And she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life sitting at the front desk of American Fitness drinking smoothies from the juice bar in lieu of dinner and watching re-runs of Friends on her iPad. Bailey knew what her calling was, and that wasn’t it.
See me.
So he wanted to see her. Maybe it was something good. Maybe she’d done better on her test than she thought. Bailey glanced around the room, peeking at the Scantron papers scattered on various desks. The grades were marked up top with a red pen. The girl next to her, a tall, busty brunette named Shelby who had far more cleavage than Bailey could have hoped for, always set the curve in all her classes. Her test paper had a 92 up top.
Bailey took a deep breath and lifted the top right corner of her test, seeing a number in the corner—seven. Seventy? Could it be? She turned it over, incredulous, and saw that unlucky seven was the only number there. And a big red F circled beside it. Seven percent. How could she have missed so many questions? She knew, when she turned in the test, it wasn’t going to be good. But she’d held out a little hope that maybe, just maybe, she’d passed. Even barely passed would have been okay.
Seven percent.
She was mortified.
Bailey crumpled the test paper and shoved it into the backpack at her feet. She was done. No more graduate school. No more chemistry. No more classes that had little or nothing to do with what she ultimately wanted to be doing in the world. She’d call her father and tell him all the money he’d spent on her tuition was a waste—his daughter was a complete idiot who, apparently, didn’t know a covalent bond from an ionic one.
See me.
She glanced up at Dom who stood at the front of the class, chalk in hand, working out one of the problems on the test that nearly everyone had missed. His back was to her. She wasn’t going to stay after class. She wasn’t going to submit to whatever humiliating lecture he had in store for her.
Bailey shrugged on her coat, grabbed her backpack and headed up the aisle. He was still talking, writing numbers on the board, but she kept her eyes on the door. She jogged left at the front of the class, meaning to hit the door practically running.
“Where are you going, Miss Parker?”
His voice stopped her, hand on the doorknob. She could almost feel the eyes of the entire class on her, front and center. Answers to his question rattled around in her head.
Home.
To bed.
To the nearest store that sells gallons of ice cream.
To kill myself.
She’d considered all of those options, some more than others.
“Miss Parker?” he prompted again.
“I’m…” Her voice trembled. Damn it. Like getting a seven percent wasn’t humiliating enough. She glanced over her shoulder at him, expecting to see anger, disappointment, and mostly judgment. What she saw instead was pity and that turned her stomach.
“The bathroom,” she managed to finally say before throwing open the door and heading for the nearest ladies’ room. Anywhere but there, but under his watchful gaze.
She took refuge in a stall, sitting on a public toilet and crying because her dream of being a nurse-midwife was circling the drain simply because she couldn’t do the math. Ryan, the manager at American Fitness, had hinted a few times that she could move up the ladder if she was willing to perform certain favors. Was she going to be reduced to giving blowjobs just to keep a crappy ten dollar an hour job?
Fucking chemistry. Her nemesis. Her downfall.
Bailey sat and cried, she didn’t know how long. Long enough she felt stupid going back to class after being gone. But she had to go back. Otherwise she was admitting defeat. Wasn’t she?
“Oh holy hell!” a female voice, low and gasping.
Bailey stiffened on her lavatory perch, considering pulling her feet up to hide herself completely. A low moan echoed off the tiled walls. Whoever she was, the girl sounded like she was in pain. Great, now I’m going to catch stomach flu on everything else, Bailey thought, standing to grab her backpack off the hook on the back of the pink painted door where someone had scratched Fuck This!!!!!! with not one but six exclamation points. She knew the feeling.
Bailey winced when the automatic toilet flushed at her movement, an announcement of her presence. She had no choice but to open the stall door and head out. Ignoring the girl—and it was a girl, probably a freshman or a sophomore, no older than twenty, her hair cut into a short, dyed-black-with-blue-streaks pixie, nose, eyebrow and lip each sporting a silver ring. Bailey tried to ignore her, going to the sink to wash her hands.
The girl straightened from her bent-over stance at the sink, looking at Bailey in the mirror and attempting a smile. Bailey smiled back, turning off the water and grabbing for a paper towel, in a hurry to get out of there. She just wanted to go home and lock herself in her room with her iPad, a Netflix subscription with unlimited reruns of How I Met Your Mother and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food. Or maybe a gallon. How many pints were in a gallon anyway?