One

September

Deja Evans glanced from the watch on her wrist to the line ahead of her to her phone and back, impatience oozing from every pore. She was in a rush. She was always in a rush when she was on campus, which meant that, of course, the campus coffee shop Go Brews! had a line out the door. And as always happened, that line was moving at the speed of glacial thaw one hundred and fifty years ago.

She’d just taught her last class of the day, “Introduction to World Cultures”, her largest class of the semester, and her worst in terms of student participation. For a torturous fifty-five minutes, 105 students sat in their seats with blank, bored, or quizzical looks on their faces while she lectured. The only signs of life were when she changed the slide on her PowerPoint, and they wrote down what she’d typed but nothing she said. The more innovative students up front, however, couldn’t even give her that. She changed slides, and they rotated their cell phones for a picture and then promptly turned to stare out of the window.

It was a demoralizing way to spend almost an hour three days a week. All of the jokes Deja told to try and lighten the mood and engage them in discussion bombed spectacularly, she always seemed to be half a lecture behind the syllabus, and she was already on the lookout for as many extra credit opportunities as possible because close to a third of the class had failed the midterm. She hated “Intro” most of all, and she just wanted to go home, lick her wounds, and slip into her baggiest sweatpants like she usually did on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Deja loved schedules, and she wanted to keep up with her regular sad evening routine of puttering around her apartment, thinking intensely about working on one of the many articles she’d half-written and then giving up to pour a glass of wine and watch an hour (or more) of reality television instead. Then she’d cap it all off by convincing herself that a gluten-free frozen pizza was a healthy dinner before falling asleep tired and sad.