He nodded to her half-full wine glass and the empty next to it that hadn’t yet been taken away. She blushed, despite herself. She wasn’t ashamed. She could order whatever the hell she wanted from a bar. Her face must have said that because next he said, “You’re not exactly the picture of fun and excitement looking like that. Wine is a couch and Netflix drink, not something to be seen with unless you’re at Martha’s Vineyard.”
She glared. “Anything else? I come here to avoid your insults.”
“I can buy your next round if you’d like,” he said, shrugging.
“And spit in it?”
“Watch you drink it and come up with all sorts of witty insults,” he said, smirking. “I’m waiting for my asshole friends who are always late.”
“Maybe they ditched you.”
He narrowed his eyes, dropping down next to her, perhaps thinking this was his best way of getting revenge on her. His presence was the worst punishment he could inflict on her. She angled herself so that she was turned away from him. Unfortunately for her, the result was a view of the wall inches from her face and her own empty wine glasses. He chuckled behind her.
“You can handle having me in your peripheral vision,” he said. “I swear, I’ll be quiet.”
She sighed, slowly starting to shift back. She kept her eyes and head focused in the other direction, however. She played with her wine glass and took a sip, letting the dry, tart taste settle there and work its way down her throat in warmth.
“Did you do the reading for class?”
“I thought you said you’d be quiet.”
“Well, this is an actual question.”
“Yes, I did the reading.”
“Did you think it was bogus too?”
Her first answer in her own head was yes, absolutely, it was bogus. It was a piece on why shifters should be patient with society, that their place in the public was still somewhat new and everyone was adjusting, that they’d catch up. It was complete garbage. She was pretty sure that was the point. No self-respecting person in the shifter rights field could read it and not cringe. But she didn’t want to agree with Erik on anything.
“Yeah, that was the idea,” she said like it was obvious.
“But do you think there’s something to it?” he asked, turning to face her and letting his head cradle in the palm of his hand as his elbow rested on the bar top.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Why the hell should shifters have to wait to be considered people?”
“Well, think about all the small steps towards progress, you know? Like getting the first senator and the first Academy award-winning director. The steps are there,” he said.
“And what about the people who never get to live to see the full progress because they’re told that they should be grateful for whatever miniscule amount of achievement they get in their lifetime?”
“It’s bigger than just one person, or a couple people. It sucks to think about some grandma who picketed for years and years dying before she gets to see all that freedom. But this is about an entire group. The individual never matters in a revolution.”
He didn’t end up meeting his friends that night. Somehow drinks seemed to keep appearing in front of them both and before they knew it, someone flickered the lights for last call, ushering them out the door. They split a ride back to campus and kept their heated debate going before she told him he was wrong, slammed the door behind her, and walked from the car into her apartment building. From the window he rolled down in the cab, he called a good night to her and said he’d see her in class next week.
#
She purposely slipped into the lecture hall for class just before it started, preventing him from eying her too much, trying to talk to her before. She shuffled into her normal seat while he answered someone’s question. She took out her notebook and pen and pretended to be busy writing something down to avoid any eye contact, any chance. Maybe he forgot he asked to speak with her after class.
Fat chance.
“Miss Monroe,” he said when everyone stood to leave.
He beckoned her over with a wag of his finger and she imaged herself ripping the digit off and laughing at his pain. He got her so incredibly angry. She didn’t like feeling hateful, but at least her fear was vanishing into something a little more productive. She could use rage a lot more than she could use nervous energy.
She walked up to him with all the confidence she knew she didn’t have. Her head was held up high, her shoulders rolled back, her hand placed with purpose and care on the edge of her bag.
“Yes, professor?” she asked with an overly sweet voice. She might need to pull it back; that sounded a little bit like the beginning of an awful porno.
“You are here as a guest in my class,” he said, leaning against the desk and crossing his arms in the typical I-know-better-than-you teacher pose.
“Actually, I’m a contributing part of the curriculum,” she said. “I’m a teaching fellow which means I’m meant to serve as an asset to the education of the students taking this course. I have four years of formal education on the matter and several years of experience before that. I’m here to use it.”
“As I see fit,” he said.
“Is it that I’m a woman?” she asked. “Because you’re meant to be a color, gender, and orientation-blind individual working for an educational institution. Is it my age? Because twenty-five is a respectable—”
“It has nothing to do with those things, Miss Monroe. I can assure you,” he said. “I am a firm believer that women will take the Earth from men and we’ll all be better for it. Likewise, I put my faith in the generations below me.”
“What’s the issue then? It’s not fair of you to disrupt my education like this.”
“Why did you go into this field?”
He’d switched his position again; now it was the teacher therapist here to tell her all the places she fucked up so far in her life. He was convinced he knew better, she could read that all over his face. He thought the grey stubble on his chin made him look older, made him seem wiser. He thought the build of his body made him seem powerful, the strange sort of energy coming off him made him seem dangerous…
Wait.
Oh crap.
Suddenly, she realized the source of all his frustrating antics with her, all his decided mistrust of her competency. He was a shifter. Of course. He seemed to read her mind on her face because he was nodding.
“I know why I got into this field,” he said. “It was the only option I had at the time because no one wanted to give me a chance. Now I’m making sure new generations are educated and have chances of their own. Why are you here?”
“My best friend is—”
“That, right there. That is your problem.”
He pushed himself up from his passive position leaning against the desk and moved to collect his things, shoving books and papers back into his bag.
“You can have empathy, you can have sympathy. You can cry a thousand tears for what your friend is going through and the things she faces, but you can never know what it’s like for her. You will always be an outsider, and that makes you a liability to the education of future generations when you will always be a secondhand source,” he said, slipping his coat on. “You’re here because the administration forced you on me and I cannot reject a student for the practicum portion of your courses. So you will continue to be here, and that is all. I will give you a satisfactory grade to complete what you need to complete and then you will move on to bother the next professor in your list. I’m the only one of my kind on the faculty, however, so you’ll have a breeze with them by comparison.”
And with that, he walked past her and out the door of the lecture hall. It was the first time she’d seen him express an actual emotion. He was frustrated; she saw hints of how sad he was below the surface. He was a dragon shifter. She’d never met one before. The only shifters she knew were Trish and her family, all wolves. She was left stan
ding there, staring at the wall at the back of the lecture hall with a gaping mouth and wide eyes.
She couldn’t tell if she felt incredibly guilty for what he said or wanted to get even angrier. She’d heard bullshit like that before, that the non-allies of shifters couldn’t possibly understand or help a single thing. She’d seen it at protests and rallies. Now she faced it in her own classroom, from a man who spouted it right to her face, telling her she wasn’t only useless to the cause but a detriment to it all.
She wouldn’t take that at face value. He couldn’t stop her from running her discussion sessions. He couldn’t stop what she did outside of class and no matter who he was or what he went through, he didn’t have the right to hinder her education because he believed one thing about her without ever giving her the chance.
He wanted to make a challenge for her? She’d answer it.
Chapter 5
She sat in the Starbucks the following day, waiting for her students to arrive. She probably should have picked a slightly less crowded place to meet at three p.m. on a workday afternoon, but it was the only café nearby that had reliable Wi-Fi and wouldn’t glare at them when they didn’t buy anything while sitting there for several hours. The baristas were too busy rushing Frappuccino orders and stressing about whatever midterm was already on the horizon to worry about a couple of students using up the table in the corner.
“Well, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
It wasn’t one of her students. It was Erik. Earlier today in the seminar, they’d gotten into a heated debate about whether milestone strides were enough for the shifter movement or whether they should be instead looking to achieve huge successes. It had lasted so long that the proctoring professor stepped in and told them both to be quiet the rest of class to let someone else in the seminar have a turn. And now, here he was, standing in front of her once again with that smirk across his dark eyes.
“Can I help you?”
“You look deep in thought.”
“Yes. So I’d love it if you left.”
Naturally, he did the opposite. He pulled out one of her chairs and sat down across from her.
“That’s for my students.”
“What students?”
“I’m holding office hours.”
“In a Starbucks, impressive.”
“Let me guess, you bring your students back to your bong-infested apartment and get them high so they can like, totally talk about the shifters and the universe, man.”
“I don’t hold office hours.”
She rolled her eyes. She took a sip of her cooling coffee. It was 3:10 and no one had yet to appear. She told them she’d wait for anyone who needed to stop in by three thirty before calling it quits on the day. Before she’d been happy with herself just to say she was doing this at all, she was there in the Starbucks, ready and waiting. But now, with Erik as her audience, she wanted someone to show up, just so she could prove a point. It was probably bad show for a teacher in training, using your students as trophies or an I-told-you-so moment but she really wouldn’t care if it knocked the smirk off Erik’s face.
“So, how is the demon professor? I heard Tekkin was an awful piece of shit,” he said, leaning back and throwing his arms lazily over his chair.
“He is,” she said, curtly.
“I’ll give you props for that much, Monroe. I probably would have requested some kind of transfer the second I saw his name on my schedule,” he said. “He’s such a know-it-all, pretentious fuck.”
Erik didn’t know, she realized. How could he know when she didn’t? Dr. Tekkin’s obsessive interest in the shifter studies was something so close to home. This was probably the closest he got to exhibiting any kind of emotion. He’d made a career out of trying to convince students why his existence was valid without the students ever seeming to know. She had the brief urge to defend him before she remembered the look on his face as he told her she’d never be good enough to effectively teach a class of her own, effectively protest the horrors that the world wanted to level on shifters.
“So is he really—”
“Excuse me, Miss Monroe? I’m not too late, am I?”
A young woman from the class stood there. Alessia recognized her as the small, mouse-haired girl who constantly sat in the back, likely to avoid Tekkin’s snake-like eyes. She looked only slightly less nervous standing there, her books pressed to her chest.
“No, of course not. Take a seat,” she said, a little too excited, shoving her things out of the way. The girl looked over at Erik. “This is Erik. He was just—”
“Getting ready to help you. I’m her teaching assistant,” he said, smiling and then offering a wink at Alessia whose blood began to boil.
“Okay. Cool,” the girl said in a small voice. “I was wondering if you could help me with the reading? I’m having trouble understanding it. My name is Chaya, by the way.”
“Well,” Alessia said, pulling out her own copy of the reading that was covered in notes and highlighter marks. “The first thing to know is that this is a manifesto. That means it’s a proclamation of intentions for a specific group. So you want to look at it more as a speech than a written piece. It will have those bombastic, emotional qualities. It’s not a research paper or a dissertation.”
“You also want to keep in mind,” Erik said, leaning into the table so his voice couldn’t be ignored. “Karl Marx was a huge supporter of the shifter status in Europe and thought it was crucial to the decay of capitalism and the rise of communism. Here, the shifter status in society, as far as he’s concerned, is tied to the economic status of the government. He was the first one to propose something like that. It’s the reason you’ll find a lot of shifters identity as what the right wing government would call ‘party extremists.’ A lot of them identify as socialists, according to the 2010 census.”
Alessia couldn’t say he was wrong. That was exactly what was going on in the text. She’d written a paper about it for her history elective years ago when she took Soviet Russian History in her final semester. Marx was the looming villain of the capitalist west, but to the shifters and their allies, he was a champion of their importance, the first person to say they mattered in twentieth-century society. She had no doubt that Tekkin would spin his lecture towards not so much pro-Marxism but total hero worship of the man. She needed to prepare the students for that.
“So was Marx talking about social reform or reform for shifters?” Chaya asked.
“They’re linked topics,” Alessia said. “Marx is often the champion for the disenfranchised because he brought importance to various social statuses and ethnic groups that the ruling elite wanted to ignore. He argues not only are they part of the system, but they will be the ones driving the future of our economies and governments.”
The girl scribbled this down feverishly in handwriting that she couldn’t possibly discern later.
“I’ll type up some notes and send them to you to use as a guideline for your own reading,” Alessia said, taking pity on Chaya’s clearly cramping hand.
“That would be awesome, thank you.”
“Why don’t you get a drink or something and we’ll start by looking at the lecture notes. Tell them you’re here for a study session and it’s 50% off.”
The girl hopped up and got in line behind the horde of blond, white girls waiting to get their vanilla bean, sugar-laden cups of barely coffee. When Alessia turned back, Erik smiled at her. He wasn’t smirking, he wasn’t winking, he wasn’t sneering like he knew something the rest of the world didn’t. He was smiling, honest to God looking like a nice man for once.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Nope. You’re doing fine.”
The problem was it seemed like he totally meant it. He wasn’t making fun of her in some indirect way. She’d actually managed to impress him and got some kind of human response. It made her a little bit uncomfortable. She opened her mouth to say something, maybe a thank yo
u, or something not completely vitriolic, but she never got the chance.
The sirens went off. White strobe lights started flashing and a long siren whined. Everyone jumped at once when the sound cut through the typical din of the Starbucks. Alessia looked up and Erik turned around to see everyone looking wildly confused. He went over to call Chaya back to the table and they gathered their stuff.
“Fire drill?” he asked as he helped both women shove their papers in their bags.
“That’s not what the fire alarm sounds like.”
They walked warily outside along with the sea of other students and were met with a strange sight. Thousands of purple flyers floated through the air, dropping from somewhere above. The ones that had already made it to the ground coated the quad in a layer of purple. Erik reached down to pick one up, turning it over.
9-21-1017. WE WILL RESIST.
That’s all it said. They all were stamped with these big, bold letters and shouting words. Alessia looked around for any other sign or clue, but there was nothing, just purple flyers littering everywhere.
“9/21… what is that?” Erik asked, flipping the flyer around to see if there was any other writing.
“The fall festival block party,” Alessia said.
“Well, that’s only going to end well.”
#
All the students were sent back to their dorms, afternoon and night classes were canceled while police covered the campus, looking for their culprits. Alessia stood in her apartment, her hair wet from a shower and her pajamas on. She looked out the window at the cops below with bomb-sniffing dogs and flashlights. There was no way to tell who sent out the flyers, but there was one word on everyone’s mind—shifters. Alessia always wanted to believe the best in them, everyone had their extremist groups. But the shifter extremist groups made it very hard for normal shifters to go about their lives without facing some kind of prejudice or, worse, danger.
Purple was the official color of the National Shifter Party. They vowed to get one of their members into a seat in Congress by the next election and took up any sort of resistance to their ideas with outright violence where they deemed it necessary. They weren’t a model group for the shifters at all, nor were they even the largest of their political factions, but they always managed to be the loudest so they were the only ones anyone ever paid attention to.
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