Chapter 1

“Thirty percent of you will fail. Sixty percent will get Cs and Bs. Ten percent will receive As. If any of you take issue with my curve, you may leave now and return to your entitled expectations of effortless success.”

No actually. We couldn’t leave.

This was the last semester before the application season for the Psych program. Social Psychology was the final prereq, and this was the only section without a waitlist. We were the unlucky forty that were stuck with the infamously brutal Doctor Wells. His overall Rate My Professor rating hung at a solid 1.2, and more students in his class reported to the mental crisis center during finals week than any other demographic.

“Social Psychology,” he continued. “An examination of why you silly people behave in the silly ways you do. Special as you children like to imagine yourselves, if you dissect any brain into small enough pieces, you behave exactly the way biology expects you to behave.”

That's college in a nutshell for you. In high school you’re told you’ll finally be treated as an adult, be free to think how you please and skip class whenever you want. Then you arrive and thirty percent of your grade is attendance-based and you have to pander to your professor’s political ideologies to pass the class. Oh, also, now you’re paying a ton of money to do so.

Not that I was cynical.

“Stand up,” Doctor Wells snarled at a girl in the front row. She did.

He twirled his finger for her to face the lecture hall. “In my classroom, I expect the highest level of respect. Clothes like this? Coming to class in what is virtually underwear?” He flashed her a nasty smile. Even hated as he was, Wells was undeniably handsome.

“You’re dismissed,” he told her. She left crying. “So is anyone else who takes issue with my policies.”

“Should we go?” my roommate Georgia whispered to me. “We can always apply to the Psych program next year. There’s no way we’re getting the grades we need in this section.”

“Oh yes we are.”

_______________________________________

By the end of our first class, two more students, a boy and a girl, had left in tears. Our second class was significantly lighter than the first. By the third, numbers had finally stabilized. There were twenty-three of us still enrolled―two As in total.

Doctor Wells was every bit as terrible as everybody said.

He screamed at students who arrived any later than five minutes early.

He slammed closed laptops, once on a student’s fingers. “Paper notes only!”

He would call on students randomly. When they answered, he would scowl at them, scribble something on his clipboard, then drill them on the intricacies of their response until they were forced to admit they understood nothing. If they stuttered or faltered, he cackled at maniacally them.

“Why did so many supposedly ‘good’ German men go along with the Nazi regime?” he asked the second week of the semester. When nobody raised their hands: “Because the thing humans crave more than anything is to conform. You think you’re different. You’re not.” He smirked. His highest point of the day was telling us how terrible we were.

Our first midterm was only three weeks in. I studied for hours and hours. I skipped every other class for three days and pulled an all-nighter with Georgia to prepare. When we finally sat to take the exam, the multiple choice questions were A through K. Each free response required a complicated essay on topics we’d barely touched, and the time limit was an hour.

“No!” Georgia sobbed when we got back our results. “I’m never―” she sniffled “―never getting into Psych.”

“It’s just the first test,” I told her, keeping my own results to myself: a C+. It wasn’t great, even compared to the class average, but it wasn’t Georgia’s F.

“I think―I think I’ll go talk to him after class. Maybe he’ll give me accommodations for my Dyslexia?”

He wouldn’t. I knew that, and so did she, but she went anyway the next day. I left without her. I expected her to return to our dorm room sobbing again―Doctor Wells had made it clear how he felt about students asking for special treatment―but she didn’t. Georgia walked into our room and lay on her bed, with a vacant smile on her face.

“Did it go okay?” I asked.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, okay. He’s not as bad as he seems.”

_______________________________________

Students had dressed up for Doctor Wells lectures from his first class―business casual usually, sometimes even dresses and suits―but by the end of the first month, the clothing shifted.

It was imperceptible at first. I didn't notice until one day, I looked around and I was surrounded by shades of pastel. Girls in cream and gray skirts. Boys in khaki slacks and sky-blue button ups. It felt like I was the only one dressed in black at a spring garden party.

Odd coincidence.

It happened the next class too. And the one after that. By week six or seven, most of the girls were wearing pale or gray dresses, and the boys would dress mostly in white. Only a few, like me, dressed in anything else.

“Is this a standard?” I asked Georgia one day in the library. “Did I, like, fall asleep or something the day he told us white was mandatory.”

“It just feels right to look nice.”

“It doesn’t affect our grades?”

“Why would it?”

Good. That was all I cared about. I needed that A. I was barely sleeping at all anymore, so I could spend a few more hours studying each night. I could sleep in the summer.

“Let’s do an experiment,” Doctor Wells said one day. “You four in the front, come up here.”

They obeyed. He taped up a piece of paper with a medium-sized line on it. Then he flipped over three identical papers with lines.

“Tell me one by one,” he said. “Which of these lines most closely matches the length of the one on the board. You first.”

The first student said the third option. So did the next two. The last boy hesitated, glanced at the three papers, then reluctantly said, “the third.”

Doctor Wells nodded. Then he shook his head, smiled cruelly, and held up the first paper. “It was this one that matched. It was obviously this one, and yet you all said the last one. The first three of you I told to do so before class started, but you―” he narrowed his eyes at the last boy “―you lied even when you knew you were wrong, all on your own. Why is that? Why do all humans comply?”

The boy didn’t answer. He blushed. He was dressed normally, like me, I realized, not in white.

“We don’t all.” I whispered to Georgia.

“He is handsome, isn’t he.”

“The student?”

“No,” she sighed. “Not the student.”

“Excuse me!” Wells announced. “Would you like to make a comment?”

He was staring at me, I realized. The whole class was. For a brief moment, anger flashed inside my chest, sharp and hot. “I said we wouldn’t all have lied to fit in. Most of us, okay sure, but not everybody.”

“Oh?” he asked, then whirled back to his volunteers. “Take your seats.” He jabbed a finger at the boy he’d just finished humiliating, “Come speak with me after my lecture.”

At the end, as we all filtered out, I watched the boy approach the doctor, tugging at his collar, and wiping at his brow nervously.

Our next class, he looked much calmer. He was dressed all in white.

_______________________________________

The next midterm, I was determined to get the highest grade.

By that point, I’d dropped two of my five classes. I could load up my semesters later on. For now, I needed the extra time. I carried flip cards with me wherever I went―to the student cafeteria, to the grocery store, to the gym (JK. Who had time for the gym anymore?).

I memorized facts, terms, and experiment details until three every morning. I dreamed about the Stanford prison experiment and attachment styles. Eventually, I was desperate enough to message several of the top students to meet up for a study group.

“The Scapegoat Theory.” I held the front of the card to the group. “Who knows it? Anybody? James?”

“I’m James,” said the boy next to whom I'd thought was James. I kept mixing their names up. They all looked so… similar.

Not-James stared out the study room window. “I wonder what Doctor Wells is doing right now.”

“Probably devising some way to torture us,” I said.

“I wonder if he ever misses us.”

“I… that’s a weird thing to ask.”

“He must sometimes,” James said. “He takes such care with his lessons. He shapes them just for us. He must be thinking about us now.”

“He must,” Not-James agreed.

“He must,” the others agreed as one.

I left the group early. Waste of time. None of them were even trying to study.

The second midterm went better than the first. I scored in the top ten percentile. If I could just ace the final, I might really have a shot at an A.

When I asked Georgia how she’d done, she waved me off dreamily. “Oh, I don’t care so much about that anymore. It’s a bit silly to worry about.”

I stared at her on her bed. It was the first time I’d really stared at her in the past few weeks. I’d been so busy in the library. She wore a long flowing white dress, even though we weren’t in class, and her face… something was different. Was her skin smoother than normal? Or was it her nose? Had it always been curved like that?

Georgia sighed contentedly, staring at the ceiling.

The next day in class, I looked at my peers, truly took them in. They all wore cream now, all but me, and their faces… I’d never gotten to know any of them especially well, but had they always looked this similar? The boys were blonde-haired and square-chinned. The girls were petite and pale. Even Georgia. When I looked between her and the girl next to her―it took me a moment to decide which was which.

“A volunteer,” Wells commanded. Every hand shot up. They always did recently. I kept mine firmly down. He pointed at a girl in the back who stumbled over herself with excitement to get to the front of the room.

“Sit,” Wells said. “Sit until I tell you not to.”

She did so.

He stood behind her, one hand on the back of her chair. He stood some more. Then some more. “Good,” he whispered at one point, but still, she remained sitting. Still, he remained standing. We watched. The entire hour, we watched.

Eventually, I checked my phone. Class had ended ten minutes ago. Nobody had left. Soon fifteen minutes had passed. Then twenty.

I stood, slung my bag over my shoulder and slunked from the lecture hall.

The girl in the chair never showed for class again.

_______________________________________

“I think something odd is going on with one of my professors,” I told the dean of Psychology.

Her whole face narrowed. She leaned forward above her desk. “Who?”

“Doctor Wells.”

The dean leaned back. Her face slackened. “Ah.”

“I don’t know how to describe it, but my classmates―they've been acting weird. Again, I can’t really explain how, but one of them, a girl he used for some sort of an experiment, she’s gone now. I think he did something to her.”

“Doctor Wells can be a strict professor. We hear complaints about his rigor five times a year, but I assure you, he cares deeply for his students.”

“But―”

“A bit of advice? I would focus less on complaining, and more on studying. College isn’t meant to be easy.”

I left.

I’d tried. I’d gone to the person with any sort of power over the situation, and it hadn't worked. That wasn’t my fault. I was absolved for this. There was nothing else I could do now.

Except get that A.

_______________________________________

One by one, the others started disappearing. Every week the student count in Social Psychology shrunk. Those that did remain seemed distracted and vacant-eyed, albeit content. They gazed upwards, mouth slightly parted, or rested their dopey chins on their palms. When Wells asked a question, no hands shot up anymore. He didn’t seem to mind.

Neither did I. After all, one point of extra credit for every ten questions you answered. The more for me.

I transcribed his every word. I pored over them for hours in the evenings, and pondered them as I showered. When he posted his famously brutal ten-page extra-credit essay option, I woke up at five each morning to get it done. Still, I wore my black dress to class. He never told me not to.

Eventually, there were only ten of us attending.

Then eight.

Then five.

“I’d like a word after class,” Wells told Georgia the week before the final. She grinned stupidly and nodded.

Then there were only four.

I studied. I skipped my Physical Science final to gain a few extra hours. It was fine. I could retake the class during the summer. I rewatched every single one of Wells’ lectures on double speed, then on normal speed, then on double speed again. I worked harder than I’d ever worked for anything ever before.

The last day of class, after taking the final, it was only me.

I sat in the first row, in the middle seat. Wells delivered his lecture just like the very first day, as if the hall was brimming with students, as if this weren’t the very last day of class. I listened intently. I took thorough notes.

When it was done, he shut off the projector, set his clipboard on his stand, and approached me. He handed me a bundle of papers, which I accepted, recognizing it immediately: my final. On it, circled twice in red sharpie, was 98%.

“Perhaps you were right. Maybe not everybody does conform in the end.” He set his hand on my shoulder. He really was a handsome man. Doctor Wells handed me a second thing from behind his back, a parcel tied in ribbons. I slid them loose and pulled away the thin paper to reveal the thing inside. A flowing, white dress.

“The A for the class is yours,” he told me. “You deserve it. I hope it makes you happy.”

“It does. Of course, it does.”

Then I pulled the white dress over my head, the soft cotton slick over my shoulders. He smiled down at me. I smiled up.