The school for the Shifter Culture and Studies program wasn’t a highly well-funded institution, which wasn’t surprising, but also said something considering this was the top school in the country for the program. The student body that made up the roster of classes each year was sparse and, more often than not, populated by undergraduates who got permission to take the course to fulfill an elective requirement in their own general education studies.
Still, it would be home for the next two years; she might as well get used to it.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside. It smelled of dust and old floor cleaner that was far past its best use date. Old flyers were stuck to the announcement board, dating back several years from when no one bothered to change them out. The hallways were empty.
“So it begins,” she sighed, becoming the loudest, most alive thing in the building.
Her heels clicked aggressively against the tile, the sound bouncing off the walls and back at her as she moved down looking for Room 107. It was a lecture hall that seated fifty, but the class roster had only thirteen students signed up, just barely enough for the administration to justify the course and not shut it down before the semester started. She pushed the door open and saw two students already sitting in seats, faces to their phones. At the front of the building, a man in a white t-shirt and jeans stood, back to the audience.
For a moment, she thought he was another student, readying herself to go up and tell him that whatever profane comment or penis he would draw on the blackboard wouldn’t be tolerated when he turned around at the sound of her heels and she was met with an older man. He was no older than thirty-three, she was sure of it. His hair still had all its color, though the stubble on his chin gave away the flow of a gray tide. His jeans were washed out from years of use. Loose, untied Doc Martens adorned his feet. He looked more like he should be on the cover of Rolling Stone for a story about his Bruce Springsteen cover band than teaching a class about the social context of shifters in society.
The arms and chest beneath the shirt were defined as it hung on him loosely, clinging to the curves and valleys of his muscles, clearly visible underneath. A sprinkling of chest hair sat at the very tip of the V-neck in his shirt, hinting at more below.
“And you are?” he asked, looking over and reaching for his class roster.
“Alessia. Monroe. I’m not a student,” she said. “I’m your teaching fellow.”
“Right. The administration-assigned glorified assistant.”
She felt her head jerk back at the comment without meaning to, blinking at him as he turned back to the blackboard, his interest in her gone completely now. He wrote notes on the board from a slip of torn, ratty paper in his hand.
“I’m student teaching as part of my practicum,” she said, stepping forward, putting herself a few feet closer to him.”
“Yes. I’m aware. You’re not my first teaching fellow and you will not be the last because the administration does not seem to get the hint.”
She bristled. “Sir, if you’d like me to switch to another section I can—”
“Nope. You’re here. We’re going to see it through. I’m not overly interested in cultural tourism that the majority of this major seems to be populated by—”
“Cultural tourism?”
“—And it seems as though every single one of my teaching fellows up to this point has been a kind hearted ‘ally’ just looking to piss off Mommy and Daddy with a controversial field of study, not realizing there are actual lives and lifestyles at stake here—”
“Sir, I absolutely do—”
“—But there’s always hope that someone will be different.”
He dropped the chalk down, finishing writing his name on the board. It bounced off the ledge of the chalkboard and hit the ground in a tiny white cloud. He walked away, not bothering to reach for it. On instinct, Alessia came forward and picked it up, placing it back on the ledge. He turned to look, smirking, and then went back to his notes on the podium.
“You’re already a natural, Miss. Monroe,” he said. “Take a seat, if you will, and we’ll see if the rest of the class doesn’t decide to show up.”
She felt her face heat up, watching him pace back over to the chalkboard, his black boots clanking on the floor with authority. She watched his back, the muscles underneath moving as he put words on the board. She ignored the impressive stature of the flesh that so perfectly seemed to wrap around his frame. She hated that assholes always seemed to have the nicest bodies. They didn’t deserve it, like that bitch Becky Holland in the eighth grade who had the massive breasts and pushed her in the cafeteria once.
She marched over to the front row, looking at the present students who didn’t seem to retain a syllable of the conversation that happened in front of them at the podium, texting and tweeting their lives away. For once, she was fine with the awful technological addiction everyone seemed to lay on her generation. She dropped into her seat with more of a huff than she intended. She always managed to come off childish when she was agitated in situations like this.
It would be a long first day.
Chapter 2
Alessia founded the Shifter-Non Alliance in her high school. Virtually every high school in the country had one except for her backwoods Arizona high school filled with nothing but racist white kids picking on the Mexican kids who could barely speak English. No one showed up the first time. The kids who were shifters never admitted it aloud. Though it became easy to tell who was who, after a while. Alessia didn’t like giving into stereotypes. The amount of times she said Mom, you can’t say that on a weekly basis was getting painfully repetitive. But there were some things that she cringed to admit did reveal shifters.
Everyone always said they started to look like their animal other halves, something wolfish about the wolf shifters, that the dragons had crazy body heat. But the easiest way to tell who was a shifter were the kids getting thrown into the dumpster after school, or worse.
James Tory was a bully. He probably still was for all she knew. He was probably some high-class businessman with a job and a bimbo wife who let him put it in her ass every night and pretended to like it. While he was in school, he made a hobby of picking out the kids he thought were shifters and putting marks on them. He took his dad’s old Swiss Army knife and put deep x’s on their left wrists so he could always find them and they’d always know what they were, what their place was.
That’s how she met her best friend. Because James didn’t differentiate between boys and girls, he put scars on them all the same. He didn’t have a sense of chivalry when it came to shifters. He said animals were animals.
Alessia found him one day, in the normal spot. Instead of a scrawny boy in glasses or a Mexican pleading for help in another language, it was a girl. Alessia recognized her from her algebra class freshman year. Her name was Trish, she was a wolf shifter and came from a poor branch of a proud wolf clan. Now she was looking at the sharp edge of a knife about to put an inerasable mark on her skin.
“Hey.”
She called it out without thinking, before she could stop herself. But then there she was, staring down James and his gang, and the pale face of a petrified girl.
“Leave her alone.” It wasn’t overly commanding and if she heard someone say it to her, she probably wouldn’t have obeyed either. But it was a start. If nothing else, it delayed the pain, the blood; she was buying time for this girl to get to safety.
“You some half-breed whore?” he asked. “Some beast lover?”
Later in life, she’d take those titles on with pride. In that moment, she was petrified, staring at the shine of his knife and the cackle of his friends. She swallowed down a wad of thick spit in the back of her throat. Every second she waited to answer was a moment bought for Trish, but it was also a moment she lost her nerve, his smirk getting bigger.
“I’ll call the cops.”
“Go for it. The fuck they care about beast bullshit.”
She knew th
at was true; she knew it before she even said it. The cops in these small towns were known to be no friend to the outsider. They often attacked shifters, claimed they resisted arrest, claimed they were about to illegally shift in public and all sorts of other trumped-up lies to get them in handcuffs and behind bars. The media called it brutality but the lawmakers called it necessary.
In the end, she and Trish ended up running for their lives. She had the common sense not to run home, not to give him the advantage of knowing where to find her whenever he felt like harassing her. Instead, she led him to the one mall in town where they could lose them, her hand in Trish’s pulling her along. It was hard not to end up best friends after that.
“This is my friend Alessia,” Trish would introduce her in high school. “She saved my life once and won’t leave me alone now.”
She’d roll her eyes but smile and toss back her drink.
#
Alessia tried to think of Trish while glaring daggers at her professor. Two more students arrived and he decided five minutes early was as good as any time to begin. He introduced himself.
“They won’t give me tenure because they hate me,” he said. “I think they’re hoping I die of liver failure. I’m a whiskey mouth, I’ll admit.”
He didn’t give her a chance to introduce herself. He rolled right from his own introduction into the syllabus. She cleared her throat several times, but he didn’t budge an inch, never even looking at her. He didn’t hand her a syllabus when he passed them around to the students and she felt her blood nearly boiling in the veins beneath her skin. She was ready to vibrate with heat and anger, wishing for laser beam eyes or some Jedi power to suck the life right out of him.
Still, she had to admit he knew what he was talking about.
“In this class, we use the term ‘Non’ to refer to non-shifters,” he said. “There is no ‘human,’ ‘normal people,’ or any other bias language in this class.”
“Sir?” A boy raised his hand. “Isn’t using Non kind of bias too? I mean you’re suggesting that shifter is the default state and anything else is the outlier.”
“Yes, it bothers you, doesn’t it? Makes you feel a little bit off, like you might not be welcome? Just imagine.”
The boy didn’t say a word the rest of the class, shrunk down in his seat in the fourth row, staring into his syllabus with a scowl and a red face. She understood the feeling. She stared a hole into the blackboard at the front of the room for the rest of the class as he explained a piece of paper that was in front of all their faces. Then he said he’d let them all go, but expected them ready to take on the class for real in two days when they met again.
The students shuffled out to join their peers as they crossed the campus in a mass exodus to their next class, or lunch, or a nap in their dorm.
“Professor Tekkin?” she asked, stepping up to him, hating the need to address him formally.
“Miss Monroe?”
“I was wondering what my role in this class might be, seeing as you didn’t introduce me—“
“That is for you to decide, Miss Monroe. You’re here to learn how to do my job by doing. It’s not like your other classes where you take notes and think in the abstract about all your activism and philosophical standings. This is where the real world begins. It will not be kind to you, so why should I?” he said, swiping his arm across the board to make the words disappear and she tried not to stare at the way his muscles flexed and twitched to accommodate the movement. Awful people weren’t allowed to be hot, she kept telling herself this. “So if you want a place in this class, take it. I am life, Miss Monroe, and I won’t hand you a damn thing.”
She swallowed, gripping tightly at the binder against her chest so hard she thought plastic might imbed itself in her hands. She hadn’t expected him to have such a point with his completely awfulness. That didn’t mean she liked him any better or the things he said, but at least it wasn’t an outright refusal to do his job. She could pretend he played the part of tough love mentor who was making her better.
Though somehow, as she walked out, she was pretty sure it was just that he was an angry man.
#
“Yep, sounds like a douche,” Trish said from the screen where her face sat in a New York City apartment.
While Alessia had gone on to fight for rights and pick fights with bigots backed by a college education and a fancy piece of paper with her name and degree on it, Trish had gone on to be the artistic one. She was a born actor. That much was clear when she auditioned for the play in junior year and spent all night a nervous wreck until she looked at the cast list the next morning and saw her name next to Annie Sullivan for the fall production of The Miracle Worker. Even Alessia had to admit she was phenomenal in it, even for a school play, despite all her teasing that Trish was some artiste now.
It worked out for her, apparently, because she was accepted into Tish School for the Arts at NYU and everyone suddenly realized how serious she was about this career path. She graduated with several auditions waiting for her and agents throwing business cards at her for representation. It was kind of cool, being best friends with a theatre-world celebrity.
“Stuff like this happens a lot,” Alessia said. “The bureaucracy of the college administration is never in the student’s favor. It’s all always about ego.”
“Good thing you’re pursuing a PhD in working the rest of your life for said corrupt a-holes.”
“I don’t have to become a professor.”
“What else do you do with a Shifter Culture and Studies degree with Dr. slapped in front of your name? That’s like the kids who major in philosophy just to teach philosophy.”
“I can do public work.”
“For no money.”
Trish had always been apprehensive of Trish’s choice in taking the devoted path of activist on behalf of the shifter population. Trish’s experiences in high school had made her wary of being too outspoken, even about standing up for herself. Alessia couldn’t blame her for that. That’s why she had a long hard think one night about her own privilege and the safety she had speaking out where others didn’t. Her parents asked how the hell she expected to pay rent and her student loans back spending her days holding up signs on a picket line and calling herself a Doctor for show.
“Did you get that part in the Disney musical?’ Alessia asked.
Trish paused, her lips pulling into a tight line, her face turning somewhat red, even through the grainy image of her on the Skype screen.
“Trish?”
“I didn’t get it.”
“And it’s bothering you this much?”
She was worrying on her lip with her whitened, perfect teeth. She’d always kept them above and beyond in cleanliness. People always said they could spot a wolf shifter by their gnarled, crooked, and stained teeth, even as a human. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t keep Trish from being incredibly paranoid every time she smiled for pictures and took two hours to decide on a headshot photo.
“The audition just didn’t go well,” she shrugged and tapped a pen somewhere off screen. “I messed it up.”
“Damn. That’s not like you. What happened?”
That’s when Trish let out a long and frustrated sigh, expelling all sorts of breath that Alessia didn’t notice she was holding onto. She leaned back in her seat.
“The director said he didn’t hire half-breeds and kicked me out.”
“Trish!” She felt her skin vibrating in anger, seeing red in front of her eyes. “That’s illegal. He can’t discriminate based on race, religion, orientation, gender, or shifter status. It’s the law.”
“No one cares anymore. The Bill of Protection will pass and anyone can do whatever the hell they want if they claim they’re protecting themselves and their families.”
“And this is exactly why I followed through on this major and why I’m still here now. This is appalling.”
“And you’re going to change it from your seat in a lecture or behind your desk in
an office with your name on it?”
Trish’s tone had become sharp, edged over on every side. Her eyes were hurt though, not matching the venom in her tone. Alessia clenched her jaw and tried not to rise to the bait. Trish wanted something. She could be angry at that. She could see, something in front of her face that was real rather than the abstract idea of a bigot.
“Yes. I’m going to try. Just like I always have.”
Without having to say it, she called that time, when Trish was backed into a corner with a knife, ready to make her bleed, and Alessia had been dumb enough to step in. It had been her one great moment of action, of taking on something bigger than herself for a cause that was so much bigger than herself. It was an image, a time she constantly clung to. She wrote about in her entrance essays and often recalled when she doubted what she was doing.
Trish backed down. Her face dropped, the snapping of her gaze and tone disappeared in an instant.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I knew getting dumped from auditions like that was a possibility but now with all this crap on the news… it’s just getting to me a little bit more. It’s like even if I were to try to tell someone about this, no one would care, you know?”
“Well, I’ll make them care.”
Trish smiled at the childishness but looked grateful. They talked the rest of the night about things that were infinitely less depressing.
Chapter 3
The day between her classes with Dr. Tekkin were a nice relief. She had two classes, both seminars, which meant most the hours spent in them meant everyone was gathered around a table like King Arthur’s knights, debating freedom and justice, and all sorts of other righteous things.
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