4. Amalia
Officially one week of college down. Third class of the day. No hot chocolate. A philosophy lecture so boring it’s making me question the nature of consciousness — which I suppose counts as participation.
I had to pick some extra classes and made the grave mistake of thinking, how bad could philosophy and international negotiations be? Catastrophically bad, as it turns out.
One more “What do we think about…” and I’m slamming my head into this desk. Repeatedly.
I’m simply not built for hypotheticals and sociological abstractions. Give me a concrete problem and a clear objective and I thrive. Ask me to reflect on the human condition and I’m just a girl staring at a wall.
“Tell me you’re dying in here too,” a voice whispers from behind me. When I turn around, I find a pair of green eyes fixed on me.
“I’m still deciding which exit strategy is fastest: throwing myself out the window is the most accessible option, but the drop only guarantees two broken legs, and my pen tip isn’t sharp enough to break skin, so I’d just make a mess.
” The second I finish talking, my eyes go wide.
Good grief, Amalia. What is wrong with you?
The guy staring back at me looks openly amused and shakes his head.
“Gabriel. Nice to meet you.”
I look at him, and all my brain registers is that he’s wearing the latest Apple Watch, which means money, which means he’s just trying to buddy up to the nerd who earns good grades to carry him through exam season.
He wouldn’t be the first. But I’ll play along.
“Nice to meet you too, and sorry about the monologue. I promise I don’t normally have thoughts like that,” I tell him, realizing I never gave him my name in return.
“What do your normal thoughts sound like?” he asks, laughing, and I try to keep my own smile in check while the professor rattles off the eighth piece of required reading we’ll apparently be analyzing.
“I can assure you they are pretty boring.” A lie, but he doesn’t really care. He’s just making small talk, trying to break the barrier.
“Noted,” he says with a quiet laugh, and I turn back to copying the titles off the board.
When class ends, I realize algebra is next, and even though I’d normally be perfectly happy to spend an hour with vectors, I know they come with him attached.
I don’t know why I’m spiraling. Spilling the coffee was an accident, and during that first lecture he didn’t throw a single suspicious glance my way.
I’m fully convinced he’s already forgotten I exist, and I’m probably just manufacturing drama out of nothing.
That’s what Lupe always says, that my brain is my greatest ally and my worst enemy all at once.
Because without meaning to, I complicate everything.
My mind doesn’t operate in straight lines.
Everything branches into more variables, more possibilities, more ways something can go right or wrong.
I’m the first one to arrive at the lecture hall, and when I spot Mr. Vaughn already at the podium, I turn around quietly, hoping to dissolve into the hallway until more students show up.
“I’ve already noted that your sense of direction is concerning, but this time you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, Miss Sanchez.”
I could swear he didn’t even lift his eyes from his papers, so how on earth did he see me?
And how does he know my name? Then I remember he knew the name of the student he kicked out on the first day too.
He strikes me as the kind of person who reviewed every student’s file before the first lecture, mapping out exactly how to take each one down based on their individual weak points.
I turn back toward him after swallowing the knot in my throat four times over and scramble for an excuse.
I could tell him I need to go to the bathroom, or that I forgot to grab water…
But no, my water bottle is sitting right there in plain view, so that would just make me seem unhinged on top of scatterbrained.
What if I told him I got an urgent call from home the second I stepped inside?
But that would mean leaving the lecture, and I actually want to hear what he has to say about those algorithms today.
“For the love of everything you hold dear, just come in and sit down. You don’t need to justify not wanting to be the first one in the room,” he says, and I can hear the barely-there exasperation in it.
My cheeks go warm. I almost tell him the reason I don’t want to be alone in this room with him is that he radiates Dementor energy and I only have so much soul left to lose, but I manage to keep that one in.
I am civilized. I am pleasant. I am civilized. I am pleasant. I’m also broke and deeply uninterested in getting expelled after paying an obscene amount of money to be here.
It’s sixty minutes, Amalia. You have survived worse. Probably.
The lecture hall fills up fast, but the front row stays empty except for me. Everyone migrates to the back, which would have been the smarter call, except I can’t see the board from there and the background chatter makes my brain short-circuit.
Forty minutes in, Mr. Vaughn turns to face the room and I find myself actually looking at him. Contemplative. A little severe. The kind of man who gives the impression that absolutely nothing can touch him.
Black shirt, chinos, Converse. He looks nothing like authority is supposed to look, which somehow makes him more authoritative.
His gaze does most of the work, quiet and assessing, like he’s already made up his mind about everyone in this room and is simply waiting for confirmation.
Rectangular glasses. Hair a little disheveled, like he’s dragged his hands through it several times today.
On his fingers, a few rings I wasn’t expecting to like as much as I do.
Stainless steel, each one etched with a different pattern, simple and deliberate, very much like him.
But it’s the look in his eyes that gets me.
He seems like someone who has lived too much for his age — there’s a weight to him, something that looks like guilt.
I recognize it because it’s the same guilt I carry every time I think about Julia.
The way she must have managed on her own to get two little girls out of that house.
The way she ran back inside before the explosion.
The way I think she didn’t want to let us down.
Maybe if we hadn’t been a burden, she would have called the police sooner. Maybe if she hadn’t had to get us out first, she could have helped our parents, and they’d all still be alive.
I shake myself free of those thoughts and bring my attention back to the man in front of me.
The real problem is exactly his presence. I can guarantee that if you’ve ended up on his bad side, you’re done for.
Some giggling breaks out in the back rows, and the way this man turns toward the source of the sound — ay Diosito.
“If that buzzing isn’t contributing anything to this lecture, I’d ask you to save the gossip for the break.”
He’s the only professor who reacts to the smallest noise, and you do not want to be the one who set him off. Those eyes could turn you to stone if he put in a little effort.
“Through an external point, how many lines can be drawn parallel to a given line?” he asks, and I force my mouth to stay shut.
Come on, Amalia. It’s simple, you just have to keep that mouth closed and not make a scene, because it’s a very basic question…and nobody answers.
Without meaning to, I catch my lower lip between my teeth, forcing myself to stay quiet, to not draw attention. I’m not repeating high school, where every classmate resented me for always knowing the answers.
At some point I glance up at him, and I almost forget to breathe when I find his gaze trained directly on me. His eyes are almost black in the dim light of the room, but there’s no question about it. He’s looking at me.
“Miss Sanchez, any ideas?”
No, Amalia. You have zero ideas, your mind is a complete blank. Just stay quiet.
But he’s fixing me with a look that says he already knows I know the answer, and he’s daring me to play dumb. And I have never once turned down an intellectual challenge.
“At least one, at any given time,” I tell him, chin up, and something moves across his face. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a flicker that gives me the nerve to keep going. “And you didn’t mention the congruence axioms.”
If I’d blinked, I would have missed the way the corner of his mouth ticks upward at that. Before I can get a better look, he’s turned back to the board and written congruence axioms in clean, deliberate letters.
Something shifts in my chest because he didn’t get angry. Another professor would have snapped at me for the remark.
Maybe he’s not so bad after all.
A few minutes later, his voice fills the room again.
“Does anyone see what’s wrong with the problem on the board?”
I look up and go through my notes carefully, but everything seems correct. The diagram has all its labels, every theorem applied has a logic behind it, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what’s off.
My pencil dances through my fingers — my personal stress-relief system.
What am I not seeing?
“Miss Sanchez.” That low, smooth voice says my name, and I swallow the knot of nerves lodged in my throat.
Yeah, about that “he’s not so bad.”
I look up at him, and that’s when I catch the satisfied look on his face. He knows I don’t have the answer, and that’s exactly why he called on me. To show me I’m not as smart as I think.
What he doesn’t know is that this is precisely why I always study ahead.
Because not knowing the answer does something to me that I can’t logic my way out of.
My pulse spikes first, then the heat rushes into my cheeks, then my hands start to tremble, faintly but enough that I press them flat against my thighs.
It’s not embarrassment, not exactly. It’s something older and harder to explain, a reaction I’ve spent years trying to outrun by simply never being caught unprepared.
I think something in my face gives me away, because his eyes narrow on me, and then all I hear is his voice.
“You’re all free to go. Take the problem home and work through it.”
I hear movement all around me, and I think I even spot Gabriel leaving with a group of guys, but I’m stuck here, just trying to breathe through the panic attack.
I know. A panic attack over not knowing one answer. My brain, however, did not get the memo that it’s not a big deal, because it’s been replaying that moment on a loop since it happened and shows no signs of stopping. I can’t rein this in. I never can.
When I was nine years old, Se?ora Alvaro called me up to the board and I couldn’t solve the problem she gave me. All my classmates started laughing, said I wasn’t nearly as smart as I pretended to be, that I was a fraud, that my teachers gave me good grades out of pity because I was an orphan.
Lupe always fought them over it. Me? I developed panic attacks instead.
I force my eyes open, but the voice in my head is too loud this time, looping the same thought on repeat: if you’re not good enough here, you’re not good enough anywhere.
Come on, Amalia. It’s okay. Breathe. Breathe, damn it.
Something touches my hand, and I flinch away.
Please don’t touch me right now.
“Amalia.” The voice cuts through. “What’s the algorithm for finding the lowest-cost path between two nodes in a directed graph?”
Somehow my brain, locked in the voices of childhood classmates, makes a turn and locks onto his question instead.
Path. Minimum cost. Graph.
“Dijkstra’s algorithm,” I say, my voice quiet, but my mind’s steadier.
When I look up, I meet two eyes dark as obsidian, and for the first time since this lecture started, they shine. With understanding, of all things. Which only makes my face burn hotter.
You got it right, Amalia. You’re ok.
“Good,” he says, and I don’t know why, but it feels like he might be able to hear that voice inside my head.
First I spilled coffee on him. Now I’ve officially fallen apart in front of him too.
I avoid his gaze, but when I reach for my notebook and laptop to pack up, I realize my wrist is in his hands.
As if catching himself, he pulls back like he’s been burned and runs his fingers through the strands of hair falling across his forehead.
Before I can collect myself, Mr. Vaughn has already left the room, and all I’m left with is one single thought:
Why do I have the impression I scared my math teacher?