“I’m late, I know, but I just spent an hour fighting with the ice cream vending machine.” She holds up a half-eaten Chipwich. “Before you ask, yes, it is worth all two of my dollars.”

She’s wearing tight, high-waisted jeans and an oversize highlighter-yellow blazer with ’80s shoulder pads and a graphic tee of Ariel from The Little Mermaid covered in face tattoos. Ariel’s iconic red hair—which reminds me of Rachel Maddow’s but edgier, with soft-pink highlights at the tips—is buzzed short, and there are gauges in her ears.

“Before we get started, no, this will obviously not be our classroom. There was a scheduling mix-up; when we meet on Wednesday, we’ll be in a room with drafting desks and the proper tech so you can hit the ground running. I’ll email alert you all.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. Leila shifts her weight and tosses her hair so that it swishes against my desk, obviously to rile me up.

“Someone tell me,” Professor McPherson asks between bites of the melty ice cream sandwich, “What’s a trope? And please introduce yourselves so I know who you are. Name and pronouns.”

I go to raise my hand, but Leila’s hand pops up quicker, and before Professor McPherson can call on anyone, Leila just goes right ahead and speaks.

“Leila Casablanca. She and her and hers.” She pauses like she’s waiting for applause or something, a by-product of always being under the spotlight when we were in high school. When it doesn’t come, she clears her throat. “A trope is like a common or easily recognizable element of plot, or character, or event-slash-situation in a story.” Her voice is rigid and robotic, like Siri reciting a definition she found online. This is her “I’m superior” inflection.

Professor McPherson doesn’t look impressed. “What’s an example of one?”

“Love at first sight,” Leila answers.

“Why do they work? In other words, why is something like ‘love at first sight’ used over and over again?” Professor McPherson asks. “And how might something like that be turned on its head?” She scans the room then points at me. “You with the gray hair.”

“Chase Arthur. He/him, maybe they/them? I, um …” I start a little breathlessly, but she nods in affirmation. “Tropes work because our brains don’t really have to do much work. We see them so often, from the time we’re babies, that we automatically register their meaning, allowing us to almost predict what’s going to happen in the story. Lonely princess meets a charming prince. We know they’re going to end up together. The fun is how they get there. What do they survive to make their triumphant love worth it?”

“How would you turn that on its head?” she asks.

“You could use another trope,” I answer. “Enemies to lovers. Hotheaded princess who wants to be a knight meets lazy prince from enemy kingdom who has something to prove to his warmonger father, so he goes after the princess, not really wanting her for anything but to spite the king, but through a series of events, they fall in love. Or maybe the princess realizes she’s queer and kills the prince, commanding both kingdoms. Actually, that’s way better. Dibs on that.”