Page 6 of Mostly My Boss
I sat in the lecture hall and tried to control my breathing. Third row from the front, one seat in. Not too aggressive, not too far in the background. Not immediately on the aisle, where I might be seen, but not so far in that I would be trampled if people arrived late.
I had my laptop open and ready. It didn’t matter that it was a used, refurbished MacBook Air, because everyone would think it was just my old one. Which was fine. Because no one ever let go of a MacBook Air, once they had one.
I was wearing jeans and a light sweater. My shoes were embarrassingly Keds, but no one was going to see them tucked under the seat the way I had them. I took another deep breath. This was it. I was here. I’d made it.
Fucking Harvard.
The irrational fear that someone was going to tell me my acceptance letter had been a massive joke was starting to ebb.
People were milling in around me. I could hear the hushed helloes of people who must already know each other. I wondered how that was. It was only the first day of class. Four days into the semester if you counted orientation.
Shit. Had everyone made friends already during orientation? I hadn’t really. I’d been too nervous. Then there was the way my brother acted. The second he’d moved me into my dorm he’d left to go get drunk. Fine. Whatever. But did he have to come back and make a scene?
Thank God, he’d ended up passing out in his car. Campus security found him the next morning and told him to leave.
I pushed that out of my mind. I was here, on my first day of class. At Harvard. And I was studying economics. This was the beginning. The first real chapter in my life. John getting drunk after dropping me off was not my problem. It was his.
There was no professor yet. I glanced at the clock on my computer and it was still five minutes until noon so no reason to panic.
I felt someone approach my row but didn’t worry about it because there was still the open seat to my left on the aisle.
“You’re in my seat.”
I turned to the person standing on the aisle. A guy. Tall, thin, angled cheekbones and jaw. Eyebrows that could use a trim. I looked around me as if searching for the person he must be talking to.
“You,” he said, pointing to me. “You’re in my seat.”
I blinked and thought,Here we go. My first hazing episode. He was probably some rich legacy student and somehow he’d already picked me out as The Girl Who Did Not Belong.
Options:
a) Move and don’t cause a fuss.
b) Call him out on his shit.
I was feeling sassy enough to opt forb.
“It’s the first day of class, how can this be your seat?”
This time it was his turn to blink. “Right, sorry. It’s my thing. I always sit in that seat. Doesn’t matter where. Third row back from the front, right side of the room, one seat in. I don’t like to be on the aisle because I don’t like getting up, but one seat in and people are less likely to move over you. My seat.”
“You’re whacked,” I said, still not sure if I was ready to move, although at least I could appreciate his logic. And it didn’t seem targeted toward me.
He sighed. “Okay. Imagine I’m like an athlete…”
I snorted. He was not an athlete.
“Yeah, I know, it’s the lankiness, but trust me, I’m sneakily athletic. But that’s not the point. Let’s say I’m this super athlete and I’ve just been traded to a new team. I’m number twelve. I’m always twelve. That’s like…mynumber. So I get to this new team and I need to be number twelve in order to stay on my game, but someone else is wearing it. That’s you. That seat you’re sitting in is my number twelve. Do you really want to wear Michael Jordan’s number when Michael is on the team?”
That made laugh. “And you’re Michael Jordan in this story?”
“I need to be twelve.”
I shook my head. Whatever was happening, I didn’t think I was being played by some rich douche who thought he could mess with me. Instead, I was being shoved over by a guy who clearly had OCD issues. Picking up my stuff, I stood to shift one seat when I saw he was still looking at me with some expectation that I’d keep moving.
“To make room for our stuff,” he said, putting his laptop case on the seat next to the infamous number twelve.
In my new seat, two down from where he was now sitting, I resettled myself. Laptop open, blank Word doc on the page. A few more mental reminders that I’d earned my place here. That’s when an older man walked down the center aisle and put a briefcase on the desk situated in front of a large white board that took up almost the entire wall.
