Most people wouldn’t notice the switch from eccentric to totally whacko. Then again, most people hadn’t been spending Mattie’s office hours playing “train that halfling” for the last week.
Mattie just nodded in a daze as she looked absently around the room again, her student’s “refresher course” going in one ear and right out the other.
If she could look me in the eye, I might believe it has nothing to do with me.
She had to let it go, though, because scrutinizing Mattie while the woman was already under a lot of pressure wouldn’t help either of them. And they still had those office hours.
Then Cheyenne noticed the three students sitting in front of her, Messy Bun being one of them, had turned around in their chairs and were staring at her. Clearly, she’d missed something extremely important. She raised her eyebrows, and when nobody offered any information, she asked, “What’s up?”
Messy Bun rolled her eyes. The Peter guy sitting next to her smirked; it could’ve been in amusement, disbelief, or some twisted kind of admiration. Who knew with that guy? “I said, you know about that part of JavaScript, right?”
The drow halfling shrugged. “Probably.”
“Right. But the assignment we had on Tuesday, yeah?” Peter glanced at Messy Bun and let out a confused laugh. “We’re trying to put together that last string of code to make the whole thing run. Did you have any problems with it?”
“Nope.”
Messy Bun scoffed. “I call bull.”
“Hey, call whatever you want.” Cheyenne spared a glance at Mattie, who now had all ten fingertips pressed lightly on the top of her desk, eyes closed as she muttered something under her breath. She’s not even paying attention. “I didn’t work on it. Therefore, no problems.”
“Wow. You don’t even care about being here, do you?”
“Well, not as much as some people. More than everyone who isn’t here right now.” Cheyenne pursed her lips. “You know, ‘cause this is such a full class.”
Dorito Breath chuckled behind her, but she was really just hoping Mattie would snap out of it and then snap at everyone else to pay no attention to the girl behind the Goth mask. Not that she couldn’t handle a little misplaced attention, but the halfling was starting to think she’d have to go shake their Computer Sciences professor out of whatever funk she’d fallen into.
“You’re unbelievable.” Messy Bun spun toward the front of the room and opened her mouth to most likely complain, then noticed Mattie’s apparent concentration on her own internal dialogue. The student in the front row turned back toward Cheyenne again and opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
Nice game face.
Messy Bun’s gaze fell to the halfling’s shoulder, and the weird expression morphed into shock. “Oh, my God. Your shoulder.”
Fighting back a laugh, Cheyenne looked slowly at the large and alarmingly red holes in her flesh and won first place in the Keep-a-Straight-Face challenge. “Huh. Look at that.”
“Are you okay? That looks awful. What happened?”
It was the most interest the other woman had shown Cheyenne, which wasn’t saying much. The half-drow just couldn’t help herself. “Bear attack.”
“What?”
Not even that level of shrieking tore Mattie Bergmann out of whatever still had her full, slightly panicked attention. Cheyenne stared at the woman, watching for a sign that things were about to get a lot better or a lot worse.
“Oh, yeah,” she muttered, not bothering to look at Messy Bun despite being able to feel the girl’s stunned awe aimed at her. “Just came at me with its claws raised and…”
She mimed scratching at something with two hooked fingers and leaned to the side when Messy Bun leaned toward her, just to keep her eyes on Professor Bergmann.
Peter forced a cough into his fist and turned quickly back around to hide his reaction.
“No way. I didn’t even know they could do that. How did you… I mean, was it hard to escape?”
“Not really.”
“What did you do?”
Maybe Cheyenne took a little too long before answering the next stupid question, but watching Mattie Bergmann’s fingers twisting in complicated patterns across the surface of her desk was a pretty good excuse. Please don’t tell me she’s trying to cast a spell with her eyes closed in a room full of human grad students.
Messy Bun let out an impatient grunt. “Hello?”
“Probably just punched it in the face.” That came from one of the guys sitting behind Cheyenne, followed by smothered laughter. It sucked that Messy Bun had turned this class into a comedy act this morning, but it was a hell of a lot better than any of these students paying attention to their professor’s serious issue—mainly that a little pocket of air in front of the woman had started shimmering, right out in the open for everyone to see.
“Come on,” Messy Bun muttered. “You can’t punch a bear.”
“Why not?” Dorito Breath laughed, his chair creaking dangerously as he leaned his huge frame against the back of it. “It’s just like punching anything else. One good swing…”
“That’s not…no.” Messy Bun leaned toward Cheyenne again, trying to catch the halfling’s eye. “Did you really punch the bear that did that to your shoulder?”
A thin, barely visible line of blue light appeared in the shimmering air in front of Mattie, and that was when Cheyenne realized the woman had no idea what was going on.
“Yeah. You should try it sometime.” The drow halfling slammed both hands on the lab table in front of her and leapt to her feet. The back of her chair hit the table behind her. “Professor Bergmann!”
Messy Bun reeled away from her, someone else’s chair squeaked across the floor, and Mattie’s green eyes flew open. Cheyenne hoped she was the only one who heard the woman’s sharp gasp of surprise before the partially formed spell in front of her vanished. The halfling was positive no one else could hear their professor’s pulse racing through her veins. Blinking
