The assault of genitalia diagrams was seemingly endless.

When Nick finally clicked off the projector, turned on the lights, and started telling us to have a good weekend—but not too good a weekend, because we had reading due Tuesday—I was the first person in the room to lurch out of my seat.

I hugged my notebook to my chest, the loose sheets of my article shoved inside for safekeeping, and started shuffling backwards into the aisle.

"I'll see you tonight?" I asked Andre, raising my voice just enough so he'd hear me over the rustle of papers and the hiss of zippers while everyone packed up.

It was the first Thursday of the semester—a day referred to as either Thirsty Thursday or Blackout Thursday, depending on who you asked.

There would be house parties up and down the Rodeo, a street a few blocks north of campus that was lined with twelve historic Victorian houses that'd all been rented out to different student groups—the baseball team, the women's field hockey team, the Black Student Union, cinema club.

There were no sororities or fraternities at Garland, but a lack of infrastructure had never stopped our student body from finding ways to get white girl wasted on a weeknight.

It was fantastic people-watching.

Hanna, Andre and I planned on hitting our usual spot, the Art House, which was far from a rager but did possess a kind of cool, intellectual vibe.

Music I hadn't heard, discussions of poetry I hadn't read.

Probably lots of boxed wine.

"I'm coming over to pregame," Andre said as he closed his laptop. "Tell Hanna not to drink all the Fireball before I get there."

I scrunched my nose and shivered with disgust.

"Do you hate yourselves?"

Andre rolled his eyes.

"Go turn in your damn article!" he said, shooing me off with a wave of his hand.

Before I turned to leave, I allowed myself one glance across the room.

Bodie St. James was standing in front of his seat, fingers laced at the back of his head as he stretched his elbows out and arched his back. His hair had dried funny, so his bangs—which he usually kept off his forehead—curled a little to one side.

He turned to Kyle Fogarty and said something that made him laugh, then slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned towards the opposite aisle. He didn't so much as look back in my direction.

For some pathetic reason, I'd been hoping he would.

I spun around, hating myself a little, and bolted out the door.

Outside the biology building, the rainclouds had thinned so streaks of golden sunlight came pouring through. While very picturesque and all, this meant the air was both damp and warm.

My hair had never done well in humidity.

I could practically hear it crackling as I trudged across campus.

The student union was a massive, horseshoe-shaped building at the far end of a quad that housed the enormous oval-shaped fountain where the seniors always did the annual Trunk Dunk the week before graduation.

It was a perpetually crowded part of campus—even with the grass soaked and the skies still half grey. There were people studying on beach towels and a pair of guys tossing a football back and forth, both of them wearing bro tanks and board shorts.

I took the elevator up to the top floor.

The media center was always buzzing with noise, and smelled vaguely of stale coffee and warm printer ink. Daily headquarters hadn't been updated in at least five years. I was sure the aggressively yellow walls and overabundance of beanbag chairs (all of which seemed to be eternally leaking pellets of foam stuffing) had once been the cutting edge of interior design, but now the whole place felt like a giant throwback. Although the open concept was nice, at least.

At any given time, there were at least thirty people in the media center, scattered across the sittings areas and desktop-armed tables, some of them collaborating with teammates and some of them staring vacantly at the sunflower yellow walls while they squished beanbag foam pellets between their fingers.

I spotted Ellison Michaels immediately.

She was hard to miss.

Ellison was six feet tall and walked with the authority of a steamroller. She had a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of papers in the other. Trailing one step behind her was a wide-eyed kid with a headset around his neck and half-moons of sweats staining the armpits of his Garland green polo shirt.

Headset Boy was talking fast. Ellison was nodding every few seconds, listening intently but not looking at him.

Wherever she went, rooms orbited around her.

Ellison Michaels was simultaneously a supermassive black hole—unmovable and terrifying—and a supernova—blindingly bright and capable of titanic explosions that could vaporize everything in her wake.

And her blond hair was always perfect.

A lot of people talked a lot of shit about Ellison for being so authoritarian, but I liked her.

Freshman year, when I'd drafted my first article for the Daily, she was the sophomore editor assigned to my work. Her infamous red ink revisions had been so scathing that I sat down and cried at a table in the student union.

That night, I'd opened my laptop to change my major, but stopped when I saw an email from the editor-in-chief at the time (a senior who'd gone on to work at the Washington Post). He'd said Ellison had told him I showed enormous potential. He'd invited me to sit in on one of the closed-door weekly meetings with all the senior writers.

I'd been the only freshman there—wide-eyed and incapable of not smiling.

So, maybe I was biased, but I thought Ellison Michaels was pretty cool.

She also scared the living daylights out of me.

It didn't help, of course, that I was holding a very poorly executed article I knew she'd have to read.

Just get it over with, I thought.

I darted between desks and beanbag chairs to intercept her.

"Ellison?" I said, already regretting it.

Her eyes snapped onto me, sharp and alert.

"Your article's late," she greeted, blunt and no-nonsense.

She hadn't stopped moving, so I had no choice but to scramble along beside her, falling into step with Headset Boy, whose face was pinched in a way that told me I'd interrupted him mid-sentence. I tightened my grip on the notebook clutched to my chest and inhaled, fortifying myself to say something.

"Um," is what came out.

Ellison expected hard-hitting expository journalism. Something cutting-edge. Something that upheld her original assessment of me as having great potential. Instead, I was going to hand her what was basically glorified gossip about the head coach of Garland's football team, and she was going to uncap her trademark red pen and stab me in the eye.

Headset Boy sighed impatiently.

"Like I was saying," he resumes, voice tinged with annoyance, "President Sterling wants coverage of the alumni fundraiser this weekend. They're doing a reception in Buchanan, campus tours, professor talks in Kennedy Hall."

"Assign a sophomore," Ellison told him, then, to me, "Do you have it?"

I fumbled with my notebook.

"Look, I'm really sorry—" I began.

Ellison plucked my article out of my hand, unmoved by the wrinkles and smudges of ink where the rain had blotted the paper, and slapped it onto the top of the stack in her arm.

"I was wondering if I could explain where I was going with it. I work at the Garland Country—I'm a waitress slash ball girl—" a glorified one who made a whopping eleven dollars an hour (every nickel of which I needed), "—and some of the women on the tennis team—"

Were ridiculously wealthy and ridiculously bored. All they seemed to do was go on pointless vacations to island destinations together, drink copious amounts of white wine, and talk shit about everyone they knew. I just had to compliment their serves and they'd spill tea like it was Boston Harbor.

The weekend before, when I'd returned to work, they'd discussed every little detail of Coach Vaughn's summer bender in Cabo San Lucas, down to the bars he hopped and the hotels he trashed.

"I've got a meeting in five," Ellison interrupted me, before I could relay any of this. "Shoot me an e-mail."

And then she was gone, turning the corner towards her office and marching down the hallway, the rubber soles of Headset Boy's sneakers squealing against the tiled floor as he stumbled after her.

I watched until they disappeared.

Then I tugged out my phone and texted the group chat with Hanna and Andre.

Save me a shot of Fireball.

❖ ❖ ❖

A brief note on something I had hoped I wouldn't have to address in 2018.

Having non-white characters in a book does not mean those characters were made non-white for bragging rights. Their races/ethnicities are important to how they relate to their world. Each is intentional. Not a hat draw. Let's stop pretending race/ethnicity/entire cultures are just fun character quirks to slap on.

To be clear: Andre is black. Hanna is Vietnamese American. Laurel is half Mexican (important to note here that Hispanic/Latino is actually an ethnicity—she'd be technically "white" as her roots are in Europe, but simplifying this completely ignores the relationship between the US and Latin American countries).

Please don't ignore textual evidence that Laurel's ethnic background is important, and don't go erasing that part of her. Certainly don't come after me saying that Laurel "isn't diverse enough," because that shows a remarkable lack of understanding about the way Mexican immigrants are treated in this country. (Trump is shaking.)

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Kate