Rebelling my Professor

“F*ck!” 

The glass slips before I even realize my fingers have let go of it.

It hits the kitchen tile and explodes into a hundred little stars, water spreading fast across the floor, and I freeze there like the sound itself has nailed my feet down.

“Are you kidding me right now?” my father growls, not even looking up from his newspaper at first, like he already knows it's me who broke something.

“It was an accident, Dad,” I say, already crouching to pick up the shards with my bare hands because panic doesn't exactly come with instructions.

“Everything with you is an accident!” he finally lowers the paper, his eyes flat and tired in that way that makes me feel about two inches tall. “The shattered vase last month. The broken chair before that. Now this!”

“It's a glass, not a national tragedy,” I mutter, sucking in a breath when a piece bites into my thumb.

“Watch your mouth!” he snaps, standing now, arms crossed like a wall I'll never climb over. “Today of all days you can't just be careful for five minutes?”

I press my thumb against my jeans to stop the blood from dripping onto the floor along with everything else I've apparently ruined. My father doesn't move to help. He never does. He just watches, like he's cataloguing another item on the long list of ways Polly Lawson fails to be the daughter he ordered.

“I'm sorry, okay?” I say, and my voice cracks in a way I hate, because I don't want to sound small in front of him, not today.

“Sorry doesn't clean floors,” he says, turning away like the conversation, like me, is already finished. “Sorry didn't win you that scholarship either. Don't embarrass me there the way you embarrass me here.”

That one lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there, burning. I grab my bag off the counter, my thumb still stinging, and I don't say another word because there's nothing I can say that will ever be enough for him. There never has been.

I slam the door behind me harder than I mean to, and the whole frame rattles like it might come apart, which feels about right, since I'm not too far from doing the same.

The walk to campus should feel like a victory lap. Full scholarship. Best law school in the state. The kind of place girls like me only see in brochures, not the girls who actually attend. But all I can think about is the way my father looked at me like I was something spilled, something he has to keep mopping up before he ever gets to be proud.

By the time I reach the gates, I've swallowed most of it down. Almost.

“Polly Lawson?” a woman calls out, waving a clipboard like it's a flag of rescue. She's polished, warm-smiling, exactly the kind of person universities parade around to make prospective students feel like they matter. “I'm Denise, from admissions. I helped process your scholarship file — I've been so excited to finally meet the girl behind that entrance exam score.”

“That's me,” I say, forcing my best normal-human smile. “Guilty.”

“Come on, let me show you around before your first class,” she says, already walking, clearly the type who doesn't wait for permission.

I follow her past marble floors that gleam like they've never met a shoe, past glass walls overlooking gardens too manicured to be real, past a library that looks like it swallowed a cathedral whole. Everything about this place smells like money — old, comfortable, untouchable money — and I feel my scholarship folder growing heavier in my bag with every step, like proof I don't quite belong.

“This is where dreams get built,” Denise says, beaming, gesturing at the lecture halls like she's selling me a house I could never afford.

“Or where they get crushed,” I say under my breath, but she doesn't hear it, or pretends not to.

She finally leaves me by the main staircase, wishing me luck with a hand squeeze that's meant to be encouraging and just makes me feel more alone. I barely have a second to breathe before I spot them — a cluster of girls by the lockers, hair too shiny, bags too expensive, laughter too loud on purpose. The one at the center has a badge pinned to her blazer that says «Mary Stewart» in gold cursive, like her name needed its own announcement.

“Oh my god, look at her shoes,” Mary says, not bothering to lower her voice, eyes raking me up and down like I'm a bug that wandered into the wrong exhibit. “Did you steal your dad's work boots or something?”

Her friends laugh on cue, that practiced kind of cruelty that only comes from people who've never once worried about anything real.

“At least I didn't need my dad's credit card to get in here,”I snap back, chin up, because backing down has never once been in my nature.

“Cute,” Mary says, unbothered, twirling a strand of perfect hair around one manicured finger. “Scholarship girls are always so feisty. It's adorable, really — like a stray that thinks it's a house pet.”

I don't have a comeback fast enough, and honestly, my throat's too tight to trust with words right now, so I just turn and walk before she can see exactly how much that landed.

That's when I check the time and my stomach drops — three minutes to get across campus for my first class, in a building I've never even seen the inside of.

I run.

I take the stairs two at a time, lungs burning, bag banging against my hip, and I round the corner too fast, too reckless, exactly like my father always says I do everything.

I slam straight into someone solid, papers exploding into the air around us like startled birds, and I stumble back to find a handsome tall man in glasses staring down at me, his jaw tight, his expression somewhere between disbelief and barely restrained fury.

“Watch where you're going,” he says, low and clipped, crouching to gather the scattered pages while I just stand there, frozen, already knowing this is not how I wanted my first day to start.

“Watch where you're going,” he says, and something in me just snaps clean in half.

Maybe it's the glass still shattered on my kitchen floor. Maybe it's Mary Stewart's laugh still ringing in my ears, or my father's voice telling me I embarrass him just by existing. Whatever it is, I'm done swallowing it down for one more stranger to add to the pile.

“You watch where you're going!” I snap, pushing myself up off the floor, ignoring the papers still scattered everywhere between us. “I'm not gonna be lectured by some old man with vision issues.”

His head tilts, just slightly, like he genuinely can't believe the sentence that came out of my mouth. Up close he's not as old as I first thought — maybe late twenties, sharp jaw, sharper eyes behind those glasses, the kind of face that probably terrifies freshmen on sight. Right now it's doing a decent job on me too, except I'm too far gone in my own anger to care.

“Excuse me?” he says, voice dropping low, dangerous in a