Page 240 of Small Town Firsts

“How?” I whisper, my voice hoarse from crying.

“By dealing with it. Head on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Who is this person? Can you avoid him?”

I shake my head. “He’s my TA.”

Stella cringes. “Ooh. Can you talk to the professor? Change classes?”

“The thought of changing crossed my mind. Do you think I could?” A small seed of hope blooms in my chest.

“Log in and check. You should be able to request it through your portal.”

I’m still not ready to leave the comfy warmth of my bed. Luckily, Stella understands my puppy eyes and grabs my laptop for me.

“Thanks,” I murmur, as I pull up my web browser and log in. Except, every time I try and submit a request to change the class, an error message pops up. “Ugh!”

“What’s wrong?” Stella asks, leaning into my space to look at my screen. “Oh. That blows.”

“What do I do?” My earlier panic threatens an unwanted encore.

“Try your advisor?”

“That’s a good idea.”

I exit out of the portal and open my student email.

Professor Ellison,

I am emailing to request a meeting with you about my class schedule. I tried adjusting it via the portal, but keep running into an error message.

Thank you in advance,

Emmy Pierce

“There,” I say, feeling moderately better. “Now all we have to do is wait for him to reply.”

“And pray like hell he accommodates your request,” my roomie unhelpfully adds.

“That, too.” As I move to close my laptop, a whoosh sounds, alerting me to a new email. “He replied!”

“That was fast! What’s it say?”

“That he can see me tomorrow at noon!”

“You know what that means?”

“What?”

“No more panic until you know for sure there’s something to panic over. Okay?”

Slowly, I nod. “Yeah. Okay.”

Stella grins. “Good. Oh, and it also means you owe me a meal. I tried getting soup, but it looked inedible.”

I can’t help but laugh. “What sounds good?”

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