by Mia Archer
“Exactly,” I said. “I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a few pointers, y’know?”
“But you’ve taught before. You did gen chem during the summer sessions,” Charlie said. “What’s the difference?”
“The difference is this isn’t a summer class. This is the real thing with students who don’t want to be in there and not the dedicated summer people. I want to make sure I’m perfect at this.”
“But why do you need to be perfect? You just have to be good enough to keep that stipend and that tuition assist, right? Save perfect for your actual work.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said.
“Oh I understand. Perfect Ashley sticking to the perfect plan so you can get into med school. You really need to stop and loosen up sometimes,” she said.
“I’ll loosen up when I’m out of med school and my residency, thank you very much,” I said. “And until that day I’m living school.”
“Well you’re not doing a very good job of it right now,” Charlie said.
“What are you talking about?”
Charlie mimed tapping at her wrist. It had been so long since I’d worn a wristwatch or seen anyone else wearing a non-smart wristwatch that it took me a moment to realize what she was talking about.
“Very funny Charlie,” I said. “You think I’m going to fall for that?”
“Fall for what?” she said. “I’m serious. You have a lab that started five minutes ago!”
My eyes darted down to the time in the bottom corner of my monitor.
Five minutes past the hour. Five minutes past when I was supposed to be up in my lab.
Shit!
I scrambled to grab the folder that had the lab plan for today. It was easy enough. Introductory stuff and going over some of the equipment and rules followed by a short experiment to make sure everyone in the room knew what they were doing.
We wouldn’t work with anything too terribly dangerous in the lab for this class, but it was still a good idea to identify people who might potentially cause trouble or were in need of more handholding as the year went on. I was not going to have any accidents in my lab thank you very much.
There was another girl who supposedly haunted the halls of local community colleges after an incident with a freshman who didn’t follow directions properly and messed something up with a fume hood. I doubted that particular chemistry department urban legend, freshmen weren’t allowed near anything dangerous under a fume hood in their classes, but it still served as a warning of the price of failure.
I wasn’t going to fail, damn it.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said as I moved for the door.
I stepped out into the hall and very nearly tripped over Professor Arnold. He was a short balding man with glasses that had been out of fashion for so long that they’d looped around and come back into fashion. He also always had a smile on his face and everyone loved him even though he taught some of the toughest courses in the program and was notorious for slaying people’s GPAs.
“I’m so sorry Professor Arnold,” I said. “I just realized I’m late and…”
Shit. I just admitted to senior faculty that I was late to my first class of the day. That wasn’t good. But he just smiled and waved me on.
“Go on then,” he said. “I remember what it was like to be young and teaching my first classes.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Of all the profs to run into when I was running late he was probably the best. Still, I kept an eye out for other professors on my way down there. The last thing I needed was to get in trouble because someone who signed my paychecks realized I wasn’t in my lab at the right time.
It didn’t occur to me until I was well away from my office to wonder exactly how Charlie knew I was supposed to be teaching a lab right about now. I hadn’t talked about my schedule with her, but she also wasn’t around to ask. I’d have to file that away and bother her about it later if I thought about it, but right now I needed to get down to the lab and I needed to get down there ten minutes ago.
I swore up and down in my head. I couldn’t believe I got so carried away studying for teaching a class that I forgot about actually going to the class I was supposed to be teaching. It was ridiculous. It was going to be the end of my academic career before it got started if word got out that I wasn’t very reliable.
“Idiot,” I muttered as I stepped into the room.
The students didn’t look like they were having too bad of a time. Some of them were glancing at the clock and I heard a couple of them mentioning the five minute rule while others were arguing about how they heard it was the ten minute rule. I rolled my eyes and wondered if I could’ve ever been this dangerously young.
They were probably mostly freshmen if they were taking intro chemistry which meant they were all only three or four years younger than me, but that was an age gap that was starting to feel like an eternity now that I was the one teaching the classes and not the person at the desk learning. I remembered how old the TAs had seemed when I was the one sitting at a desk.
I wondered if they were looking at me right now and thinking about how old I looked. Damn. Time flies.
I stood at the front of the room for a moment and waited to see if they were going to get under control, but nothing happened. I blinked. Okay then. Maybe I didn’t seem as old as I thought. A couple of them gave me weird looks like they were wondering what the heck I was doing standing at the teacher’s island at the front of the room, but none of them were acting like I was an authority figure.
Finally I clapped my hands a couple of times to get their attention. They looked up.
“Okay everyone,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint all of you, but I’m afraid the five minute rule and the ten minute rule will not be letting you out of class early today.”
I paused and leaned over the table, then promptly stood up when I saw a couple of guys in the class staring. The profs here weren’t much for formality in the dress code so I’d worn a tank top for my first day which probably went a long way towards making me look like another student rather than a TA, but it fell open slightly and I could see them enjoying the goods. I fought the urge to blush.
The last thing I needed was to encourage some naughty TA fantasy in their mind. For one it was off limits, but most importantly none of the guys in this room had anything on offer that I was interested in.
A couple of the girls did, but again, strictly off limits. Not to mention they were all younger and I’d probably lose interest the moment they opened their mouths and started talking.
“Also a quick bit of advice to all of you since you’re new. There is nothing in the student handbook about a five minute rule or a ten minute rule. Follow that rule at your own peril,” I said.
A guy near the middle raised his hand. “Are you really our professor?”
“I am a TA,” I said. “That means I’m a grad student and I get to teach your lab, but I’m not a full professor. I’m also not much for formality so you all can call me Ashley.”
The crowd was about what I’d come to expect from a lab like this. There were the go-getters near the front who were leaning forward eager to suck up all the knowledge I was willing to drop on them. There were the good students near the middle who were ready to go but not nearly as excited as the teacher’s pets in the making in the front row.
Then in the back there were the ones who probably wouldn’t be there by the end of the semester if my summer experience was any indication of their future performance. They were the ones who weren’t going to put in the work this class took.
It was a pity. There was one girl back there who was looking pretty damn cute. If I was inclined to think about students in my class as cute, which I wasn’t because that was a dangerous path I wasn’t going to walk down.
I blushed and looked down to my notes. I needed a distraction from that girl in the back. I was about to get started with the lecture portion of the lab when I realized the same guy had his hand up again.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Are you sure you’re a TA? Because I’ve never seen a prof as fine as you!”
Ugh. So this was going to be one of those students. At least he was nice enough to let me know he was going to be a troublemaker at the get go rather than making me figure it out for myself. Still, it made me wish I’d gotten a good enough score on the stupid MCAT to be in med school right now rather than teaching a class of my own.
Wishing wouldn’t make it reality though.
“That’s not an appropriate question,” I said. “Now if we could get on with the lab for today, it’s pretty simple…”
I glanced down to my notes again and grabbed a piece of chalk. This room was old enough that it still had an old fashioned chalkboard rather than some of the new dry erase boards. Of course “new” was a relative term since the boards were probably installed back when I was still in diapers. None of the TAs got the fancy new electronic whiteboards that used a stylus to write on.
Before I launched into an explanation of what we were doing for the day, a simple exercise to point out the ones who were hopeless with equipment so I could know about potential danger moving forward, I stopped to look at that girl in the back one final time.
There was something that felt different about her. Sure she was in the back of the room, but she seemed so confident. Not at all like the other underclassmen who were looking up at me as though I held their future in their hands, which I suppose in some small way I did.
No, that girl didn’t look worried at all. She just looked like she was here and there was work to do and she was going to do it. Weird. You didn’t usually see that kind of poise and confidence in an underclassman.
I realized the students were staring at me and I shook my head. I didn’t want to get a reputation, so I got to work and endured the sound of cheap chalk squeaking on an ancient chalkboard as I walked them through the day’s work.
That girl was never far from my mind though. I could feel her gaze staring at me, but I brushed it off. There was work to do.
5
Keri
When I got a look at the goddess who stepped into the room and took up a position behind the island at the front of the class I knew exactly what Charlie was talking about. No one else in the room had noticed her standing up there looking absolutely gorgeous, but I’d noticed.
I’d noticed and I wanted to get to know her a heck of a lot better, if you know what I mean. It was a damn shame she was probably the one teaching the class. If what Charlie told me about the rules was anything to go by that meant there wasn’t a chance I was going to be able to get with her.
At least not during this semester. Probably not after the semester either. I wasn’t lucky enough for a girl like that to be into girls. Charlie was probably only teasing me because she knew I’d have some eye candy to look at for the duration of the semester.
Talk about some nice eye candy though.
“Damn you Charlie,” I muttered as the girl introduced herself, Ashley, then fielded some inappropriate questions from a guy sitting about halfway up the class. She did a good enough job of shooting him down though.
Yeah, she wasn’t interested in any attention from her students. Which was a damn shame because again, she looked like the kind of girl I wouldn’t mind giving some attention to. Of course if she was into girls then she probably would have been a regular down at the Alliance or at the very least she would’ve been at one of the bars or something.
I hadn’t seen her at either and she didn’t look to be that much older than me so I would’ve seen her around if she did her undergrad here.
Not that it would’ve necessarily been a good thing if she did hang out with the LGBT crowd on campus. I had something of a reputation, and a string of broken hearts and one night stands, with the L part of that group. So much so that it was getting difficult to find a date. Not that I had much time what with trying to cram four years of premed science classes into two to two and a half years tops.
The girl in front of me turned around and handed me a paper. I stared at it blankly for a moment and she wiggled it in my face. The girl was pretty enough, but she didn’t hold a candle to the goddess at the front of the room.
“Are you going to take the lesson plan or not?” the girl finally hissed.
Oh. Right. I was so preoccupied with checking out the hot TA at the front of the class that I hadn’t been paying attention to what she was saying. Still, could anyone blame me with the way her ass looked in those tight jeans as she wrote something up on the chalkboard?
I wasn’t the only one distracted by the sexy at the front of the class if the blank drooling stares from the guys in the room were any indication.
“Sorry,” I muttered as I took the paper from the girl. It had a simple lesson plan that was basically making sure we knew how to boil water. Probably so they could weed out anyone who was going to be an obvious danger to themselves or the people around them.
“Okay then,” Ashley said.
She clapped her hands together and a cloud of chalk rose in front of her causing her to let out a cute little cough as she tried to wave the cloud away. “If there are no questions then we can head over to the lab and get to work.”
As she said that she looked pointedly at the guy who’d made the inappropriate comment about her hotness earlier. It was a totally accurate comment, but not the sort of thing the guy could come out and say.
“No questions? Good. Let’s get going,” she said.
Ashley led us across the hall to a room in the middle of the building. As we stepped inside I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I’d expected something that wouldn’t have looked out of place back in high school. Long rows with gas lines and water lines and that sort of thing.
This was completely different. There were several rows of massive machines, fume hoods I think she’d called them, set up.
They must’ve been expensive because we were supposed to partner up. At least I think she’d mentioned something about partnering up. I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure about that because I’d been more interested in staring at her ass as she wrote on the chalkboard than in paying attention to the day’s water boiling exercise.
This was going to be difficult if it kept up. It was going to seriously affect my grade if I couldn’t pay attention to the lab because I was too busy paying attention to the teacher.
I walked around the room but people were already partnering up. I was entertaining a pleasant fantasy of getting to work directly with Ashley the sexy TA when I rounded the last row of fume hoods and saw my partner standing at the end of the row. Great. The guy who was going on about how hot she was.
He looked at me and grinned. Well then. Time to head that off at the pass.
“Don’t even think about it buddy,” I said as I pulled up a stool next to him. “I play for the other team, so don’t get any funny ideas.”
The guy shrugged and held out a hand. “Fine with me,” he said. “I’m Craig by the way. That just means we can talk about the hotties in this class together, right? Can you believe that TA?”
I rolled my eyes and looked down at the assignment for the day. He didn’t seem at all perturbed by the eye roll though. Great. Crass and unable to pick up on obvious social cues. This was going to be fun.
“I’m Keri, and could we maybe just concentrate on doing the work? I’d like to get out of here on time. I have to be across campus at the English building like ten minutes after I’m done with this lab,” I said.
“That sucks. You didn’t test out of your English stuff? I tried to test out of as much of it as I could. Can’t stand that,” he said as he started getting our supplies ready for the day’s experiment.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m an English major.”
“Whoa. What the hell are you doing over here in this lab then?”
“Decided I wanted to be a doctor too,” I said. “Sort of a last minute thing.”
“What made you
decide that?”
I looked down and went quiet for a moment. In my mind’s eye I was back in the middle of a mall with people screaming as my grandma’s eyes rolled into the back of her head and she fell forward. I shook my head and I was back in the real world. Back in front of a fume hood.
“I couldn’t help someone when I really needed to and I promised myself that would never happen again,” I said.
“Fair enough,” Craig said. “I thought about doing the whole med school thing, but I decided to be a dentist instead. You make about as much money but there isn’t all that life and death stuff looking at people’s teeth.”
I stared at him for a long moment. I’d never heard of someone talking about going into a branch of medicine in quite such mercenary terms.
I guess it made sense though. If you were in it for the money might as well go for the easy money. Then again easy was relative here. I had a feeling dental school was just as difficult to get into as med school even though I’d never looked into it.
I was starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be stuck as lab partners with this Craig guy for the semester. He seemed easy enough to talk to when he wasn’t drooling over a girl, and me telling him I was into girls seemed to be enough to get him to back off which was more than I could say for a lot of guys. Then he poured some water over my hand and I pulled it back and cursed.
“Watch it man,” I said. “If that was acid or boiling water you could’ve really hurt me!”
“What?” Craig said. He looked down at my hand I was shaking off. Some of the water landed on his shirt. “Oh, shit! Sorry Keri. I was just…”
He was talking to me, but the entire time he was staring down towards the end of the row of fume hoods again. I turned to follow his gaze and realized what had distracted him. It didn’t make me any less pissed off at him for being distracted, but I could understand the distraction.