Detention with Prof. Ward

Professor Ward lives a couple blocks away from campus. All told, the walk is kind of pleasant; you haven’t really been to the more residential parts of this college town before, but you figure this must be where many of the professors and other staff live. The roads here are a bit wider, the streets cleaner, and the greenery… greener?

You eventually comes across Professor Ward’s house, a quaint little two story house that looks like it could have been built during the colonial era. A minute or so after you ring the doorbell, Ward gets the door open for you, wearing her typical business casual blouse and knee length skirt. The top couple buttons are left undone, exposing a tantalising strip of cleavage, and all of a sudden, you’re reminded of just how hot your economics professor is. She might be a little older than the typical girl that catches your eye, but there’s no doubt that she has caught yours.

“Want to come in?” she asks, a hint of a smile catching across her lips. “It’s going to be winter if you take any longer.”

“Yes, of course Professor Ward,” you say, hastily following her in.

“Valerie’s fine,” she replies. “I’m not that much of a stickler for formality.”

“Got it,” you say, deliberately not using her name or her title. It feels awkward to call your professor by her first name, even if she’s asked you to. “So am I just… sitting around and doing work?”

The two of you have settled down in her living room, a cozy space featuring several leather-backed chairs, a couple wooden coffee tables, and a fireplace tucked in the side. On the wall sits several album covers: you recognise Things Fall Apart from the Roots and The Low End Theory from A Tribe Called Quest, as well asEnter the Wu-Tang, but there are a couple others that you can’t quite pin down—maybe more underground artists?

“That works with me,” Professor Ward says. “To be honest, I’ve never really given a student detention before. What do kids in there do for all those hours?”

“Listen to old school hip-hop?” you suggest, nodding at the covers hanging on the wall.

“Hey, you’re into that?” she asks, sounding much more like an excited 7 year old getting a lollipop than a professor in the midst of giving you detention.

“They made sampling cool. How could I not be into it,” you reply.

Professor Ward claps her hands together in delight, and she walks over to the shelves full of album covers on display. She surveys her collection for a second, and then picks out one of them.

“Up for some 36 Chambers?” she asks. Seeing the smile break across your face, she opens up the cover, picking out the vinyl. Her record player sits on one of the coffee tables tucked into the corner of the room, and before long, the opening bars of Bring Da Ruckus is echoing through the room.

You pull out a book that was assigned for your Writing Seminar class, the good old Republic, and continue reading on about how all poets should be killed or something like that. Truth be told, you’re not all that impressed by the text, but work is work, and your old codger of a professor’s probably going to make you have an opinion on it next class, so the reading will get done.

Ward’s been flipping back and forth through a thick stack of papers, making extensive notes in the margins. After a good half hour or so of reading, you’ve grown tired of Plato jerking himself off about his fantasy city, and so you drop your book and take a look at Professor Valerie Ward. She looks cute like this, curled up in a chair and biting a pen between her teeth, nodding along to I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side, an intense look of concentration furrowed in her brow as she stares at a page.

Eventually, she turns the page, and her eyes peek up above it to land on yours, still staring at her.

“Something up?” she asks.

“Just resting my eyes for a second,” you say. Then, pushing your luck just a little: “After all, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

“Save that line for Mallory,” Ward says without skipping a beat, and you take one, shocked at how she could know that you…

Ward is laughing now.

“It’s not that surprising. You bet hundreds of minutes to score a date with her, Alex.”

Oh, right. You’d somehow forgotten that she knew that.

“How do you know I didn’t bet hundreds of minutes to score a date with you, Valerie,” you say, giving your best attempt at a comeback.

“Sometimes, I wonder if romance is dead,” she muses, putting her stack of papers to the side. “But then, I meet young guys like you, who take ladies out on dates where they both read stuffy texts while listening to music two decades out of style, and I know that it’s alive and kicking.”

“Hey, the work was your suggestion,” you laugh, wagging an accusatory finger at her.

“Oh yeah? What do you think we should do instead?” she asks, leaning forward in interest.

Spotting the sparkle in her eye, you realise that this could be your chance to get something done. But, what is the right thing to do?

Ward +15