I was lost.
Perhaps, had I admitted this earlier, I would not have also been late.
The professor was a big man with close-set knees, the kind that make for a poor athlete. He leaned heavily over a worktable at the front of the room, tie thrown over one shoulder, palms flat either side a stack of paper; when I sidled through a door to his left, he peeled a sheet off and shook it at me with detached insistence, never breaking from his recitation of the grading rubric. I took the syllabus and the first available seat.
Nothing happens on the first day of class—I'd learned that much as a freshman, if not the floor plan of the social sciences building. It's downright embarrassing, getting lost as a sophomore. I'd had all of last year to be bumbling and wide-eyed, lugging my textbooks to every lecture, wearing my ID on a lanyard around my neck like an unaccompanied minor at the airport. I was supposed to have blended in by now. I was supposed to have figured it all out.
I slouched in my chair and withdrew a spiral-bound notebook from my bag.
"Do you have a pen I could borrow?" I asked the boy sitting next to me. He wore a red down jacket, the puffiest I'd ever seen, absurd in this early September heat.
He handed me a pencil with the eraser chewed off.
EC122: Introduction to Microeconomics I wrote, and nothing else.
YOU ARE READING
Transfiguration
Short StoryA mysterious boy who never takes off his jacket. A temple where men talk directly to angels. An extremely boring college economics course. Curiosity gives way to confusion as our nameless, genderless narrator learns the reason behind their classmate...
