Chapter 31 | Four Minutes of Silence Was Too Much to Ask
She placed her notes on the podium with a quiet, deliberate click and didn’t speak immediately. Instead, her gaze moved across the room, row by row, unhurried and precise.
Jason had never understood how she managed to make looking around feel so much like being inspected. She didn’t need a register. She probably already knew who was supposed to be sitting where.
Average Professor Warren’s class
Nobody moved.
Somewhere near the back, a chair gave a tiny creak.
In the silence, it sounded absurdly loud.
"Phones away."
Two words.
Her voice remained perfectly level. No raised volume, no warning tucked into the edges of it. Somehow, that made the command harder to ignore.
Around Jason, screens disappeared almost instantly. One student turned his phone face-down beneath his notebook. Someone else shoved theirs into a bag and zipped it shut with unnecessary urgency.
Near the front, a guy actually folded both hands on top of his desk, as though physically restraining himself from reaching for it again.
The lecturer watched the last few screens vanish before resting both hands flat against the podium.
She waited.
Just long enough for everyone to wonder if she was going to say something else.
"If I see one phone today–!"
Her eyes swept across the room once more before continuing
"...I’ll assume you’re volunteering to teach this section from the front."
A ripple of nervous laughter moved through the hall before dying almost immediately.
Jason’s hand twitched toward his pocket.
His phone was already away, he knew that. But he was forced to check it anyway.
When he looked up, the lecturer’s gaze was moving across the room again. It passed over him without pause, continued toward the far side, and stopped.
Amanda was sitting at an angle, her attention still partly turned toward the guy beside her, as though she’d forgotten the conversation they’d been having before class had officially ended.
"Miss Carter."
Amanda’s head came up.
"Yes, Professor?"
"Sit properly."
Jason watched her straighten in her seat.
There was no irritation in the lecturer’s voice. No need for one. It was the same tone someone might use to point out that a page had been left open or a name misspelled.
Amanda didn’t seem bothered.
"Okay, Professor."
She adjusted herself with an easy little smile, and the lecturer’s attention moved on.
Amanda straightened in her seat and faced the front again.
That was it.
No further comment. No lingering tension. The lecturer had corrected her, Amanda had adjusted, and the entire exchange had taken less than ten seconds. Yet Jason couldn’t help noticing how quickly the room had accepted it. Nobody questioned the correction. Nobody laughed.
The lecturer simply moved on.
She turned to the board, uncapped a marker, and began writing in small, precise strokes.
"Today we’re finishing resonance stabilization."
Jason opened his notebook.
"Don’t think of electron delocalization as an abstract diagram you memorize. Think about what’s actually happening to the charge across the structure."
She underlined a term.
"When you see overlapping p-orbitals, ask yourself which resonance structures meaningfully contribute and which are merely valid on paper."
Two taps of the marker against the board.
"Because you can’t predict reactivity without understanding where the electron density actually lives."
Jason’s pen paused briefly above his notebook.
"Not where the arrows point."
She looked back at the class.
"Where the density lives."
She continued for several minutes, moving through the material with the same measured confidence.
Every so often, she’d pause just long enough for the denser points to settle before building on them. It wasn’t exactly thrilling, but Jason found himself respecting the precision of it. She never seemed to search for the next word or glance back at her notes.
She simply knew the material and expected them to keep up.
Jason was managing, mostly.
Beside him, Marcus leaned closer, lowering his voice until it was barely audible.
"Do you ever think she dreams in chemical structures? Like, her subconscious is just–!"
He made a vague exploding motion with both hands.
"Benzene rings. All night."
"Marcus."
"What? I’m making an observation."
"Quietly."
Jason turned back toward the board.
The lecturer hadn’t looked around. She hadn’t broken her sentence or even changed her pace.
Still, something about the room had shifted.
Jason couldn’t have said exactly what.
Maybe it was the sudden silence around them. Maybe it was simply the feeling that she’d noticed without needing to turn.
Either way, Marcus seemed to feel it too.
His mouth closed.
Marcus, apparently incapable of learning from experience, leaned toward Jason again a minute later.
"Also, do you think she’s ever laughed? Like genuinely. Not that scary laugh she does when someone gets an answer wrong. I mean an actual–!"
"Marcus"
Ben’s voice was quieter this time.
More urgent causing Marcus glanced at him.
"I’m just asking questions. That’s called curiosity, Ben."
"Marcus"
Jason felt the warning before anything actually happened.
The lecturer placed her marker on the tray.
She didn’t turn around immediately. She finished the sentence on the board first, capped the marker with deliberate care, and set it down.
Only then did she face the room.
Her eyes found Marcus almost instantly.
Not searching.
Not guessing.
Just landing on him with the calm precision of someone who had known exactly where the whispering was coming from the entire time.
"Marcus!"
He froze halfway through the movement, one hand still suspended in the air.
"...Yes?"
"You’ve been in this room–!"
Her eyes flicked to the clock on the wall.
"—for a little over four minutes."
The entire class was silent
Marcus seemed to process the information with the solemnity of a man receiving a life-changing diagnosis.
"...Personal best."
Jason felt the laugh hit him before he could stop it.
Around the room, several other students had the same problem. He caught at least three people physically biting their lips, shoulders trembling as they fought for control.
The lecturer didn’t smile.
"Stand."
Marcus rose immediately on the order
His chair scraped loudly against the floor, the sound stretching through the sudden quiet as every head seemed to turn toward him.
He stood there with the resigned expression of someone who had somehow become the main event without ever agreeing to participate.
Ben leaned slightly toward him.
"Congratulations."
Marcus didn’t look at him.
"I hate you."
Jason kept his voice barely above a breath.
"Four minutes is impressive. That’s a new record."
Marcus’s eyes shifted toward him.
"I hate both of you specifically."
"Solidarity," Ben whispered.
"There is no solidarity happening right now. I’m standing."
He gestured subtly toward the two of them.
"You two are sitting."
Jason lowered his eyes to his notebook before his smile became too obvious.
Marcus had somehow managed to make getting reprimanded entertaining.
That was probably why the lecturer had chosen him.
The lecturer didn’t move.
She simply watched Marcus stand there with the patient expression of someone who had no intention of arguing and even less intention of rushing him.
Jason could practically see Marcus searching for another way out, but every possible complaint seemed to die before reaching his mouth.
Eventually, he gave up.
He stood in silence, radiating the kind of exaggerated suffering that made it increasingly difficult for the rest of the class to keep straight faces.
The lecturer allowed it to continue for another few seconds.
Then she turned back to the board.
The marker touched the surface again, her handwriting continuing exactly where she’d left off, her voice just as steady as before.
"Now."
She underlined the final term and something sharpened in her tone.
"Let’s see who actually did the reading."
Jason’s grip tightened slightly around his pen.
Around the room, the mood changed and a few students shifted in their seats.
Marcus stopped looking quite so amused.
Jason had a feeling the lecture was about to become a lot more interactive.