Page 37 of Heartbreak Kings
For several heartbeats, there was nothing but silence, and I crushed down a surge of apprehension. She did not strike me as the flaky type, which meant that if she wasn’t there, there had been another problem. But then I heard a creaking sound and footsteps padding toward the door. It unlocked, and Sabine peered out at me skeptically.
I caught her checking beyond me and nodded a bit sadly, knowing she had grown wary of every interaction at this school. “Come in,” she offered finally, and I nodded and followed her inside.
The room was small, neat, and dominated by her computer setup, complete with professional lights, a decent core system, and an enormous flat screen. It was almost as big as the one Jude used for his gaming. As I glanced around, I saw a tripod tucked inside the open closet and a newish camera sitting on a shelf near it. She only had one chair, the computer chair at her desk. Her bed was narrow, the bedspread plain, as were the curtains. Her upgrades to her space had been purely technological.
“Thanks for coming,” she declared in a very neutral voice, her gaze searching my face. I felt that distracting surge of desire again and forced myself to do quadratic equations in my head until it went away. She noticed my distracted expression and frowned. “This is my one morning off, so let’s get to it. How much time do you have?”
“Three hours until classes,” I clarified. The classes in question were hardly ones I had to worry about. Anthropology and the single obligatory English class for general education requirements that I hadn’t tested out of. In short, largely a waste of my time. If she turned out to need more help, I could skip them. “I can stay longer if needed.”
Her eyebrow quirked, and she smiled faintly. “I only really need help in my general education courses. I have three of them, and I swear they’re giving me fits. I’m still not sure why they’re required.”
“Well, the liberal arts department demands a certain amount of math and science. They consider it part of a well-rounded education. A common practice that I find tiresome. However, as a physics student, I should be especially able to help you study and prepare.”
“Good. I got ambitious and took astrophysics, and the professor is difficult. I swear that man talks like he grew up in a lab orbiting Jupiter and has only had human contact with other scientists since birth. I wrote down all his jargon, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.” She went to her desk and pulled out a blue-covered notebook. “You can sit on the bed. I only have the one chair right now. They wouldn’t let me keep the one I borrowed from the common room.”
“Fine.” It felt strange settling on the edge of her bed, feeling the overstuffed comforter give under me and smelling her perfume and soft, enticing, musky under-scent clinging to it. I surreptitiously adjusted the crotch of my trousers once she had handed me the notebook and then turned to go back to her chair. “Dr. Lambert?”
“Yes, the exact one. Why did you have him?” Her faint smile became an exasperated smirk.
“I had him my first year, when I was determining which aspects of physics I wished to focus on. He helped me decide against astrophysics.” I tried on a small smile, touched by irony, and saw her blink in surprise. “He is the very definition of a lab rat. He never even bothers to correctly spell what he puts on the board. Apparently, when he coauthored the textbook, he left his editor in tears over his quirky spelling and grammar.”
“Thank God it’s not just me, then.” She puffed out her cheeks and regarded me curiously. “You’re a little different. Were you putting on an act as well that night?”
“A bit of one. I withdraw during conflict. I only emphasized it more than usual. Had I the choice, I would have boycotted the entire meeting.” I hesitated, knowing that sounding too sincere after being so detached would seem fake to her. She was smart, observant, and understandably wary.
“I see.” She sounded a touch startled. “You all just went along with what Blake wanted?”
“He is chapter president,” I replied a little too quickly. “We voted him in for a reason, and we follow his lead for a reason. However, that does not mean his authority is unquestionable or that he doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Fair enough,” she intoned. Her thoughtful stare told me she was chewing over this additional information and didn’t quite know what to make of it yet. Then she pushed all that aside.“So, astrophysics.”
“Yes, let me see here.” I opened the notebook and started paging through, finding her notes thorough and in a much neater hand than Lambert’s. “Well, you’ve taken down everything he said and wrote, though I’m afraid he’s misspelled even some of his technical terms.” It was almost painful to see those transcribed mistakes glaring from the page. The perfectionist in me wanted to fix all of them.
“Yes, I tried looking some of this up online to get a bit of insight, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t even find them with suggestions on.” She winced.
“Let’s start there, then. Your notes will do you no good if parts of them are incomprehensible.” I grabbed a red pen and started the corrections, working quickly. “You may notice a few—” I paused, eyebrows climbing as I skimmed the gibberish written under the first diagram. “You wrote everything down word for word?”
“Yes. I even photographed the board so I could copy the diagrams correctly.”
“I see. Well, he’s mislabeled his own diagram.” Instead of trying to fix it in the limited space, I took a gummed notepad from my pocket, drew the corrected diagram onto it, and then pasted the corrected one over her copy. “There. That should be a great deal more comprehensible.”
She peered at it, then nodded, looking relieved. “And here I thought I was just stupid or something.”
“Far from it. The man is misleading his entire classroom with jargon, poor spelling, and mis-drawn diagrams. He’ll have dozens of students failing the midterm because of his own mistakes.” I couldn’t keep the warmth out of my voice as I spoke to her. But when I took back the notebook, I saw that her smile had returned.
We went on like that. Once she realized that the problem was with the professor and not with her ability to understand the material, she immediately did a lot better. “So, this rule for calculating the distance of galaxies according to their redshift—is this written correctly?”
“No. The Hubble law in question is not a strict ratio. It is that same ratio, minus one.” I added that to the equation, squinting in disgust. Lambert was a dinosaur, one of the oldest members of the science faculty. And as we went on, the sheer number of stupid mistakes made me wonder if his mind was going. “You know, I’m actually serious about his setting your classmates up to fail. This is going to lead to a very large number of angry students addressing the dean of sciences next week.”
She sighed and nodded, biting her lip. “We have one more class before the midterm. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t pass out the collected notes with a little memo.”
“What sort of memo?” I struggled with the growing sense of affection I felt as I gazed at her. I had gone from wanting to impress her intellectually to wanting to touch her, and it had barely been an hour.Focus, damn you. She needs your full abilities, not you turning into a horny fool after only an hour.
“Hmm.” She tapped her gleaming lips with a finger. “Something like, ‘I have corrected these notes, including the diagrams, with the aid of an upperclassman in physics.’ Then include the photos of the board so they can verify that he messed up, and I didn’t just mis-transcribe.”
“That could make you some friends in your astrophysics class. For those students, the warning alone could be a lifesaver. How do you plan to prevent Lambert from finding out? He’s extraordinarily proud.” I felt a stab of apprehension at the prospect of her getting on the nasty side of the faculty, on top of everything else. Lambert had been especially furious in his online screeds against not only allowing Sabine to attend, but even allowing women to be on faculty. He would need little provocation to provide Sabine with a fresh set of problems.
“There’s an email list for the class. I can copy the emails on the list and make sure that Lambert’s isn’t among them, then cc everyone.” Her expression was apprehensive. “Do you think some asshole in the class will forward it to him?”
