Chapter 1: The Locked Lecture Hall
The lecture hall smelled like old books and dust, a scent Marlena had come to associate with dread. She shifted in the hard plastic seat, the rough fabric of her oversized oatmeal-colored sweater scratching her neck. On the projection screen, a map of 1870s Europe blurred at the edges as she tried to focus. Professor Vance’s voice was a dry, relentless drone.
“And thus, the Siege of Paris commenced,” he said, tapping his pointer against the screen. “A pivotal moment of deprivation and resilience.”
Deprivation. The word echoed. Marlena’s own pivotal moment was building in her lower abdomen, a low, insistent pressure that had gone from a gentle reminder to a sharp, focused ache over the last twenty minutes. She’d made a mistake. A huge one. The large iced coffee she’d gulped down before class to stay awake was now staging a violent protest.
Her hand, slightly trembling, crept up from her notebook.
Vance’s pale blue eyes swept over the two hundred students without seeing her. He turned back to his notes. “The consumption of rats, dogs, and ultimately, the animals of the Paris zoo became commonplace.”
Marlena bit her lip. She squeezed her thighs together under the desk, a covert, painful knot. The pressure surged. She needed a plan. The bathroom was just down the hall. If she could just get his attention, she could slip out. She raised her hand higher, her fingertips stretching toward the fluorescent lights.
“Professor?” Her voice came out as a reedy squeak, lost in the vast room.
He adjusted his glasses and continued, detailing the parliamentary procedures of the Third French Republic. A girl a few rows ahead coughed, and he paused to glare. Marlena saw her opening.
“Professor Vance, I’m so sorry, may I please—” she tried again, louder.
This time his gaze landed on her. It was flat, impassive. “Miss Grant. The discourse of a nation’s collapse is not to be interrupted for trivialities. You may confer with me after the lecture concludes.”
“But it’s kind of an emergency,” she whispered, mostly to herself, her face flooding with heat. The kind of was a pathetic lie. It was a five-alarm, red-siren, catastrophic emergency. She’d been here before. She knew the terrifyingly short timeline.
She tried the mental tricks. Think of deserts. Think of rocks. Think of… Vance’s bald head. Nothing worked. The ache was a living thing, a balloon being inflated by the second. She recrossed her legs, jiggling her foot. The clock above the door ticked. Five minutes had never felt so impossible.
A boy next to her glanced over, noticing her rigid posture, the white-knuckled grip on her pen. She looked straight ahead, pretending a profound interest in Bismarck’s foreign policy.
Vance moved to the lectern and leaned into the microphone. “To ensure our scholarly focus remains undisturbed, the door is now locked.” With a theatrical click, he used a small remote. A definitive thunk echoed from the back of the hall. It was his famous rule. No one in or out. A collective, soft sigh rippled through the class. For Marlena, it was the sound of a cell door slamming.
Panic, cold and sharp, shot through her. Locked in. She was locked in. The bathroom. She thought of the single-stall bathroom at the end of this corridor. The one with the warped door that always stuck. Last week, she’d seen the janitor, Mr. Henley, fighting with it, cursing as he jimmied a key into a gap near the rusted chain.
The door is rusted shut. The thought was a death sentence. Even if by some miracle Vance let her go, that door might not open. The image was vivid: the flimsy chain, the sickly glow of that single, flickering fluorescent bulb inside reflecting off the cracked mirror, the sink forever clogged with gritty, gray grime.
A new, more terrible warmth began to bloom, unrelated to shame. It was a deep, internal warmth signaling a breach was imminent. Her body was giving up. No. No, no, no, not here. She clenched every muscle she could, a last-ditch, total-system lockdown. She pressed her knees together so tightly the bones protested.
Vance was narrating a letter from a starving Parisian grandmother. Marlena heard none of it. Her universe had narrowed to a single, screaming point of sensation. Her breath hitched. She stopped breathing altogether.
It was no use.
The first warm spill was a betrayal, a sudden release of the sharpest pressure followed by a wave of sheer, impossible relief that horrified her even as it happened. Then it was a floodgate, unstoppable. A spreading, profound warmth soaked through her leggings, darkening the grey fabric to charcoal, then to black. It pooled on the plastic seat beneath her with a soft, almost silent patter she was sure everyone could hear.
Time fractured. The lecture hall sound returned in a rush—Vance’s droning, the rustle of pages, a phone vibrating on silent. She sat perfectly still, frozen in the humid, growing aftermath of the accident. The warmth quickly cooled into a damp, chilling cling. Her face was on fire, but the rest of her felt icy.
She didn’t look down. She just stared at the map on the screen, unseeing. The Siege of Paris. Deprivation. Humiliation. Her mind was blank, white static.
The clock ticked. Ten minutes until class ended. Ten minutes sitting in this. She calculated the logistics with a detached, clinical horror. The walk of shame. Two hundred pairs of eyes. The squelch of her wet leggings. The trail of droplets on the linoleum.
Finally, a bell rang, sharp and jarring. Vance nodded. “We’ll conclude the reading on the establishment of the German Empire. Dismissed.”
The thunk of the door unlocking was the loudest sound she’d ever heard. Chairs scraped. Backpacks zipped. A wave of students began shuffling toward the exits, a slow-moving river she would have to navigate.
She stayed seated, pretending to scribble in her notebook, her body a block of stone. A few people filed past her row. She caught a whisper, a stifled giggle from somewhere. Her vision blurred.
When the hall was nearly empty, she forced herself to move. She slid her backpack onto her lap, a pathetic, sodden shield. Standing up was an agony. The cool air hit the soaked fabric, making her gasp. She didn’t look back at the chair.
She walked, each step a careful, measured mortification. She kept her eyes fixed on the exit sign, a red beacon. The corridor was mercifully clear. Her sneakers made a faint, damp sound on the floor.
She passed the bathroom. The warped door hung slightly ajar, a sliver of darkness and that flickering, sickly light visible from the broken bulb within. The rusted chain dangled. It was open now. Mr. Henley must have fixed it. The irony was a physical punch.
She didn’t stop. There was no point. She needed to get home. To shower, to burn these clothes, to disappear.
As she pushed through the heavy double doors into the bright, indifferent afternoon, she thought she heard Vance’s voice again, faintly, from inside. “Miss Grant? A word about your last paper?”
She kept walking, the damp chill seeping into her skin, mapping the long, quiet journey of her shame.