Scene from a Dream

This was, more or less, a dream I had last night. I wrote it down this morning, fleshing it out and doing things like naming the characters from it and cleaning up some of the nonsensical weirdness. I have no idea how much sense it makes to an outside reader, but it's a pretty clear scene to me.

----
Joan was sitting in the second row of the classroom. Unfortunately, this gave her the perfect view of the first row. Athletes to a man, they were currently mooning the classroom and tittering to themselves. This was both a good and bad thing. Good, because being in the second row meant that she was very close to the professor’s desk and the blackboard, and bad because she had absolutely no interest in the dozen or so pale and hairy butts in front of her.

Joan took a quick survey of the room. She was the only woman in sight, in a classroom auditorium that probably fit a hundred students. There were a few discomfited faces in the crowd, but many of the boys--really, anyone who would participate in this was not yet a man--had the giggles. Or, worse, they were whispering and pointing at her. Joan bit down on her tongue before raising her hand.

The professor, from the looks an ex-military good old boys type, waited a minute before acknowledging her.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sir,” she said. “This is inappropriate.”

There were rules about sexual harassment, and they made a nice neat fence between her and the first row. Joan felt secure for all of two seconds.

The professor rose from his desk and approached her. Up close, he was no less intimidating than before.

“And how, miss, is it inappropriate?”

His eyes pierced hers when they met, but he showed no signs of concern for the dozens of policies he was allowing to be broken. Joan fought down her temper and the urge to squirm in her seat. The boys behind her grew less rowdy, seeming to settle into their seats. The whispering back and forth swelled like a wave.

“It’s harassment,” she said. “Sexual harassment.”

The whispered wave broke in a froth of snickers.

“What makes it harassment for you?” said the professor.

The professor was calm. Very, very calm as if this were a sort of situation he’d experienced before. Joan’s temper flared. How dare he first ignore the situation and then, then! To be asked for an accounting of why being mooned by a dozen jocks was insulting! Joan pushed back from her seat and stood. She looked into the professor’s eyes and counted to three.

“Because I don’t want to see their stupid asses,” she said.

Joan bit the inside of her cheek, still furious. At the same time, a sort of shock set in. She’d sworn at the professor. He was going to boot her from the classroom. She sat again and swept her pencils and notebooks into her bag. Joan was scrambling to think of a way to make a quiet exit. She was sure everyone was staring at her. She was pinned to the spot.

“All right then,” said the professor.

He strode to the front of the classroom in dead silence.

“Pull up those pants boys!”

What? Joan looked to the professor.

“I said pull up those pants and sit down!” he said. “No one wants to see your stupid asses unless it’s on the field, whooping the other team!”

Joan sat, dumbstruck. The professor pulled down a whiteboard, covered in what appeared to be test questions. The front-row boys hitched up their pants, one by one, and seated themselves. Nobody said a word.

“My name is Harmon,” said the professor. “You may call me Professor Harmon or Sir. If you want to talk to me, raise your hand. If, and I say if, I call on you, you will stand while you speak. When I am done talking to you, you will sit.”

His eyes swept the classroom. He turned toward the board and waved at its contents.

“This,” Harmon said, “is your first test. Answer it to the best of your abilities as quickly as you can. Calculators are allowed. Get to it!”

Professor Harmon left the front of the classroom and went to sit at his desk. He pulled out a stack of papers and ignored the class. Joan was stunned. She slumped in her chair.

She looked at the board and felt like crying because none of the equations looked familiar, except maybe the first one. She dug into her backpack. She dug a little more and frowned. She rooted frantically in her bag. Joan pulled out a notebook of blank paper and a couple pencils. No calculator. She needed a calculator. She couldn’t solve the equations without a calculator. All around her, the other students were frowning and pushing buttons and scribbling down answers and solving processes.

Joan despaired. She sat, frozen, watching the time tick away from her. Ten questions stood between her and success. Ten miserable math problems lined the path to her academic failure. She snuck glances at Professor Harmon. He had his head down, pen working furiously over the papers in front of him. The clock ticked mercilessly as she stared at the board.

Half an hour went by as Joan’s eyes skittered all over the board, seeing no way out. Then, something miraculous happened: Joan noticed that question four was something she understood…sort of. She took a deep breath and put pencil to paper. She wrote, carefully, “4.” at the left margin line. She cringed to be skipping ahead, leaving vast blank spots for questions one through three on the page. Teeth gritted, she copied the problem off the board and started to break it down into manageable pieces. Joan almost jumped out of her skin when someone coughed beside her.

She looked up. The professor was standing there.

“Took you long enough,” Harmon said. “I thought I was going to have to kick you out.”

“What?” Joan said.

“You have to learn to stand on your own two feet in my classroom,” he said. “I thought you weren’t going to make it.”

Joan looked down at her paper, embarrassed.

“I’m not very good at math,” she said.

Harmon raised an eyebrow at her.

“Oh really,” he said. “Then why are you here?”

Joan couldn’t tell what he wanted her to say.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had a math class,” she said. “It’s been…”

Joan counted on her fingers, thinking hard. She chewed her eraser.

“It’s been since sophomore year of high school. That was ten years ago, give me a break here!”

Professor Harmon stared at her. His jaw worked up and down a moment.

“Why don’t you just go home to your father, let him pick out a nice husband for you?”

That chauvinistic bastard. Joan was going to kill him.

“Because,” Joan snapped. “He’s dead and he can’t, and I’m here with you to learn!”

The professor smiled at her and Joan’s anger was overlaid with confusion.

“That’s what I’m looking for, here,” he said. “No excuses, no layer of politeness for the sake of being polite, no political correctness. Just straight-up honest answers.”

Harmon laid a polite hand on her shoulder and clarified himself.

“I’m going to break down the walls between you and me and get to the real you, because right now, the way you are, you’ll never learn a damn thing,” he said. His face was even more serious than before.

“But,” Joan said. “But…”

Joan didn’t like the idea that she was some sort of project for this man.

“Oh, you’ll nod and smile and agree, but you won’t learn anything.”

He was quiet, calm. He gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“Good luck with the test, miss,” Harmon said.

He turned to go back to his desk.

“It’s Joan,” she said. “Not miss. Joan.”

Harmon’s laugh was sharp and loud in the classroom. Half the front row jumped in their chairs.

“I like you, Miss Joan,” he said. “We’re going to have fun together.”

Harmon sat at his desk again, shuffled his papers, and noticed that the class was staring at him.

“What the hell are you all looking at? Get back to work before I fail everyone in here!”

Joan bent to the task at hand and tuned out the rest of the room. She could do this. She knew she could.

----

I swear, it's always math classes that haunt my sleep. I remember that the first question of the test had something to do with the quadratic formula, except it was all jumbled and weird, as such things usually are in dreams. (And yes, I really did dream that the entire front row was mooning me. It wasn't a standing-up mooning, though. They were bent at the waist and bracing themselves with their elbows on the desks. Their butts were distinctly jiggly.)

~Later