Chapter 3 #2
“Ramona fucking Wilder?” A voice a few rows above her cuts through the quiet. “I thought you were in rehab or something. Did they let you out early? Did a teenage girl somewhere need a new song to cry to?”
Her cheeks blaze to the sound of murmured laughter.
She let her guard down a moment too soon.
The nerve, to joke about rehab when she’s seen some good people struggle with addiction.
Even though every cell in her body is telling her not to, she whirls around, finding the guy who called her out.
A lanky white boy with an ugly-ass Stewie Griffin tattoo on his forearm. Figures.
“Nope,” she says with forced cheerfulness, “I came here just so I could listen to your thrilling commentary on a topic you don’t know shit about.”
A handful of oohs.
A girl next to him gives him a nudge. “Be nice, Trev. She was like, my whole childhood.”
“Must be a bit,” someone else says. “Getting in character for a movie or something.”
“Aren’t you a little too old for college? You’re what, thirty?”
Don’t engage, don’t engage.
The first guy, Trev, takes the lead again. “This is just what we need. Budget cuts all across campus, and now there’s a celebrity in here taking resources away from legitimate students.”
Well, fuck her all the way to Saturn. She thought her biggest threat would be an overzealous fan, and she’d have to gently say that she was there to learn when asked for a photo.
She didn’t once stop to consider that her classmates might actually resent her.
But what is she supposed to do—sit back and take it?
“Right,” Ramona says as she gets to her feet, nodding vigorously, as condescendingly as she can.
“Because they’re better used on misogynists who feel the need to overcompensate by pretending they’re so much smarter than everyone around them.
We should really save those precious resources for this dipshit with a micropenis—”
“Hell-o, fall quarter!”
The voice rings out in a confident timbre, belonging to a broad-shouldered man in khaki pants and a pale blue button-down, a messenger bag slung casually over one shoulder.
Professor Nicholas Navarro, according to the schedule they printed for her at registration.
Behind slim circular glasses, his eyes snag right on her.
“A little feisty already, are we?” he addresses the room with a half laugh. “Careful. We haven’t even gotten to Freud or Jung yet.”
Realizing she’s still standing, Ramona shrinks back into her seat.
Jesus Christ, her professor just heard her insult another student in the most immature way imaginable.
She’s usually so careful with her language—her years of media training taught her better than this, even if she was prone to the occasional outburst. And sure, the guy was the one who started it, but it’s not the first impression she wanted to make.
It probably isn’t too late to switch classes.
“If Ms. Wilder is finished distracting everyone,” Professor Navarro continues, this time without a glance her way, “I have a psychological dilemma for all of you. Don’t worry—you won’t be graded,” he rushes to add as a few people reach for notebooks or laptops.
“Behavior and the Brain is an introductory-level course. This is just a warm-up exercise for me to get to know you.”
A warm-up. Okay. Ramona pulls her hair over one shoulder, ends clutched tight between her thumb and index finger, trying her best to relax.
This guy looks more like an ad for J.Crew Outlet than a professor, with the clean lines of his shirt and the well-worn loafers that could easily transition between seasons.
She blames the past twenty-six years of her life for her hyperfocus on what other people are wearing.
His age is a mystery; he only has a few grays, or maybe he’s behind on dye jobs.
Then again, she’s not sure even the most skilled stylist could match the deep russet shade of his hair.
A lovely color, actually. Too bad the blue shirt is all wrong against his tan complexion—True Autumns can’t do pastels.
Still, she decides he’s hot, in a work-in-progress kind of way, but much too clean-cut to be her type.
Everyone she’s dated has had a bit of edge to them, even her first boyfriend, her Greta Life!
costar who had a penchant for sneaking liquor into his dressing room.
The kind of men who look like they could bite.
She catches herself before she goes any further. This is her professor, for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t matter whose type he is.
“Let’s say you go to unlock your car in the parking lot after a morning meeting,” Professor Navarro continues, “and you notice there’s a scrape along one side.
The space next to yours is empty. There’s no note.
No way of contacting the other driver. Do you think the person who hit your car is inherently a bad person? ”
For a split second, Ramona blacks out.
No. It has to be a coincidence; she can’t have hit her professor’s car. Surely the universe wouldn’t do this on her first day.
But it wasn’t the universe—it was her idiotic self. Who this class is now, apparently, going to put on trial.
The girl next to Ramona raises her hand.
“Yes,” Professor Navarro says, approaching their row. “What’s your name?”
“Callie.”
“I’m Nick. Great to have you in class, Callie.”
“Thank you,” she says, just as timid with him as she was with Ramona. “So, well, I think I’d want some more information first. How bad is the scrape, exactly?”
Professor Navarro—Nick—gives her a firm nod, as though appreciating her interest in the details. Now that he’s a little closer, Ramona notices a thin gold hoop through one ear. Huh. Maybe not so clean-cut after all.
He arcs one hand through the air, mimicking the scrape. “It’s a long jagged mark along the right side. Stops just before the passenger door.”
“What kind of car is it?” calls out another voice.
“How is that relevant?” someone else asks.
“Just trying to paint a picture.”
Nick gives a jovial clap of his hands as he jogs to the other side of the room.
Puts a hand to his brow as though trying to get a better look at the student who asked the question.
He’s almost too animated, like teaching is a sport and he can’t possibly be expected to stand still.
“I like where your head is at. Your name, good sir?”
“Joaquin.”
“Joaquin. Excellent. It’s a top-of-the-line, very luxurious 2005 Toyota Prius, with zero of the original siding and 320,000 miles. I think it’s on its fourth battery?”
This draws some laughs while Ramona melts deeper into her seat.
“Are we this afraid to pass judgment?” Nick asks, grinning, even though his car is the one that’s damaged.
“I’ll bite,” says Ramona’s tormentor. “Trevor Mullins.”
“Hey, Trevor. Good to meet you.”
“Yeah. I think anyone who pulls a hit-and-run is a shitty person. They couldn’t take two minutes out of their day to leave a note? They don’t know how much that car means to the owner. Maybe it looks like a piece of junk, but it has sentimental value.”
“I agree,” another student puts in. “My mom was the victim of a hit-and-run years ago, and she still has neck pain.”
“No one was in the car,” someone else says, and Ramona’s alarmed to discover that it’s her.
She swallows hard, aware of the craning heads and bated breath, as though they’ve all been waiting to see what she might contribute.
If she’s a legitimate student or not. “Obviously anyone who leaves the scene of an active hit-and-run is a terrible person. But this was in a parking lot, and no one was injured. It sounds like it was more of a…scrape-and-crawl.”
Nick heads back toward her row. He seems so fucking natural in front of the classroom, with those self-assured strides and easy jokes, and why shouldn’t he? This is his territory. If it makes her a little envious, it’s probably because it’s been months since anything felt that natural to her.
“So I take it, Ms. Wilder, that you don’t believe the perpetrator of this scrape-and-crawl is inherently evil?” She swears when he says her name there’s a hint of chill that wasn’t there with the others.
For a moment, she considers this. Is she, Ramona Wilder, inherently evil? He doesn’t know she was the driver, and yet she can’t shake the feeling that it’s somehow what he’s asking.
“I don’t,” she says. “We don’t know what’s going on in the driver’s life. Maybe they were running late. Maybe they had an emergency, and they didn’t have the time to leave a note.”
“An emergency that gave them the time to slink away and find a new parking spot,” Joaquin says, followed by murmured agreement.
So it’s been decreed. She’s a piece of shit.
She’s had full-body waxing sessions more pleasant than this.
The exercise over, Nick launches a PowerPoint that links to the class website and portal, where, he informs them, they’ll be submitting all their homework, and details each unit they’ll be covering this quarter.
It doesn’t escape her notice that she’s the only one he didn’t have a warm welcome for.
The only one whose name he already knew.
UCLA must have given him advance warning about her, and now she wonders whether he feels the same as Trevor. If he thinks she’s just here wasting his valuable time when she’s going to use her degree for fuck all.
She doesn’t say a single thing the rest of class, except for when Nick asks everyone to introduce themselves with their name, where they’re from, and a fun fact.
“Ramona, LA, I collect vintage salt and pepper shakers,” she says all in one breath, and she’s relieved when the next person jumps right in.
Her bag is zipped before the professor officially dismisses them. She beelines for the door, not wanting to overhear what any of her classmates have to say about her. If they even still care, or if she’s proven herself someone no longer worth gossiping about.
A calm but firm voice stops her.
“Ms. Wilder,” Nick says. “Could I speak with you for a moment?”