Where are you?
But she didn’t find anyone interested in staring down the Goth chick sitting alone with her open laptop. The cool tingle faded some beneath her scrutiny. Cheyenne pursed her lips and turned her attention to her laptop.
If I’m gonna make this stupid meeting with Rhynehart and his thug with a magical attitude problem, I need to focus.
The VCU wi-fi wasn’t public. She logged into it with the password all students received during enrollment. It wasn’t the most secure network in the world, either. The school’s servers were wide open. All instructors, TAs, and professors were required to use them for everything related to their courses.
They have no idea how unsecure this whole setup is. Not like university staff expects anybody to hack into their system in the first place.
Cheyenne Summerlin had been hacking into school systems since she learned she could apply to colleges at fifteen. Of course, her mom was adamant her only daughter would attend college at the same age as her peers, despite Cheyenne surpassing her “peers” in every way by the age of twelve.
I wonder how many other students break into their professors’ class plans to preemptively turn in assignments and make skipping class less of an issue?
She grinned at that thought and muttered, “It’s probably just me.”
Two girls wearing the same hot-pink joggers and matching zip-up hoodies stopped at the closest table to the half-drow and shot Cheyenne confused glances. One of them frowned and touched her eyebrow, clearly having a hard time fathoming that piercing, plus the others. Cheyenne met the girl’s gaze, then glanced at her almost-twin. One of them rolled her eyes and pulled out a chair before sitting pertly at the table.
It was easy enough to find her professors’ files on the VCU network. Given that they were university staff teaching advanced computer science classes in the graduate program, they were fortunately smart enough to back up all their class plans in the cloud. Good thing, too. Or we’re all here learning from the wrong people.
She located the next assignments her other two professors for the day were planning to give later. It hardly surprised her that they were simple tasks for grad students. They each took her twenty minutes, which made her chuckle. The syllabi stated the assignments should take most students between two and three hours to complete.
“Maybe I should be teaching these classes.”
The pink twins at the other table turned halfway around in their chairs to give Cheyenne blatantly disapproving looks.
Okay, that’s enough. Cheyenne stared back and shot them a tense grin that was more of a sneer. “Is there a problem?”
“Yeah, actually.” The pink girl on the right shot the pink girl on the left a wide-eyed look of disbelief. “You keep talking to yourself like a weirdo, and we’re trying to study.”
“Oh.” Cheyenne glanced around the Student Center and all the other college kids walking back and forth, talking, laughing, and high-fiving each other. “Sorry. I’m new here. Is this the library?”
The other pink girl rolled her eyes. “Do you go to school here?”
Cheyenne laughed, shook her head, and looked down at her computer. The girls whispered uncomfortably about the crazy Goth chick who didn’t know how to put on eyeliner the right way, but she drowned them out while writing the emails to her professors. It was pretty much the same thing she’d sent them all last week when she’d opted to stay home and search the dark web for anything on that dead orc walking named Durg. Instead, she’d found the Borderlands forum.
The difference this week in the preemptive absentee emails, which included attachments of the finished assignments both professors had yet to issue, was three extra lines Cheyenne hoped would keep them off her back a little longer.
‘My best friend was in an accident last week and might not walk again after her life-saving spinal surgery, so I’ve been helping her adjust now that she’s awake. I don’t plan to miss any more classes after this week, but I will keep you updated on the situation with my friend. She doesn’t have any family in Richmond, so I’m the only one who can help her.’
Yes, it was a little heavy-handed, but it wasn’t a lie, either. Cheyenne didn’t expect Hersh to have many sympathetic bones in his body, and Dawley wouldn’t be much better. She was banking on LePlant and Beckwith having spent more time interacting with other humans. Maybe they wouldn’t penalize her for assisting people who needed help.
“Other humans,” Cheyenne muttered and shut her laptop. “That’s ironic.”
She ignored the nasty looks Pink One and Pink Two shot her as she grabbed her laptop and charger and stuck everything in her backpack. When she stood from the armchair, the girls at the table turned back around toward their “studying,” neither bothering to hide their misplaced disgust.
Cheyenne slipped her arms through the straps of her backpack and headed toward the Student Center’s entrance. She peered over Pink One’s shoulder to see the Advanced Calculus textbook open and the mess of an equation the chick had been working on in her notebook. When she passed the table, the half-drow pointed at the calculus problem Pink One was trying to solve—with a pen—and muttered, “That’s wrong.”
“Excuse me?” The face Pink One pulled with that question made her look like she needed a bathroom break and a calculator.
“It’s not wrong,” Pink Two added with a scoff. “And you’re not in our calculus class, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Nope. I took the class when I was sixteen.” Cheyenne shrugged and stepped away from the
