When he was sure she was gone, he put on his clothes and after awhile of bumping around in the dark warehouse managed to find his way to a door and left the warehouse. It was blindingly bright to him outside, and quite obviously he'd been out of it for some time. Still, he recognized that he was in the same run-down area of campus he'd had his accident in before... Though, God only knew how much time had elapsed since that had happened.
He found his bearings and headed to the student union in the central part of campus. When he arrived at the building he found one of the kiosks for the free student newspaper and quickly found the date.
Shit! He thought, it was now Tuesday, which meant he'd been out of things for at least a day, judging by the amount of sunlight and student foot-traffic on campus.
He dropped the paper back into the kiosk and ran inside the union looking for a clock. He saw the time on a tv blaring CNN at full volume. 10:47am...
"Fuck!" He said, he was late for Beginning Chinese...
Shouldering his bag, which he considered himself luck to still have after everything else that had happened to him, he raced off to class in his day-old clothes and unwashed body...
He arrived at his Chinese class and flung open the door, not caring what kind of entrance he made nor how his appearance and demeanor must have seemed. He sat down in the back of the class, which since it was a first year class in the fall semester, was full with roughly 30 other students there, all of whom, along with the teacher watched him scramble into a chair and look up toward the front.
The teacher, Professor Xiao Li-ling, looked up at the clock over the black board where she'd been giving the Tuesday morning lecture.
"Well, thank you for joining us for the last two minutes of class, William. For everyone else, feel free to leave early today. William, I need to speak with you." She said, as the rest of the class began putting away their materials and leaving.
Billy closed his eyes a moment and shook his head. This was the fifth absence he'd had this semester, which meant he'd now qualified to receive a failing grade for the class... Once all the students had left, Professor Xiao crossed her arms and looked at him disapprovingly.
She was originally from Taiwan, but she'd earned her MA and PhD at Oxford in "Women in Chinese Fiction in Pre-Modern times", and since her first day of teaching some eight weeks earlier had taken every opportunity she could to disparage the American college education system and generally boast every minute she could about how wonderful Oxford was...
Outside of class Billy had heard several of the Teaching Assistants who taught recitation sections for his class commenting on how much they wished she'd just take her uppity-ass back to the UK... The woman was a real bitch and didn't seem to realize that she wasn't at Oxford any longer and really wasn't the Holy-hot-shit she believed herself to be. Still, Billy had to put up with her crap as he had to take two years of Chinese to qualify for a study-abroad opportunity he really, really wanted. Resigning himself to another tongue-lashing about American students' lack of professionalism he moved to the front row of the classroom.
"Professor Xiao, I'm so sorry for being late today. I really-"
"Be quiet, William." She said coldly. "I'm not interested in your excuses. Oh yes, there's always an excuse with you Yanks, isn't there?" His teeth grated on the way she said "yanks", as her Taiwanese and forced-Oxford accent clashed horribly for the thousandth time...
"Yes, quite, you're always either held-up in your filthy, privately-owned-automobile-loving-society's traffic, and I just can't understand why you so detest mass transit here, or you had to work late because being a full time student just isn't good enough for you; I don't want to hear it!" She had worked herself up into quite a hissy-fit today.
"Fucking wanna-be Limey..." He thought.
"Professor Xiao, you're right, there's no excuse for my absence, and if I could just-"
"I said save-it, William! I'm really not interested in any excuse! You've now missed lecture five times, which means you qualify to fail the class. And you know what?" She asked, lilting the end of her sentence in such an annoyingly, synthetic and overly-British way.
"I've decided to give you a failing mark. Come to my office later today and make an appointment to see me. We have to inform your school's dean and decide how you can re-take the class next semester. That's all." She said stiffly, wiggling her tight little ass in her long skirt as she left the room, books in hand. He watched her leave and just sighed with resignation...
