“Okay,” the director said as he clapped his hands together once. “I’ve rambled long enough. The first sessions begin in fifteen minutes. Take your time finding your labs and introducing yourself to the other students in your group. You’ll be seeing a lot of each other this summer.”
With that, he nodded, then strode offstage to the echo of scattered applause from the few still paying attention.
I grabbed my worn backpack and stood as fast as I could. “Sorry,” I said with a wince as my bag smacked into the guy next to me. “Sorry, excuse me.” Without waiting for him to move, I struggled to sidestep out of the row between his knees and the row below us.
“What the hell, man?” he grumbled as he tried to shift his legs out of my way.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Careful, man,” Ken Doll said with a laugh. “You might not have enough money to pay your ER bill if you trip and break an arm.”
He had no idea.
Asshole.
The others laughed again.
Just what I needed, those jerks watching me scurry off like a damn frightened mouse.
I wasn’t frightened. And I wasn’t a mouse.
But I couldn’t afford to say what I really wanted and have one of them run to the program director, complaining about the rude, impoverished kid with a bad attitude. Risking my scholarship wasn’t an option. They could think whatever they wanted about me. All that mattered were my goals. And I’d only achieve them by working my ass off and getting accepted into a robotics engineering program. Thankfully, I lived in a city with exactly what I was looking for. Even with scholarships and grants, I couldn’t afford to go to college out of state or even in another city.
For more reasons than my family’s dismal lack of finances.
Only when I reached the hallway outside the auditorium could I finally take a full breath. My lab group met in the Emerson Lab on the building’s third floor. I hoped to make it my future home away from home for the four years of my undergraduate studies.
I jogged the two flights of stairs to the third floor and arrived huffing and puffing. No one had beaten me to the room, so I had my pick of lab tables. As much as I wanted a front-and-center spot to see and absorb every word out of the instructor’s mouth, I didn’t want to paint a second target on my back. A scholarship kid and a teacher’s pet were a bad combination. Instead, I chose a safer option at the center lab table in the third of six rows.
As the room began to fill with summer students, I gazed around at the impressive equipment lining the shelves along the walls. Each table had two laptops, one for each lab partner, and two printed syllabus packets. Hopefully, Intro to Robotics wouldn’t be boring since I’d been studying the subject on my own for years. Time would tell.
The click-clack of high heels across the linoleum floor had me glancing up to find our instructor, a graduate student at MIT, according to what she’d written on the whiteboard behind her desk. When she entered, she walked straight to the desk at the front of the room, where she pulled a laptop out of her bag. She wore straight black slacks and a cream-colored turtleneck sweater. Her long, shiny black hair hung down her back, tied away from her face in a low ponytail. After she opened her laptop, she watched her class fill through black-rimmed glasses and a pleasant expression on her minimally made-up face.
All in all, she was a beautiful woman. Though we were well into the twenty-first century, men still dominated the engineering field. I loved that our first lab had a female instructor. It would be fun to watch the rich bros in my class take direction from her.
Most likely, they’d spend their time slobbering over her instead of learning.
“Good morning, everyone,” she said once most of the seats filled up. Her melodic voice floated above the low hum of get-to-know-you chatter, which faded to nothing when she spoke. “Myname is Marissa Haverstead, and I’m a PhD student here at MIT. I’ll be leading you through this introductory robotics course. Please call me Marissa.”
She glanced down at a paper on her desk, then quickly scanned the room.
“Looks like we have a full class this year and one vacant seat right now, which means…”
My stomach fluttered as I glanced at the chair next to me.
Empty.
Awesome. Everyone in the room had a partner except me. My face heated from the stares of the other students focused my way.
“Someone is running late,” she said right before a body slid into the chair next to me.
“Sorry,” a male voice said without an ounce of the embarrassment I would have experienced at being called out for arriving last on the first day.
I turned to introduce myself to the newcomer—my partner—and my stomach plummeted.
The Ken Doll.
“Hey, FL,” he said with a smirk. “Fancy meeting you here.”
