Chapter 7
So she’d lied about submitting her assignments, then stayed up all night dashing off a few half-baked paragraphs about perception, whatever the hell that means in the context of psychology.
At least she finally figured out the class portal.
She’s behind on the reading and she won’t make a habit of it, but extenuating circumstances, and all that. A onetime thing.
Ramona used to seek out praise like candy. You want to be easy to work with so they keep booking you, her parents would say. She memorized her lines faster than anyone else on set and gave her directors exactly what they asked for and more, grinning through take after take.
Until she got older, wrapped her self-worth entirely in her work. She’d see empty seats at her shows. Her albums dropping in the charts. A bad review. All of it spelled out FAILURE in bold red letters.
After the call from Petra, Ramona spends most of the weekend in a mental state one notch above catatonic. She indulges in her favorite procrastination habit, scrolling online product reviews of things she doesn’t plan to buy. Lounges on the couch with Janet.
Then Sunday night is the VMAs. She was nominated just twice this year, in categories she knew she wouldn’t win.
Though she’s never really cared about them, she watches a little, just to torture herself, with the Behavior and the Brain portal still open on her laptop in front of her.
She’s not expecting the FOMO as she sees her former acquaintances and semi-friends strut across the stage.
She texts congratulations to Arlie J, the night’s big winner, who toured with her a couple years ago.
Arlie doesn’t respond, but she does heart the message a few hours later. Probably in the middle of some glamorous after-party.
Ramona messes around in the portal, clicking on Resources as though it’ll somehow offer a solution to her current problem.
Halfway down the page is a bolded heading for FACULTY FREERIDE, which seems to be a list of designated drivers students can call if they end up needing a ride home.
And there’s Nick Navarro’s name. Figures. So painfully do-gooder of him.
It’s unsettling, being caught between two worlds like this.
If Ramona even wanted to go back—she doesn’t—she can’t shake the sense that she’d feel behind, somehow, like everyone else skipped a grade and she got held back.
School is the world she needs to firmly plant herself in.
Not music, not the VMAs, and certainly not whatever’s happening with Zander Parrish.
At least, until she walks into class on Monday and Professor Nick announces a pop quiz.
“I know, I know,” he says to a chorus of mostly good-natured groans. “How could he, it’s only the third week of school, worst teacher ever.” He starts handing them out to the first person in each row to take and pass down. “If you’ve kept up with the reading, it should be a piece of cake.”
She swears Nick’s eyes linger on her when he passes her the quiz.
He seemed to dislike her slightly less in those emails they sent Friday night and early Saturday morning, and maybe it’s not the glow of validation she got from directors and producers, but it’s something.
Then again, he may feel differently once he reads her assignments.
He’s in chinos again, a cream shirt with the top button undone, a heather-gray sweater-vest. She’s noticed the way other students act around him, how some of the shyer girls and a few of the boys blush when he calls on them. And she can’t blame them—the man knows how to wear a sweater-vest.
She wonders if he was already in bed when he emailed her just before midnight.
The pop quiz feels like a personal attack.
She drums the desk with her pen, wraps the end of her hair around it, mulling question one.
What is Weber’s law? Fuck if she knows. Give an example of opponent process theory.
The theory of processing…one’s…opponents?
What is the primary function of the somatosensory cortex? Well, that one just sounds made-up.
When the other students start turning in their tests at the front of the room, Ramona panics. She doesn’t want to be the last one finished, for everyone to think she was this stumped by the very first quiz. So she leaves the last few answers blank and places hers on top of the pile.
“A pop quiz this early in the quarter? Brutal,” she says to Nick at the end of class, once the room has cleared out and he’s alone at his desk.
She took her time putting her things away without fully processing why.
But maybe if she can just get ahead of those bad assignments and even worse quiz, he’ll go easier on her.
Nick pauses with the folder of quizzes halfway to his messenger bag.
He seems to deflate the tiniest bit after class, as though performing in front of the room like that is a switch he can turn on and off.
A softer mouth. Hazel eyes rimmed with gold.
Up close, she can tell that the stubble scraped across his cheeks and chin is flecked with gray, drawing even more attention to the sharp cut of his jaw.
Irrelevant, she tells herself, even though she’s always been weak for a good jawline. If she ever tries dating apps, she wonders if there’s a way to filter for that.
“I’d say I’m sorry, but…” He trails off with a slight smile. “Not too hard, I hope?”
“Oh—it was fine. I just always get anxious waiting for results. Guess I like instant gratification.”
He splays the folder flat on his desk. “Well then. Let’s grade it right now.”
As he finds her test, he gives her a lift of his eyebrows that suggests this might actually be a bit of a thrill for him. Shit, he’s really going to make her watch while he fails her. What kind of a sadistic fuck is he?
Ramona refuses to let him see how much it affects her.
Squared shoulders, straight spine, teeth ungritted.
She’s wearing wide-legged jeans and an oversized black sweater today, the kind of outfit she can disappear into, one she would have avoided preretirement because it doesn’t emphasize any curves.
While he reads her answers, she tries not to wonder if the scent that’s hitting her is his cologne or shampoo or soap.
Cedar, she thinks, with a tinge of peppermint.
She focuses on the slight pilling along the collar of his sweater-vest. Thinks back to the photo of that girl in his office.
His daughter, maybe? He doesn’t wear a ring, but that could mean any number of things.
Every slash of his red pen makes her wince—and there is a lot of red.
“Did you have a good weekend?” Nick asks, extending this slim olive branch even as he eviscerates her.
“Not bad, I guess. I, uh…” She grasps for something she did this weekend. “Relaxed a lot.” Sure. Because her life is so stressful right now. “You?”
Another slash. Another wince, like he has his pen hooked right between her ribs. “Spent some time with family.” One corner of his mouth kicks upward. “Probably could have afforded to sleep in a little more.”
At this nod to their email exchange, Ramona fights a rush of heat to her face. She’s not sure why—there was nothing unprofessional about it, although maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned the undereye circles. Out of politeness.
He gestures to a multiple-choice question.
“Spicy,” he says, giving the paper a tap, and for a moment she forgets what they’re talking about.
That woodsy scent of him goes right to her brain.
“Spicy is the only basic taste not detected by gustatory cells, not umami. Receptors in the mouth determine whether something is spicy or not.”
“Right. Would have been my second guess.”
The thing is, all of this is interesting to her.
If she’d had the time—no, if she’d made the time—she would have enjoyed getting lost in the textbook, memorizing every detail about the somatosensory cortex.
She had the whole weekend to study, and now she’s going to confirm Navarro’s Fundamental Theory of Pop Stars: that she is a complete and total idiot.
When he finishes, he scribbles ?/?? at the top of her test. She’s gotten Pitchfork ratings better than this.
“Is it graded on a curve?” she asks, trying for a joke, but Nick doesn’t laugh.
“If you need help, or if you’re struggling to understand anything, you can let me know,” he says.
“I know a lot of people take psychology assuming it’ll be some quirky survey of psychiatric disorders, without realizing the level of science involved.
If this class is too much, we could see about switching you into something else.
Maybe you’d be better off with fewer credits to start with. ”
The force of this knocks her in the gut. “I see. You’re dying to get rid of me.”
His mouth dips into a frown. There’s something obscene about the way his lower lip is fuller than the top. Such a nice mouth, wasted on someone intent on using it to talk down to her. “That’s not what I meant. I’m only saying, I understand that it’s difficult.”
This isn’t how men usually act with her.
They’re either telling her she needs to slide down her bra to show a little more skin or surrendering while she’s on her knees.
A move she used to think made her powerful, when the truth was that she’d never had any power.
They wanted to control her, whether it was the words coming out of her mouth or where she was putting it.
Professor Nick Navarro is acting like he’s…concerned.
“You don’t participate in class,” he continues, leaning back in his chair. “You’ve barely done the homework.”
“It’s only been two weeks.”
“This class moves quickly. Everything we’re covering now is going to be a foundation for the rest of the course. So I’m just trying to figure out why.”
“This weekend I just—I didn’t—” she says, fumbling with an excuse. “I ran out of time.” With all her relaxing. “And then the VMAs were on, and—”
Nick’s eyes flash with something like anger as he sits up straighter, spine snapping to attention. Immediately she knows she’s said the wrong thing, but she doesn’t know how to make him understand.
“Do you think this is a joke?” he asks. “Some kind of game? You give me this speech about how you care so much, and you can’t even keep up the first few weeks? I really don’t think I’m an easy person to rile up, and I wanted to believe you. It’s only going to get harder, Wilder.”
“Look, I—I was dealing with something.”
“Right. Watching the VMAs. And then maybe you were busy deciding which dress to wear for your comeback announcement. Or whether your next album cover should be pink or purple.”
The words are ice-cold shrapnel. There it is. What he really thinks of her.
Oh, she knows exactly the kind of man he is now.
A card-carrying misogynist who hates her music simply because so many young girls see themselves in it. Because she dared to sing about her feelings.
Now she tightens her grip on her purse and jabs a finger at her failure of a pop quiz, because even if he’s biting down on that full lower lip, as though seized by momentary regret, he said what he said. And that means some part of him has to believe it.
“Let me guess, you were one of those guys who loved to tear down my music. You’d call it girly or shrill or annoying, but you’ve probably only ever heard the singles.”
He folds his arms over his chest, defensive. “I’ve never listened to it.”
Bullshit. There’s no way he could escape it.
“Sure,” she says, “and you think that makes you better than everyone else.”
The tension in his jaw is back. The quiver of his gold hoop earring.
He’s trying to wrestle control of this conversation back from her.
“I’ve had students like you before. Maybe they weren’t famous, but they still acted like the world revolved around them.
The entitled ones whose parents could buy their way into any school or job, and it wouldn’t matter if they got an A or flunked the class.
And you know what? It breaks my heart a little.
You think you can come in here and coast right on through because of your background, because you look a certain way—”
“Oh?” Ramona’s grin is wolfish. She’s caught him, even if It breaks my heart a little tugs at something inside her that’s easy enough to ignore. “What way is that?”
She can’t resist a slight pop of her hip, almost daring him to give her a compliment, whether it’s backhanded or not. This isn’t about the homework or quiz anymore. It’s self-preservation. Student vs. teacher, a battle to the death.
Nick swallows hard, Adam’s apple leaping in his throat right above where his shirt is unbuttoned. Just the top button, for decorum’s sake. His cheeks are flushed the color of ripe strawberries. She likes this, seeing him flustered. Disarming everyone’s favorite professor.
She imagines him driving home to his maybe-wife, venting about her over a sensible dinner of roasted chicken and rosemary potatoes.
The wife would comfort him, tell him Ramona sounds like one of those words women aren’t supposed to use for other women except as a joke, only she wouldn’t be joking.
She’d rub his shoulders, kiss him in his favorite spot—the side of his neck, maybe, or right behind his ear.
“Like you’d rather be anywhere else,” he finally says, fist clenched around the red pen, but the color doesn’t leave his cheeks.
“You don’t know a fucking thing about me.” Ramona’s breaths are coming faster, her chest heaving with the effort of it. She drips venom into each word. “I bet you’d just love to watch me fail.”
Nick’s face goes slack. “That’s not true,” he says. “I care about all my students. I want all of them to succeed.”
“Even the entitled ones who look a certain way?”
Now it’s his turn to wince.
He doesn’t answer that, simply plucks her exam from the desk and slides it back into the folder, his shoulders set in a rigid line. She’s never seen a sweater-vest look so menacing.
“If you don’t have any specific questions about the quiz,” he says, avoiding eye contact, “I hope you’ll excuse me. I have some more grading to do.”