all. But after three days of prepping on how best to deal with him, I guess it’s a little disappointing.
Or at least that’s what I’m going with. Because while I am a little weak, I’m not a freaking doormat. At least, I don’t want to be.
At exactly nine, Sterling closes the door. He dives straight into his lecture, still ignoring my presence completely. His eyes skip over me as he speaks and he never once calls on me when he asks questions.
Not that I’m volunteering, but still.
Instead, I busy myself furiously taking notes. Sterling Abbot might be a piece of shit, but he brings the topics we study to life. Once I get back to my dorm after lunch, I’ll recopy and color-code them.
There’s something about the repetition that really cements it all in my brain.
“Quiz time!” Sterling’s voice booms through the room, causing shivers to dance across my skin. A few groans rise up, but he shakes his head and slaps his palms down onto the podium. “I don’t want to hear it. You should have completed the required reading for it, so if you don’t do well...” He allows his words to taper off and shrugs— "That’s on you."
I grin to myself, confident I’ll ace the quiz. I not only read the assigned material—twice—but I also read several related articles and studies just to make sure I had a good grasp on it.
On a scale of one-to-ten, right about now, my confidence is a twenty.
Except, when I look down at my quiz, none of the material on it was covered in the reading.
No, no, no.
I ball my hands into fists and scrub at my eyes, hoping like hell my mind is playing tricks on me. It has to be. There’s no other option. Only, when I reread the page, none of the words have changed.
This can’t be happening.
How is this happening?
After everything with Rob came to a head, I threw myself head-first into my studies. It’s not like I had friends, much less a social life, so preparedness became my bestie.
I know I did the right reading. I know it.
My breathing accelerates as I rack my brain, trying to figure out how I messed this up.
I’m about to fail the first quiz of the semester and it’s all my—oh my God!
My brain rockets back to the email I received last week alerting me to an error in the syllabus. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. Mistakes happen all of the time.
But why wouldn’t we have gotten an updated version of it in our class portal?
Why wasn’t the update mentioned in class?
Understanding hits me with the force of an arrow plunging into a bullseye.
This wasn’t a mistake at all. I didn’t mess anything up. I was sabotaged.
Anger pulses within me, like the beat of an angry drum. My blood boils and my jaw clenches as I fight the urge to march down to Sterling’s desk and let him have it. But master manipulator that he is, I know he’d only turn it around on me.
He wants me to make a scene. I’m sure of it. So sure, I’d bet every pretty penny of the inheritance my dad left me. He wants me to throw a fit, to beg and plead.
Well, I won’t give him the satisfaction. I refuse.
Instead, I put my pen to the page, and answer the questions to the best of my ability.
I try not to let it get to me as one-by-one, my classmates hand in their papers and exit the classroom. Minutes trickle by until, eventually, only the two of us remain. The smug grin on his face as I stand from my desk and head his way is all the confirmation I need.
“Tell me,” he says, kicked back in his chair, looking as regal as a king. An evil king.
“Tell you what?” It’s a struggle to control my voice. I want to lash out at him, to scratch him with my claws and wound him with my sharp tongue.
“How do you think you did?”
“We both already know the answer to that, don’t we?”
His grin widens, and it takes my all not to knock it from his face.
“You’re a real piece of work,” I seethe, wondering not for the first time how someone that attractive can be so awful. Shouldn’t men like him have some kind of marker to denote the evil in their blood?
You know very well they don’t, my inner voice cruelly reminds me.
He shrugs before adopting a careless pose.