Teacher's Pet

1.

Tessa

I didn’t think there was ever a time in my life when I had been more nervous.

And this all had to do with a paper.

Well, really it was the grade that was going to be on the paper, and as I sat there, waiting, I tried to convince myself that everything was going to be okay, that I had done well enough on the assignment to get at least an A. Because that’s what I needed: an A.

My palms were sweating, and my heart was beating fast, like I’d drank too much coffee on an empty stomach. My stomach, in fact, was all clenched in knots, and I was having trouble sitting still in my seat. I tried to take deep, calming breaths like they told us to in yoga class, but taking deep, calming breaths is difficult to do when your whole chest feels like it is in a vice. Professor Rochman had given Kristin, the teaching assistant, half the papers to return, and he had the other half. It was probably random, who had which papers, but my mind for some reason latched onto the idea that if Professor Rochman handed mine back to me, it would be good news. And that good news could only come in one form: an A.

“I was mostly quite pleased with the effort shown in these articles,” he said. “Most of you showed that not only have you been paying attention in the past month’s lectures, but you’ve been applying the principles we’ve been learning to the work you do out in the field.”

My best friend, Lindsey, sat next to me, chewing on the cap of her pen, not even paying attention. She wasn’t in this class because she was interested in journalism; rather, she was here because she’d heard the professor was hot and not a curmudgeon like a lot of the faculty here at Benton College were.

And Professor Rochman was hot—call me Leo, he’d said on the first day of class, but that was so weird. I couldn’t call him Leo; I’d never been on a first-name basis with a teacher before. None of the other students seemed to have a problem with it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

He was getting closer to us, and I felt my heart rate accelerate. My GPA had slipped below a 3.5, and my parents would be infuriated if it remained there. Subpar performance was simply unacceptable to them, and up until this point in my life, I’d always gotten straight As. I had just assumed that going into my junior year at college, things would be the same, but then I’d made the mistake of falling in love. Well, I thought it was love, but it really turned out to be a big disaster. His name was Nick Sanders and he was one of the stars of Benton’s basketball team, a total jock, not the sort of person I ever would have dated, but we ended up sitting next to each other in an American politics lecture and it just sort of went from there. It was great, until it wasn’t, and I’d found myself totally caught off guard when he told me that he didn’t think we should hang out anymore. I didn’t think that I’d done anything wrong, or that anything had changed between us since the last time we’d hung out and everything seemed great, and it had taken its toll on my schoolwork. Only in the past month or so had I been able to wake up and not find myself thinking about him first thing in the morning, but it was still difficult to see him around campus, to know that he probably hadn’t given me a second thought.

And now here I was, behind in most of my classes, all because of some stupid guy.

There was more than just my GPA at stake. I did not take it for granted that my parents were paying my tuition, and they were also paying for my car and for me to live in a small apartment in the city, as opposed to the dorms, because they thought living by myself would not just get me out of the party atmosphere, but would also help me become more independent. My father transferred a monthly stipend into my account, which I could use for groceries, utilities, and any other expenses that cropped up. Unlike many of my classmates, I didn’t have to eat in the cafeteria, I hadn’t needed to take out any loans, and I didn’t have to try to juggle a part-time job on top of my studies.

The one condition of this, though, was that I maintain a 4.0 GPA.

If only I hadn’t gotten involved with Nick, this wouldn’t even be an issue. But I had, and on more than one occasion I’d put off studying or doing my homework to hang out with him, because the whole experience was thrilling. Here I was, dating a popular guy, a guy that other girls around campus were interested in, yet he had wanted to be with me. I still occasionally thought back to that time, marveling at the fact that it had even happened in the first place, except those memories always ended with me recalling how unceremoniously he had dropped me.

Professor Rochman was heading my direction, and I felt my heart lighten, and relief begin to flood me as he paused right in front of us. I even went so far as to lift my arm, palm up, to receive the paper he was about to hand back to me, but he handed it to Lindsey instead. He glanced at my outstretched palm like I was some panhandler he’d encountered on the street, and then kept walking. A few seconds later, Kristin appeared, dropping my paper down in front of me. She was average height and very thin, with blunt-cut, shoulder length brown hair and big brown eyes that sort of reminded me of a basset hound’s. She looked at me with those eyes but didn’t say anything. I looked down at the paper.

A C+. A big, red C+, right there on the front of the paper, like an angry slash, a blood stain, a symbol of doom.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“How’d you do?” Lindsey asked, leaning over, peering at my paper. “Oh,” she said when she saw the mark. She quickly flipped her own paper over, but not before I caught sight of the A- scrawled across the top.

Professor Rochman and Kristin had finished handing back all the papers, and he was saying something now to the class, but I couldn’t really hear what it was; his voice was distorted, like he was talking underwater.

“It’s okay, Tessa,” Lindsey said quickly. “It’s not like you got an F. C is average. So you got a C+. That’s better than average!”

She smiled, but I could tell that she felt bad for me. She knew what my parents were like. Unlike her parents, who didn’t seem to care what her GPA was, my parents were not going to be happy to hear about this. Part of me wanted to just keep it quiet, to resolve to get nothing but A-pluses on all my remaining assignments, but I didn’t even know if that would be possible. I didn’t have another choice; I would have to tell my parents.

2.