The heavyset guy sitting behind Cheyenne with the wild red beard who smelled like beef ramen let loose a low chuckle. A few others in the class followed suit. Messy Bun stiffened in her chair but just kept staring up at their professor, waiting for an answer.
“I’m glad you still have that thing.” Professor Bergmann pointed at the syllabus, her mouth curled up at the edges. “I spent a lot of time putting that together.”
“Is that what you want us to do, though?” Messy Bun asked.
“Hmm. What do you want to do?” The professor’s hazel eyes glittered with amusement, and she gazed at Cheyenne as if they were in on something together.
“I want to know if I’m supposed to try finishing an assignment before it’s even assigned. That’s not too much to ask.”
Bergmann dipped her head and grinned. “No. Don’t beat yourself up too much, though. This is the first time you’ve asked and, before you feel insulted, keep in mind if I wanted to argue about what comes first, the assignment-chicken or the turning-it-in-egg, I’d be teaching philosophy.”
The big guy sitting behind Cheyenne snorted.
“Which I’m not,” Bergmann added. Then she glanced down at her desk again, tapped her fingers on the wood a few times, and pulled her grin into a calmer, gentler smile. “I’ll return to my original question and ask if any of you took your education into your own hands and dove a little deeper into these programming languages over the weekend.”
Messy Bun just shook her head and folded her arms. “Nobody will tell you they did.”
I could. Cheyenne fought back a little chuckle of her own. But saying I did it over the weekend instead of five years ago would still be lying.
“Well, it doesn’t hurt to ask, does it?” Professor Bergmann spread her arms and seemed to make a point to not stare at Messy Bun. “But now you know that in my class, I expect at least a few of you to be working on your own time, with your own brains, even if that means I didn’t assign it. If anyone can come up with a workaround to something I’ve listed in any previous class, a different route or shortcut…hell, even if you fumbled your way into an encrypted box with no way out, I wanna hear about it. It helps me gauge the class overall and where we’re headed the rest of the semester. More than that, it helps me gauge the IT nerds I get to work with for at least the next four months.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
Peter nudged Messy Bun with his elbow and shook his head, muttering, “Just drop it, Natalie.”
Messy Bun turned her head a full ninety degrees to shoot him the death-glare.
Ignoring the power struggle between the students in the front row, Professor Bergmann clapped her hands and nodded. “So, my fine-groomed grad students, here’s what I’d like you to get crackin’ on.”
Before the woman retrieved the smartboard remote from her briefcase, Cheyenne felt her gaze settle on her for a few seconds longer than a fleeting glance. The half-drow kept staring at her laptop.
“I like Python as much as the next person who knows what they’re doing. I’m sure you guys spent hours making lists of all the pros and cons before you got here, so I won’t bore you with the fundamentals. That’s another thing you should know about this class.” Bergmann straightened and clicked a few items on the smart screen with the clean, sleek white remote in her hand. “Today, we’re gonna check out some nifty little tricks C++ can pull that most people overlook.”
“See?” Messy Bun whispered to Peter. “Even if we did any work over the weekend, she’d scrap it all and say we’re going over something else…”
Cheyenne tuned them out and focused on what Bergmann was showing them; if this class was like the first two last week, that presentation would last about five minutes before the professor told them to scatter and get to work. Not for the first time, she cursed her overactive hearing—Messy Bun’s voice was the first living experience she’d had with nails on a chalkboard.
Chapter Nine
“I still don’t understand why everyone calls these‘smartboards.’ Questions before I turn off this giant, dumb computer behind me and let you guys get down to the work that requires actual intelligence?” Professor Bergmann lifted the remote in her hand, acknowledged the lack of questions, then turned off the power and tossed the remote into her briefcase. “Excellent. Time to exercise your practical-application skills and build another light-level algorithm using C++. All the software’s already on the lab’s computers, with updates, so none of you will have to worry about sorting that mess out first. Oh, and just to be clear, I don’t want to see anything based on the example I gave you that’s over forty percent of the original. You’re learning how to build here, not copy and paste.”
The woman didn’t look at her students again. Instead, she sat and pulled out her laptop. Cheyenne heard the woman’s low chuckle—just a few puffs of air through Bergmann’s nose.
I can’t believe this is an upper-level class.
They’d just been assigned something on the lower side of advanced. Cheyenne had used C++ when she realized she was into computers at the age of eight—she might have manipulated her mom into thinking the coding expansions and non-essential updates were a surprise Christmas present for her—and that had been eleven years ago.
This little project the professor seemed to think would take her students an hour and a half to complete would take Cheyenne ten minutes if she wrote the code from scratch. She already had the bones left over from a pet project she’d mastered and abandoned when she was fifteen.
She opened the program on her laptop—she refused to use the lab’s computers—and searched for the little block
