agreed I can’t let him steamroll me either. I need to be fierce, which means taking no shit when it comes to him.

“I mean,” Stella says as we cut through the quad, “if he’s an ass to you, just ice him out. Don’t let him know he’s getting to you.”

“Easier said.”

“Lunch after, and you can tell me all about how you shut his ass down.”

“And you can tell me all about Samson,” I counter, already knowing it’s a lost cause. I asked about him at least twenty times over the last three days, but she shut me down each and every time.

“Toodles,” she calls over her shoulder with a finger-wave before breaking into a run toward her building.

I roll my eyes at her antics, but press on toward my destination, albeit slowly. While I don’t want to be late for Sterling’s class, I definitely don’t want to be early either. When it comes to his class, it’s bare minimum and nothing more.

I make it to the classroom with two minutes to spare, marching right past Sterling’s smug, stupid face, all the way to a desk in the very back of the room.

For the next one-hundred-and-twenty seconds, I sit on pins and needles, waiting for him to fling some low-handed, shitty remark my way. But he doesn’t even look at me.

It’s as if I’m not here. Invisible.

And how completely wrong is it—how completely damaged am I—that him ignoring me bothers me?

I don’t want him to torment me, not at all. But after three days of prepping on how best to deal with him, I guess it’s a little disappointing.

Or at least that’s what I’m going with. Because while I am a little weak, I’m not a freaking doormat. At least, I don’t want to be.

At exactly nine, Sterling closes the door. He dives straight into his lecture, still ignoring my presence completely. His eyes skip over me as he speaks and he never once calls on me when he asks questions.

Not that I’m volunteering, but still.

Instead, I busy myself furiously taking notes. Sterling Abbot might be a piece of shit, but he brings the topics we study to life. Once I get back to my dorm after lunch, I’ll recopy and color-code them.

There’s something about the repetition that really cements it all in my brain.

“Quiz time!” Sterling’s voice booms through the room, causing shivers to dance across my skin. A few groans rise up, but he shakes his head and slaps his palms down onto the podium. “I don’t want to hear it. You should have completed the required reading for it, so if you don’t do well...” He allows his words to taper off and shrugs— "That’s on you."

I grin to myself, confident I’ll ace the quiz. I not only read the assigned material—twice—but I also read several related articles and studies just to make sure I had a good grasp on it.

On a scale of one-to-ten, right about now, my confidence is a twenty.

Except, when I look down at my quiz, none of the material on it was covered in the reading.

No, no, no.

I ball my hands into fists and scrub at my eyes, hoping like hell my mind is playing tricks on me. It has to be. There’s no other option. Only, when I reread the page, none of the words have changed.

This can’t be happening.

How is this happening?

After everything with Rob came to a head, I threw myself head-first into my studies. It’s not like I had friends, much less a social life, so preparedness became my bestie.