by Martha Carr
When she slipped inside the open door to a computer lab, Cheyenne felt the stares of the other students on her. She picked a seat at a table in the middle row, slid her backpack off her shoulders, and settled in.
“Hey.” A kid in a white-and-blue-striped polo and his hair gelled into inch-long spikes took the chair next to her. “This seat taken?”
Cheyenne cast him a sideways glance and raised an eyebrow. “Just as taken as every other empty seat in the room.”
“Cool. Cool. I’m Peter.”
She nodded and unzipped her backpack to pull out her laptop.
“Mind if I ask you a question?”
Cheyenne shrugged as the dude named Peter kept talking. “‘I was wondering if the ‘90s called and asked for their death gear back. You still have a landline too?” Hushed laughs came from the group of other grad students beside the door.
“Don’t be a jerk, Pete.” A girl leaned against the wall with some books clutched to her chest. “She’s not gonna get the joke. The Goth kids I went to high school with never laughed.”
Cheyenne slid her laptop out of its sleeve and centered it on the table in front of her. She pushed aside the provided keyboard to make room and opened her computer.
“Seriously, though.” Peter propped an elbow on the table and stuck his chin in his hand. “I wanted to ask when I first saw you, but I figured it was better to wait until at least the second week of the semester, right? When everybody’s a little more open to getting to know each other. In grad school. So, what’s up with all the piercings? Do they mean something, or are they just supposed to make you look extra scary?”
“If you think this is a lot, I used to set off metal detectors at the airport.” Cheyenne sniffed and tucked her laptop sleeve back into her backpack. “So, yeah. I guess that scared a few people.”
Peter tilted his head, still resting in his hand, then leaned back and put a lot of unnecessary effort into looking her up and down. “I thought the whole Goth thing was a phase.”
With a deep breath, Cheyenne lowered her hands from her keyboard, folded her arms, and turned to look at the guy. “Anyone who grows out of something that makes them feel like themselves is quitting. I’m not a quitter.”
“Huh.” The dude’s top lip twitched as he decided whether to smile. “That’s deep.”
Cheyenne turned back to her laptop and shrugged. “I thought the whole asshole-jock thing was supposed to be a phase too. Looks like you don’t quit, either.”
Peter’s mouth popped open, and the group of his friends standing by the classroom door burst out laughing. They spread out to take their seats, and the guy sitting next to Cheyenne nodded and pushed the chair out behind him as he stood. “Nice getting to know you, whatever your name is.”
She waited for him to pick another chair at the row of desks in front of her before she typed in her laptop password and sat back again. More than anything, she wanted to sync her laptop with the server at her apartment and check on her running search through the dark web. Nothing else had pulled up in her three hours of sleep, but that wasn’t unusual. Cheyenne was just impatient. And tapping into her personal IP using the school’s internet was the dumbest thing she could do—especially while running on almost zero sleep.
The lab filled up with the other grad students in their first years of pursuing a master’s in computer science, though the room was only half-full. Then the professor walked in, pulling a light-brown briefcase on wheels behind her. The color of the leather made Cheyenne think of Ember’s jacket, which now had to have at least one bullet hole in it, if not two.
“See, so I appreciate my grad students so much more,” the woman said as she hustled toward her desk at the front of the lab. “If anyone’s late, it’s gonna be me.”
A few chuckles filled the room, followed by the sound of backpacks and briefcases unzipping. Cheyenne took a quick glance around at the others. Most of the students pulled out pens and pencils and notepads, which seemed ridiculous when they were here for programming and code-writing. Do they write faster on paper than they can type?
Cheyenne brought her laptop with her everywhere, even for her undergrad classes. She’d bought a new HP Spectre x360 to celebrate graduating with what amounted to a useless bachelor’s degree. But even now, at their third class of the semester, she was the only one who’d thought it was a better idea to bring her own laptop instead of depending on what the school called “cutting-edge technology.” The thought almost made her smirk.
“So who went the extra mile over the weekend and dug into all the extra fun bits of Python and Java they wouldn’t teach you as undergrads?” Professor Bergmann stood behind her desk, the handle of her rolling briefcase still extended to its full height. The woman was tall and graceful, which was the complete opposite of every instructor Cheyenne had had for her classes before grad school. Her hair was black, which contrasted with her olive complexion and striking hazel eyes.
I could be jealous right now. Cheyenne pressed her lips together and pulled up the two coding programs, just to be ready for whichever one their professor would tell them to pull up next. Or I could just appreciate the fact that she’s wearing neon-yellow Chuck Taylors and a tie-dyed skirt. She looks as much like as an IT professor as I do.
The class was silent. Cheyenne could feel the looks darting all over the place from most of the students sitting in the front row ahead of her. Only two people sat behind her, both of them at opposite ends of the last row of desks. She stared at her laptop.
“Seriously?” Professor Bergmann chuckled and scanned her students’ faces. “Oh, come on, people. You’ve spent four years figuring out how to do college. Please don’t tell me you’re taking on grad-school loans just so I can teach you how to think for yourselves.”
A girl with a messy bun tied closer to her forehead than the top of her head sighed and gestured toward the professor. “If you don’t give us an assignment before the weekend, how are we supposed to know you wanted us to show you something today?”
“Huh.” The corners of the professor’s mouth turned down in mock consideration, and she stroked her chin. “I thought you guys wanted to be here. Was I wrong?”
No one said a word.
“It’s in the syllabus,” Cheyenne muttered, still staring at the black background of her desktop screen. Then she bit her lip just to keep from smiling.
“What?” The woman sitting in front of her beside Peter turned around, the messy bun on her head wobbling a little. She cocked her head and shot Cheyenne a fake smile. “I didn’t hear you. Sorry. I think you were mumbling.”
Cheyenne just raised an eyebrow and stared at her computer until the other student shrugged and turned around again. “It’s in the syllabus.” This time, she said it loud enough for everyone to hear. “It’s laid out by the week and a detailed summary of what we’re going into.”
Messy Bun scoffed.
“It’s okay if you lost it,” Cheyenne added. “I bet that happens a lot in grad school.”
“Oh.” Messy Bun dug through her well-oiled, expensive-looking designer messenger bag, jerked out a bright-yellow folder, and thumbed through the small number of papers inside. “I didn’t lose it.” She whipped out the stapled-together syllabus and spread it out in front of her on the table. “But it says nothing about having to do assignments before we learn about it in class.”
Professor Bergmann opened her mouth to reply, but Cheyenne just couldn’t help herself. “At least your dog didn’t eat it or anything.”
The heavyset guy sitting behind Cheyenne with the wild red beard who smelled like beef ramen let loose a low chuckle. A few others in the class followed suit. Messy Bun stiffened in her chair but just kept staring up at their professor, waiting for an answer.
“I’m glad you still have that thing.” Professor Bergmann pointed at the syllabus, her mouth curled up at the edges. “I spent a lot of time putting that together.”
“Is that what you want us to do, though?” Messy Bun
asked.
“Hmm. What do you want to do?” The professor’s hazel eyes glittered with amusement, and she gazed at Cheyenne as if they were in on something together.
“I want to know if I’m supposed to try finishing an assignment before it’s even assigned. That’s not too much to ask.”
Bergmann dipped her head and grinned. “No. Don’t beat yourself up too much, though. This is the first time you’ve asked and, before you feel insulted, keep in mind if I wanted to argue about what comes first, the assignment-chicken or the turning-it-in-egg, I’d be teaching philosophy.”
The big guy sitting behind Cheyenne snorted.
“Which I’m not,” Bergmann added. Then she glanced down at her desk again, tapped her fingers on the wood a few times, and pulled her grin into a calmer, gentler smile. “I’ll return to my original question and ask if any of you took your education into your own hands and dove a little deeper into these programming languages over the weekend.”
Messy Bun just shook her head and folded her arms. “Nobody will tell you they did.”
I could. Cheyenne fought back a little chuckle of her own. But saying I did it over the weekend instead of five years ago would still be lying.
“Well, it doesn’t hurt to ask, does it?” Professor Bergmann spread her arms and seemed to make a point to not stare at Messy Bun. “But now you know that in my class, I expect at least a few of you to be working on your own time, with your own brains, even if that means I didn’t assign it. If anyone can come up with a workaround to something I’ve listed in any previous class, a different route or shortcut…hell, even if you fumbled your way into an encrypted box with no way out, I wanna hear about it. It helps me gauge the class overall and where we’re headed the rest of the semester. More than that, it helps me gauge the IT nerds I get to work with for at least the next four months.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
Peter nudged Messy Bun with his elbow and shook his head, muttering, “Just drop it, Natalie.”
Messy Bun turned her head a full ninety degrees to shoot him the death-glare.
Ignoring the power struggle between the students in the front row, Professor Bergmann clapped her hands and nodded. “So, my fine-groomed grad students, here’s what I’d like you to get crackin’ on.”
Before the woman retrieved the smartboard remote from her briefcase, Cheyenne felt her gaze settle on her for a few seconds longer than a fleeting glance. The half-drow kept staring at her laptop.
“I like Python as much as the next person who knows what they’re doing. I’m sure you guys spent hours making lists of all the pros and cons before you got here, so I won’t bore you with the fundamentals. That’s another thing you should know about this class.” Bergmann straightened and clicked a few items on the smart screen with the clean, sleek white remote in her hand. “Today, we’re gonna check out some nifty little tricks C++ can pull that most people overlook.”
“See?” Messy Bun whispered to Peter. “Even if we did any work over the weekend, she’d scrap it all and say we’re going over something else…”
Cheyenne tuned them out and focused on what Bergmann was showing them; if this class was like the first two last week, that presentation would last about five minutes before the professor told them to scatter and get to work. Not for the first time, she cursed her overactive hearing—Messy Bun’s voice was the first living experience she’d had with nails on a chalkboard.
Chapter Nine
“I still don’t understand why everyone calls these ‘smartboards.’ Questions before I turn off this giant, dumb computer behind me and let you guys get down to the work that requires actual intelligence?” Professor Bergmann lifted the remote in her hand, acknowledged the lack of questions, then turned off the power and tossed the remote into her briefcase. “Excellent. Time to exercise your practical-application skills and build another light-level algorithm using C++. All the software’s already on the lab’s computers, with updates, so none of you will have to worry about sorting that mess out first. Oh, and just to be clear, I don’t want to see anything based on the example I gave you that’s over forty percent of the original. You’re learning how to build here, not copy and paste.”
The woman didn’t look at her students again. Instead, she sat and pulled out her laptop. Cheyenne heard the woman’s low chuckle—just a few puffs of air through Bergmann’s nose.
I can’t believe this is an upper-level class.
They’d just been assigned something on the lower side of advanced. Cheyenne had used C++ when she realized she was into computers at the age of eight—she might have manipulated her mom into thinking the coding expansions and non-essential updates were a surprise Christmas present for her—and that had been eleven years ago.
This little project the professor seemed to think would take her students an hour and a half to complete would take Cheyenne ten minutes if she wrote the code from scratch. She already had the bones left over from a pet project she’d mastered and abandoned when she was fifteen.
She opened the program on her laptop—she refused to use the lab’s computers—and searched for the little block of code she’d written off as useless once she’d moved on to bigger and better things.
At least, I thought college was going to be bigger and better. If I learn nothing new in the next two years, I should ask for a refund.
That made her smirk, and her fingers flew across her silent keyboard while the rest of the students were still pulling up the program and laying their foundations. Cheyenne could have paid for her entire graduate education ten times over without batting an eye; the money her grandparents had left her made sure of that. That would’ve been nice to have as a freshman, sure, but she’d gotten a full ride to Virginia Commonwealth University on academic scholarships, none of them manufactured on her end, so it wouldn’t have made a difference.
And the way Mom talks about them, her parents were people who didn’t think anyone could be responsible for anything until they were twenty-one.
She worked on the assignment until she felt like tearing her hair out in boredom. Then, she remembered a trick she’d learned with closed proxies and threw it in for fun. If Bergmann couldn’t open it, all the better.
Cheyenne logged onto the school’s slow wi-fi and attached her new code-baby to an email from her personal address. The university’s email provider drove her nuts; despite having to work around sending files that were way too big for undergrad assignments, all her previous instructors had insisted on everything being sent that way. Bergmann, however, had provided her new students this semester with an alternate email address unencumbered by a crappy server.
Once she hit send, she reclined in her chair and closed her eyes. I need to sleep.
Five seconds later, a little ding came from Bergmann’s computer. She watched the professor lean forward with a frown of curiosity, click a few times, then her eyes widened. She glanced over the top of her laptop at Cheyenne.
The half-drow glanced away and cleared her throat. She shut her computer and stood, turning toward the door.
“Do you have somewhere to be, Miss…”
“Cheyenne.” If she saw my name on a roster, she knows what it is.
Bergmann smirked. “Miss Cheyenne.”
“Just the bathroom.” Cheyenne jerked her thumb toward the closed door. “Unless we’re supposed to be locked up until ten.”
The professor’s eyes narrowed, and her laughter cut off. “Interesting choice of words for someone who opted to keep coming to school.”
Some other students raised their heads from staring at the monitors and looked at Bergmann, then at Cheyenne. Most of them kept working, but Messy Bun wasn’t one of them.
Cheyenne shrugged, although it took more effort to keep from getting pissed off. “I didn’t think I had to raise my hand and ask permission.”
“You don’t.” Bergmann leaned back in her chair. “I just want to make sure you have enough time to do the work before you
head off to someone else’s class.”
Seriously? She just got my email.
“Yeah, I’m good.” Cheyenne went toward the door, fighting not to jerk the handle off. That ribbon of tingling warmth was building at the base of her spine, and it distracted her enough she couldn’t figure out why the door wouldn’t open. “This door get jammed a lot?”
“Only when someone’s trying to pull it open.”
Cheyenne whipped her head over her shoulder to shoot the professor a confused look. “What?”
“It’s a push-out door,” Bergmann said. When her gaze darted toward the hair that was supposed to be covering Cheyenne’s ears, the half-drow’s stomach lurched. It made the heat crawling up her back stronger.
Cheyenne twisted the knob and pushed. The door shot out and banged against the wall. She didn’t bother to catch it or close it again as she stormed toward the closest restroom. She didn’t stop until she stood in front of the sink, then she splashed three rounds of cold water on her face.
That was the other thing she hadn’t had time for this morning. Even with the piercings and the braid of her black hair tied tightly around her head, the chains and the black clothes, Cheyenne hadn’t quite recognized herself with the makeup washed off in the shower last night. Even if she’d put any on this morning, she wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to think twice about washing it off in the bathroom sink with water that sputtered and burst from the faucet.
Sighing through the cold wetness dripping off her face, she opened her eyes and stared at her reflection. “Shit.”
They weren’t there, but she’d expected them—the twin points of her half-drow ears poking up from the binding of her hair. She didn’t miss the hint of gold light flashing behind her eyes, either. Her skin hadn’t done much more than go a little darker at her fingertips and around her nails, but even that was enough for people to start asking questions. “No, it’s not a phase,” she whispered, imagining Peter’s stupid smirk as she glared at the mirror. “This is my fucking life.”