as well as I thought, she’d be back.
Just then, there was another knock on my door. Christ, she hadn’t waited long.
I swung it open. “Look, I really need you to—”
But I stopped myself.
It wasn’t Krishelle.
It was Ty Duvall, the idiot football player from Freshman English.
“Oh. Ty. Come in,” I said, opening the door for him.
“Hey, Professor Adler. How’s it shaking?” he asked with his big, dumb smile.
“I’m well, Ty. What’s going on?”
I wanted to get him out of there as quickly as I could.
“Well, I figured I’d stop by and see how I did on my biography assignment. Hoping I got an A, but you never know, do you?”
I doubt he’d ever gotten an A in anything.
And he certainly hadn’t on this assignment.
I shuffled through the papers on my desk and pulled his from the bottom, holding so he couldn’t see it.
“First, Ty, I was surprised to see that Taylor Swift was the topic of your bio. That was unexpected. But I enjoyed learning about such a huge pop star. I hadn’t really known much about her.”
Confusion crossed his face as my snarkiness went right over his head. “You mean Kanye, right? Kanye’s the one I like.”
If this guy were any more of a cliché, it would have been funny rather than sad.
I handed him his five-page paper. His eyes bugged out and red washed over his face.
“What the fuck, dude?” he asked in a raised voice.
Great. Two psychos in one day.
“You failed the assignment, Ty. But I’m willing to offer you the opportunity to write a new paper. Maybe this time you could focus on Kanye.” I couldn’t help throwing that dig at him.
He waved his paper around in front of him. “This is bullshit. You can’t give me an F.”
I sat back in my seat and nodded. “I can, and I did.”
He raked his fingers through his hair, clearly unused to not getting his way. “I don’t know how this could have come out so badly,” he said, flipping through the pages’ red marks.
“Ty, it sounds like you didn’t even write the paper.”
His head snapped up. “I didn’t. Senna Duncan wrote it for me.”
Chapter 34
SENNA
“Senna, do you have a moment?”
Oh, yeah. Always for my hot English professor. I couldn’t wait to hear his feedback on my biography on Maugham. I thought I’d really nailed it.
Or maybe he wanted to discuss something a little more… sexy?
Benno waited for the last student to leave the room before he looked from his phone. And when he did, his eyes were dark in a way I’d never seen them. And tired.
He started by shaking his head. “I cannot begin to tell you how pissed I am that you wrote Ty Duvall’s paper.”
Oh. Shit.
My stomach dropped to the depths of both fear and shame unlike anything I’d experienced in a long time.
Like the first time I brought a friend over after my dad died. My mom was on her way to losing her shit, but I didn’t know that yet. The progression was insidious, and it was probably a year or two after his death that I realized Mom was gone, replaced by a stranger. And that I was pretty much on my own.
“What are you doing here?” she’d growled from the living room sofa when we came in. I was old enough to know she’d been drinking. A lot.
Thus the humiliation.
I showed my friend out the back door and told her I’d see her in school the next morning. When I came back inside, my mother screamed at me until I ran to my room and locked the door. I slept in the closet that night.
And my friend never spoke to me again.
Although the circumstances were completely different right now, facing Benno, the same sensations were running through me. I sniffed hard to keep the tears back.
Shit. Second time in one week I’d cried. What the fuck was wrong with me?
“I… I can explain, Benno—”
He moved closer to me and lowered his voice. “If it were anybody else, Senna, you’d be kicked out of school. I have an obligation to turn you in, but I’m not going to.”
One little tear dribbled down my cheek. But I held my head up, trying to chase away the shame.
“Benno… Benno, you have to let me explain,” I pleaded, grabbing his arm.
He just looked at me.
“That Ty, he’s a horrible person, Benno. He’s extorting me, making me do favors for him or else he’ll get me in trouble with the university for working at Club V.”
He