Me, You and All That

The rain at Hawthorne University never stopped for anything.

It beat against the tall glass windows of Davidson Hall, turning the trees outside into blurry gray shapes. Water streamed down the panes in thin, restless lines, smearing the campus into a world of stone arches, black umbrellas, and wet brick paths.

Shirley Jeong sat in the third row of the lecture hall, wearing a dark gray hoodie three sizes too large, the sleeves pulled down over her hands. Her glasses sat low on her nose. On her desk, a plastic cup of iced coffee sweated into a ring of condensation beside her open notebook.

At the front of the room, Professor Davidson turned from the dry-erase board with a black marker in one hand.

Davidson was the sort of professor who never raised his voice because he never needed to. His silence alone could make an entire lecture hall sit straighter. His smile, when it appeared, was small enough to deny in court.

“When we look at records from the late Roman Republic,” Davidson said, his voice carrying through the room, “we see two different stories. One side wrote history to look strong. The other wrote it to survive. So what happens when the official record does not match the facts?”

Shirley unclipped her red pen.

She did not raise her hand.

She waited.

Behind her, Miller leaned back in his seat. He was a broad-shouldered guy from the rowing team who had a habit of speaking before thinking and then mistaking everyone’s silence for admiration. He tapped his pen against his desk in a steady, irritating rhythm.

“It’s pretty simple,” Miller said, speaking up without being called on. “The people with money always wrote history. They paid for the stone carvers. They paid the writers. So whatever they said became the truth.”

A few students shifted in their chairs.

Miller gave a small, lazy laugh.

“It’s just like today,” he continued. “If your family has enough money to get its name carved into a building, people usually call your version of events the truth.”

The room went still.

Miller’s gaze slid toward the back of Shirley’s head.

“Some people in this room probably know how that works better than the rest of us.”

Shirley did not flinch.

She did not turn around immediately either.

Instead, she slowly capped her red pen with a quiet click. Then she turned in her chair and looked directly at him.

“You didn’t read page forty-two,” she said.

Her voice was flat. Calm. Almost bored.

Miller blinked. “What?”

“Page forty-two of last night’s reading,” Shirley said. “If you had read it instead of spending twenty minutes trying to think of a joke, you would know the stone carvers in that specific town were funded by a local union of blacksmiths, not wealthy families.”

A few heads turned toward Miller.

Shirley continued.

“The wealthy families actually tried to have those stones removed because the inscriptions contradicted the version of events they wanted preserved.”

Miller’s face tightened. “I was making a general point, Jeong.”

“No,” Shirley said. “You were making an incorrect point. You made an assumption because you thought it sounded smart. But an assumption without facts is just noise.”

Someone two rows over coughed into their sleeve, badly hiding a laugh.

Shirley’s eyes did not leave Miller’s.

“If you want to talk about how money buys influence, we can do that. But I would recommend reading the material first. If you want to talk about the history test on Friday, I suggest you open the book.”

Miller opened his mouth.

Professor Davidson raised one hand.

“That will do,” he said, though the corner of his mouth betrayed the faintest sign of approval. “And for the record, Miss Jeong is correct. Page forty-two. Read it tonight, Miller.”

Miller sank lower in his chair.

Shirley turned back to her desk.

Her hand was steady when she picked up her pen again, but beneath the heavy fabric of her hoodie, her stomach had tightened into a hard, familiar knot.

She hated when people brought up the money.

She hated the way her name entered rooms before she did.

She hated that no matter how many hours she spent in the library, no matter how many notes she rewrote until her fingers cramped, people like Miller could look at her and decide her grades had been deposited into her account along with everything else.

She pressed the tip of her pen to the page.

The next line of notes came out too hard, the letters digging into the paper.

Professor Davidson turned back to the board.

“Now,” he said, writing a single word in large black letters, “let’s talk about Janus. The god who looked both ways and trusted neither direction.”

JANUS.

Shirley copied the word into her notebook.

Two-faced god. Thresholds. Doorways. Beginnings and endings.

Somewhere in the back row, someone gave a low, amused breath of laughter.

Shirley did not turn around.

She had already wasted enough attention on men who mistook volume for intelligence.

When the class bell rang fifty minutes later, Shirley packed before anyone else could speak to her. Laptop, notebook, pens, charger, folder. Everything went into her backpack in the exact order she preferred. She zipped it shut, pulled her hood over her hair, and headed down the wide stone steps of Davidson Hall into the gray drizzle.

Outside, the campus smelled like rain, wet leaves, and coffee.

Her sneakers squeaked against the slick brick path as she crossed the quad. Students hurried under umbrellas, gathering in clusters beneath the stone archways. A group near the fountain burst into laughter as the wind flipped one girl’s umbrella inside out.

Shirley kept walking.

The student center was warm and loud, filled with the smell of toasted bagels, damp wool coats, and fried food. She passed the long coffee line, ignored the display case full of muffins, and spotted Rita and Trish at a corner booth near the back windows.

Rita was typing fast on her phone with one hand and eating a bagel with the other. Trish sat across from her, staring at a stack of printed flashcards with the expression of someone considering a career change out of pure exhaustion.

“Look who survived Davidson’s cave,” Rita said as Shirley slid into the booth. “You look like you want to fight someone.”

“I do,” Shirley said.

She pulled her iced coffee from her bag and set it on the table. The ice had mostly melted. The cup left a wet circle on the wood.

Trish lowered her flashcards. “Was it Miller again?”

“He opened his mouth without reading the assignment,” Shirley said. “It took thirty seconds to fix it.”

Rita grinned. “You destroyed him, didn’t you?”

“I corrected him.”

“Same thing when you do it.”

“He was talking big at the coffee shop this morning,” Trish said. “Something about Davidson being easy if you know how to sound confident.”

“Confidence is not a substitute for literacy,” Shirley said.

Rita laughed into her bagel.

For half a second, Shirley almost smiled.

Then the moment passed.

“It wasn’t funny,” she said, softer this time.

Rita stopped chewing. Trish’s expression shifted, gentler now.

“What did he say?” Trish asked.

Shirley stared at the watery coffee in front of her.

“He said people with enough money can get their version of the truth accepted. Then he looked at me.”

Rita’s face hardened. “What an ass.”

“He didn’t say your name,” Trish said carefully.

“He didn’t have to.”

The booth fell quiet for a moment. Around them, the student center kept moving. Chairs scraped. Someone laughed too loudly near the vending machines. The espresso machine hissed from across the room.

Shirley wrapped both hands around her cold cup.

“It doesn’t matter how hard I work,” she said. “People see the name and make up their minds.”

“Shirley,” Trish said, “nobody who knows you thinks that.”

“Most people don’t know me.”

“Then let them be wrong,” Rita said, leaning forward. “Your paper on the early republic got the highest grade in the department last term. That wasn’t your dad’s money. That was you sitting in the library until two in the morning while the rest of us were at the pub.”

Shirley looked down at the table.

“I just want my work to be mine,” she said.

The words came out smaller than she intended.

Trish’s face softened. “It is.”

Shirley did not answer.

Rita reached across the table and nudged half of her bagel toward her. “Eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I didn’t ask if you were hungry.”

Shirley looked at the bagel. Butter had melted into the torn middle, glossy and uneven.

She picked it up anyway and took a small bite, mostly to give her hands something to do.

“Are you seeing Tristan tonight?” Rita asked, in the careful tone of someone trying to change the subject without looking like she was changing the subject.

“Yeah,” Shirley said. “He’s coming over around eight. He wants to read through his graduate notes while I work on my thesis topic.”

Rita stared at her.

Trish blinked.

“What?” Shirley asked.

“That is not a date,” Rita said. “That is a study group with kissing.”

“It’s efficient.”

“Romance should not sound like a filing system.”

“Efficiency is underrated.”

“Passion is also nice,” Rita said.

Shirley took another bite of the bagel. “Passion is usually just people making bad decisions loudly.”

Trish laughed under her breath. Rita pointed at her.

“That,” Rita said, “is exactly why I worry about you.”

“You worry because you’re nosy.”

“I worry because I care.”

Shirley’s phone buzzed on the table before Rita could continue.

The screen lit up.

1 New Message: Mom

Shirley went still. It was her mother, Anne Fraser-Jeong

Her mother’s name always looked like a command rather than a contact.

She did not open the message. She did not even tap the glass. She only stared at the notification until the screen began to dim.

Then she reached out, took the phone, and flipped it face down on the wooden table.

Trish noticed.

“Not opening it?” she asked softly.

“It can wait.”

“Is everything okay at home?”

Shirley took a drink of her coffee. It tasted watery and bitter.

“It’s home,” she said. “That’s what it is.”

Rita and Trish exchanged a look, but neither of them pushed. Shirley appreciated that more than she knew how to say.

She checked the time on the clock above the coffee counter.

“I have another class in twenty minutes.”

“Of course you do,” Rita said. “God forbid you experience one unscheduled feeling before noon.”

Shirley stood and slung her backpack over one shoulder.

“Feelings are inefficient.”

“Put that on a T-shirt,” Trish said.

Shirley almost smiled again.

Almost.

Instead, she picked up her coffee and looked out through the wide student center windows.

Rain fell steadily across the quad. Students moved beneath umbrellas in pairs and groups, laughing as they hurried under the stone archways. Their shoulders brushed. Their hands linked. Their lives seemed to spill easily into one another’s without fear of what it would cost.

Shirley watched them from behind the glass.

Safe on her side of the window.

Right where nobody could touch her.