“He gave me an F,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. I held up the phone so she could see the screen. Midterm grade: F.
“What the fuck?” Rachel said, more annoyed than surprised. “That motherfucker. Hang on.” She found her phone amid the bottles and shot glasses on the table and launched the app. I saw her eyes widen as the screen updated.
“That motherfucker!”
“What is it, babe?” Duke asked.
I had never seen such a look on Rachel’s face before. It was a look of absolute surprise and disbelief. She held out her phone so I could see her grade.
“How could that motherfucker give me an F?” she said, turning the phone around so she could glare at the screen. She tapped the refresh tab several times. The grade did not change.
“I know I didn’t get a fucking F,” she said. “There ain’t no fucking way.”
“Maybe it’s a glitch,” Duke said with a shrug. He picked up his beer glass and drained it dry. I would be shocked if Duke ever checked his grades. He certainly didn’t seem to worry about them.
Duke was on a full athletic scholarship. He was captain of the football team. He was headed for the NFL. I’d wager that he didn’t attend half his classes and never cracked a book, yet somehow held a 3.0 GPA.
My crime wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough. My crime was that I was not a three-hundred-pound lineman who ate quarterbacks for breakfast.
“I’m going home,” I said, struggling to keep the tears that were welling in my eyes from running down my cheeks.
Rachel reached for me. “Don’t go, girl,” she said as I gathered up my purse. “It’s got to be a mistake. Hang around. Let’s get you laid. We’ll worry about grades on Monday.”
“Yeah,” Duke said with a drunken grin. “Let’s get you laid.”
He said the words as if he was the one who would be doing me the favor of popping my cherry. No way, Duke. Keep that big thing the fuck away from me.
“No,” I said, backing away from the table. “I have to get home and check the grades on my laptop. Maybe it’s just some crazy glitch that’s happening on the phone app.”
“Audrey, we’ll sort it out Monday,” Rachel said, her eyes pleading for me to stay. “Please don’t go.”
Rachel was amazing. She got an F, too, but she was more concerned about me than her own GPA.
Maybe she was right. Maybe it was a glitch in the system.
Or maybe Hollander entered the grades incorrectly.
Or maybe his fucking F key got stuck.
Whatever the reason, I knew I couldn’t stay at the bar and just pretend it hadn’t happened.
I wanted to ride someone’s cock, as Rachel had so eloquently put it, but it wasn’t going to happen tonight. I turned before she could say anything more to convince me to stay and ran all the way back to my apartment with the letter F bouncing around in my head like a bad Sesame Street cartoon.
CHAPTER SIX: Audrey
As expected, the grade was the same on my laptop as it was on my phone. Hollander had given me an F on the midterm exam, which would make my GPA drop like a hot rock.
The only hope I had to hold on to was that it was a mistake and things would be fixed on Monday. I sat on my bed and stared at the computer screen until my eyes hurt. I was about to log off and go to sleep when my phone pinged with a text from Rachel.
The text read: That douchebag Hollander gave everyone in the class an F. Get on FaceSpace. People are going fucking nuts!
I logged onto FaceSpace and clicked onto the Trent State group page. I typed in the group password and waiting for the page to load.
The group was supposed to be a way for professors and students to communicate with one another. As you would expect, it had basically turned into a platform for students to bitch and post stuff totally unrelated to school.
The top post was started by a boy in Hollander’s class named Melvin Ayers. I vaguely knew Melvin. He always sat at the back of the room with a hoodie over his head.
He had posted: Dickwad Hollander gave me an F on the midterm. What the fuck????
The first reply was from Beth Hooper. Me 2. WTF????
There were seven more replies from people in the class, all who had been given Fs.
I breathed a sigh of relief. It had to be a glitch in the system. Or everyone in the class really failed, even Rachel. I seriously doubted that was the case, but stranger things had happened.
The screen kept refreshing each time someone added a comment. Now there were a dozen replies and responses on the thread. Most of them were from students who had been given Fs, but then everyone seemed to pile on and the tone went from confusion to anger to pure nastiness.
Former students were adding comments. Students who had never even taken Hollander’s class but had heard of his tough reputation. It turned ugly quickly, as things often did when you had dozens of drunk people online late at night.