Jessica fidgeted in the wooden chair as she waited in the hallway. Her future was riding on this meeting. But distracted by thoughts of her advisor’s dead body, her rejected thesis still in his office, and the plan to crash a frat party later tonight, she had a hard time concentrating on the spiel she’d prepared to give Professor Cynthia Van Dyke about her thesis.
Van Dyke was her last chance to stay in the PhD program. For the zillionth time, she repeated her Nietzschean mantra: “Everything decisive in life comes against the greatest obstacles.”
So far, graduate school had been one long series of obstacles: seminars that flew over her head, professors ignoring her hand raised in class, or worse, calling on her just to humiliate her, and then criticizing her in front of the pedigreed boy
