All Chapters of Grading On A Curve : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I dropped the lanyard like it had burned me."Looking for something?"His voice came from the doorway, low and amused, and I spun around so fast I nearly took the chair down with me. He was standing there with two coffee cups, one in each hand, wearing yesterday's slacks and nothing else, hair still damp from a shower I hadn't heard him take."I, uh." My brain produced absolutely nothing useful. "I couldn't find my shirt.""It's on the floor by your foot."It was. I grabbed it and yanked it over my head so fast I nearly suffocated myself in the process, which at least gave me a few seconds where I didn't have to look at him."Coffee?" he asked, holding out a cup like the last ten seconds hadn't happened."I have an early class.""It's nine in the morning.""My class is at ten.""So you have time for coffee."I took the cup because my hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for that lanyard again. He watched me over the rim of his own mug, and there was something unreadable i

"You want to drop what?"The woman behind the registrar's desk had the exact tone of someone who had said those words a thousand times that week alone, flat and tired and already bracing for an argument."Contemporary Literature and Ethics," I said, sliding the form across the counter before I could lose my nerve. "It's not working for me.""It's day one.""I'm very decisive."She didn't smile. She typed something into her computer, squinting at the screen, and I stood there gripping the edge of the counter like it might keep me upright if the news was bad."That's an honors elective requirement for your track," she said after a long, agonizing pause. "You don't have another section open this semester, and the next time it's offered isn't until spring of next year.""There has to be a substitute. Some other class that counts.""Let me check." More typing. More squinting. I watched her scroll through what felt like an entire decade of bureaucracy while my pulse climbed higher with ever

"Absolutely not."Dani had snatched the phone out of my hand before I'd even finished reading it twice, scrolling up and down like the email might rearrange itself into something less reckless if she stared hard enough."Give that back.""No. You are not going to a dark, empty building at night to meet a man who already has the power to ruin your degree." She held the phone out of reach, which was pointless since I had the email memorized in about four seconds flat. "This is how horror movies start, Mia.""It's a campus office building, not a cabin in the woods.""Famous last words of every girl in every horror movie.""He's not going to hurt me." I said it with more certainty than I expected to feel, and something about how easily it came out worried me more than the email itself had. "Whatever this is, it's not that.""Then what is it?""I don't know. That's why I have to go."Dani sighed, the long, theatrical sigh of someone who knew she'd already lost the argument but needed every

I read it four times. Same small, bureaucratic, catastrophic flag sitting under my course enrollment .*Flagged: Grading review pending.*I got out of bed too fast and knocked my phone off the mattress and had to scrabble across the floor for it on my hands and knees, squinting at the screen, convincing myself I'd misread it. I hadn't misread it. It was seven forty in the morning and my entire semester was annotated now, marked, visible to anyone in the academic affairs system who pulled my file, and I hadn't done anything wrong yet, not academically, not a single thing, and somehow that almost made it worse because imagine what would happen when I actually…Dani knocked on my door. "You're making the floor creak again.""Come in."She pushed the door open in her oversized sleep shirt, hair sideways, holding a mug, and took one look at my face. "What."I held the phone out. She read it. Her mug stopped halfway to her mouth."Okay," she said."Okay?""I'm processing. Give me a second.

The review coordinator's email had been sitting in his inbox since six this morning and he still hadn't opened it.Daniel knew what it said. He'd gotten the same message forwarded to every faculty member in the humanities department, a courtesy notification, standard language, nothing to read between the lines of. He knew this because he'd written the same type of email himself three years ago at his previous institution when he'd sat on the other side of this process, clipboard in hand, completely certain that professional clarity was the cleanest way to move through a complicated world.He'd believed that right up until Saturday night.He closed his laptop, opened it again, closed it again, and pushed back from his desk to stand at the window of his office looking out at the quad below, which solved nothing but at least gave his body somewhere to direct the energy that had been sitting in his chest since he'd walked into that lecture hall Monday morning and seen her in the fourth ro