At the Nouveau Academy of the Arts and Sciences, all students are required to take either a music or art class before graduating. When Kennedy Marx is denied of her request to switch out of Music Theory, vivid details from her past as a piano prodig...
Caught redhanded, Nate Cross leaves senior formal without Becca Matthews. What could those two possibly be arguing about? Is something finally wrong in lovers' paradise?
yours truly, Queen B.
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***
I felt like everyone was staring at me as I stepped foot into fourth period, the bell signaling the start of class thirty seconds later. The speakers buzzed for a moment afterwards, allowing students an extra ten seconds to sprint to their classes before attendance was taken. On the way to my seat, I heard the rumble of shoes scuffing the ground and teachers shutting their doors outside in the hallway. The day had started off like any other normal Wednesday.
Even as my classmates dispersed from their social circles and returned to their assigned seats, eyes followed my shadow to the back of the room. Their curiosity burned craters into my skin, creating a sense of vulnerability that circulated in my bloodstream. The feeling that all of them could see beneath my shirtsleeves, read the ridges in my bones, and derive secrets from the rhythm of my accelerating heartbeat washed over me.
Setting my bag down on the ground against the leg post of the table, I pulled out my physics notebook. The seat next to me was vacant, as expected. Erik was always late. For most of my classes, I sat to the side of the classroom in the middle, the geographical area teachers glossed over when addressing their students during lectures. Physics was the one exception.
Dr. Khan believed that assigned seats were necessary because he needed them more than we did. Even after almost three whole weeks of school, our names were still a collection of letters with mismatched faces. He was one of those teachers that mandated we call him Dr. Khan instead of Mr. Khan, as if the only way to justify his P.h.D. in physics was a prefix before his last name -- the replacement of one letter for another.
A couple heads turned when the door to the storeroom in the back of the classroom opened. Dr. Khan walked to the front with a mug of hot coffee in his hands, steam ascending from the dark liquid. The only word to describe his dark but desolate eyes was hollow. Even though he was dressed in a freshly pressed suit, the way his shoulders slumped forward as he moved hinted at sleepless nights.
All roads pointed to a struggling teacher trying to balance his research and a crap salary. Dr. Khan couldn't be more than thirty-five years old. It had taken him less than thirty-five years to realize that he had spent more than eight years in college only to accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and realize that doing what he loved wasn't sufficient to survive in New York. So, he had to learn to love something else.
"Grab a textbook from the back of the room, turn to page 259, and work on exercise number 16 with your seat partner," Dr. Khan instructed after taking a sip of his coffee. "You'll be turning it in for a grade. Remember that if I can't follow your work, you will get no credit whatsoever."
