Bound By The Campus Secret

Chapter 3. The lecture hall

The next morning the Lecture hall was filled with noises. Students were engaged in conversation; some typed on their laptops, while others switched seats from one to another. The temperature of the classroom was warm as it was early in the morning. The smell of coffee and old books filled the space.

I found a seat close to the front, attempting to behave like a typical student.

I had an open notebook and a pen in my hand; however, I couldn't concentrate at all on what was being said or done by anyone else. Instead, all I could think of was what happened the night before: being in the library, walking outside on the way home, and Leo kissing me. My body was a little sore because I had experienced a lot of events from that night.

Then, two large wooden double doors at the rear of the room swung open.

My heart stopped and hit the back of my throat as I looked up at Leo.

Leo looked different now that it was daytime. His t-shirt was clean, his jeans weren’t torn, and his hair was nice and slightly messy. He stood at the open door and scanned the room for a moment. The sounds of the hallway began to fade away, though I don’t know why. Maybe I just wasn’t listening anymore.

Leo’s gaze landed right on my face as if there was some sort of attraction between us. My cheeks felt flushed when I noticed him looking right at me. I couldn’t pull my gaze away from him. He didn’t have a smile on his face, but his eyes looked as if they were saying, *I’ve been thinking about you for a long time.

He turned and went left, without looking at me or waving to me. He walked up to the last row of the room and sat in the back row very far from everyone else. While I was watching him walk away, I felt both disappointed and excited at the same time.

When I looked back down to write in my notebook, my hand was shaking. I could feel him looking at me from high up. There was almost a string that connected us from across the enormous room. The atmosphere in the room felt thick with our shared emotion.

Then the room became silent as all the chatter ended, and all I could hear were loud footsteps coming from the other room.

When Professor Sterling entered the lecture hall, the atmosphere shifted dramatically. All the whispering that had been happening throughout the room came to an abrupt halt, and all typing stopped. Professor Sterling placed his heavy briefcase on the podium, causing it to thud loudly on the podium, shocking everyone present.

Professor Sterling's body stature was every bit the same with the figure I saw last night staring at us.

When his eyes passed over the front row where I was seated, I felt a shiver go down my back. I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck, feeling uncomfortable and awkward about myself.

"Morning, class," said Professor Sterling in an icy, cold, clear tone. "You should have all been well prepared for today; we shall now delve into the structure of the foundations of all forms of ancient buildings.

A huge image of a dilapidated cathedral appeared on the screen behind Professor Sterling when he pressed the remote control.

"Many of you will look at this piece of work as art," he continued to speak above the sound of his own voice. "I look at it as a failure…a lack of foresight. The foundation needs to be immovable; without a solid foundation, the whole structure will fall."

As he said these words, I wrote them down in my notebook: Immovable Foundations. As he spoke, however, my thoughts started to wander off. My muscles were still aching; I remembered how *movable* I was just a few hours before. Still squeezing my pen tightly in my hand, I forced myself to concentrate on the stone archways shown in front of me.

"Miss. Evans," the sharp voice sliced through my daydream like a knife.

My head snapped up to the sound; I had dropped my pen. It rolled off the desk and clattered to the floor. The entire lecture hall went silent and 200 faces turned towards me.

Professor Sterling was at the podium staring down at me with his finger tapping on the wooden surface. "As you appear to be having trouble paying attention to what I am saying, perhaps you could tell the rest of the class what you think is the primary danger to a foundation that has not been correctly reinforced?"

The heat of embarrassment was consuming me, and I could feel the glances of hundreds of my peers on me. I immediately bent over to pick up my pen so that nobody would see my crimson cheeks. As I bent down to pick it up off the ground my hand was trembling.

When I raised back and looked at the professor, I found him to be stony-faced and anxiously waiting for an answer from me. I took a deep breath and calmed myself down before looking at the top of the room. Although I could not see him in the darkness, Leo had to be there - I knew I wanted to make an impression on him.

"It's lateral movement, if the structural integrity can not sustain the lateral loads the lateral forces will push the walls outwards and it will be unable to support that structure."

Professor Sterling glared at me for an excruciatingly long time. The silence around me was deafening. I was breathing with bated breath, ready for him to say that I was wrong.

"That is correct," he eventually replied to me, in a voice that could be compared to a piece of dead wood. "Lateral movement is usually what leads to the failure of any structure. The load-up on a vertical level will not usually create a failure in and of itself. It is when the ground below moves that the structure will usually fail."

With that, he turned back to the screen and dismissed me. "Back to your notes."

I lowered my seat, embarrassed and looked down at my notepad where the term "lateral movement" kept swimming in front of my face. It was like a sign to me.

The floor under me also felt like it was shifting. I looked up at the back row where the lights were dimmed, but I could still feel him there... I was able to feel his gaze on me. When I finally adjusted, I was able to see him. He was not viewing the screen; he was focused directly at me. Even though it was dark, I could see him visibly set his jaw, intensifying the expression on his face, as if he wanted to kill Professor Sterling for the way he had treated me.

He did not break eye contact. He just kept his gaze on me from the shadows. It wasn't much, but it gave me courage. Taking a breath, I picked up my pen again.

While Professor Sterling continued to discuss weight loads on stone walls and point out cracks, his lecture rapidly became monotonous until it felt like hours had passed, not one hour had passed while I worked hard to take down notes of everything he said to keep myself from picturing Leo and so it did not work.

Each time I turned a page I felt as though I had been drawn back towards the back of the room, near Leo. While his body was not located at the rear of the classroom, there seemed to be some source of gravity holding me in place inside the lecture hall with him. It amazed me how much intimacy we had just shown for each other the previous night yet he was nothing more than a shadowy figure now far away from me in the back of a room.

Finally, after a loud clicking sound emitted from the laptop computer in one of the two hands that Professor Sterling had been leaning against all period, his lecture came to an end and he placed it down on his desk as he stood up again to leave the room and continue lecturing.

Before leaving, he stepped down off the podium and came over to me at my desk. He took my silver-and-black mechanical pencil from his pant’s pocket and dropped it onto the front cover of my notebook saying to me, “This is the pencil you lost last night at the library,” as he looked at me with a cold stare. My heart raced. Then he told me not to be late getting to his office today and walked away, leaving me standing there in a state of fear.

Did he witness the act?