Alma Greyn taught English. That hadn’t changed. The fact that we were in a different world and that the course was actually named The Morality of Magic Use did not alter the course content or Alma Greyn’s curriculum. She passed out syllabi, complete with the exact papers Kat had already written for her in the class she’d taken back in the old world. Greyn considered herself the hip professor who wove video game dynamics into her course materials.

I skimmed the page of assignments with their proposed timeline for the course and endured the peppy woman’s sickening suck-up routine. Welcome to the most insidious lie that exists. The assurance of an understanding and modern person who truly cares about her students. It was merely a thin veneer for a person who was so insecure with herself that she needed the kiss-up approval of students. When that image of the cool professor is dinged, she will turn on a dime and hang you.

I raised my hand.

“Yes,” Greyn gave an eager smile as she pointed at me.

“The syllabus says that we need to write a paper on the video game Among Us,” I pointed out. “We won’t have access to that game here.”

“There are copies of it in the library,” her eyes flickered with doubt and then steeled up.

I’d played the game in my old world and could have written the paper with no problem. It would have been easier to just allow her to remain in her delusion. It was just that this woman pissed me off horribly. She hadn’t come at me. I’d had previous credits in English, but Kat had been in this woman’s class. I’d told Kat to never believe that a professor was your friend.

“There aren’t copies of a video game in a library of this world,” I pressed the programming.

“There are,” she insisted. This was the problem with an inflexible mind that is convinced that it is flexible. I felt the world try and fail to accommodate this woman’s belief system.

Perception +1

“What’s a video game?” another student caught the idea.

Kat hadn’t listened to me. Alma Greyn had professed to be fair and available to help anyone at any time. Kat had turned in an idea for a paper, but it was so badly formatted that Alma Greyn had spent a few emails trying to kindly tell Kat that she needed to go to the writing center for a lot of help. Kat hadn’t been asking about the formatting. Kat had been asking about the content of the paper which flouted Greyn’s love of the game.

“You can ask the librarian,” Alma Greyn answered the student.

Kat didn’t like zombies. The Among Us mod that Alma Greyn had suggested for the paper was one with a zombie skin and Kat had been trying to write that the original game was better than the mod. Alma Greyn had ignored the idea that Kat was asking about content and been obviously appalled by Kat’s lack of correct paragraph structure.

“About video games?” I wasn’t giving up.

It had been a simple misunderstanding. By the time Kat had come to me with it, it was already fubar. I’d explained to Kat that she’d misunderstood Alma Greyn, who wasn’t complaining about content, but rather form. I’d told Kat to rewrite it the way I’d taught her to do. I was mad at Kat for having challenged an instructor after I’d warned her not to. Kat turned in another paper, fully formatted according to college standards, but had stubbornly insisted that making a zombie mod for the game was only an aesthetic change that didn’t add to the game’s value.

“I think we’ve exhausted this topic,” Alma gave us all stern looks.

I knew that look. It was the same look Alma had given us all when she’d insisted that Kat must have cheated on her new paper. Alma Greyn insisted that there was no way a student could go from writing something that almost didn’t have paragraphs to something that was perfectly formatted. She’d called for Kat to be kicked out of her class, and the full force of the Code of Conduct office was brought to bear on the matter. They all insisted that I must have written the paper, that I was a helicopter parent, that we were both cheating, and that Kat should be expelled from the college. Kat had been twelve at the time. It had been her first college class.

I hated Alma Greyn. We’d tried to get Kat into high school “for the experience,” but the high school district where we’d lived had insisted that she was too young and would have to be placed in junior high. After fighting for a few months, I looked up what it would take to go to college instead. Six months later, Kat had take college entrance exams that tested her straight into Calculus and English 102. I guess our homeschooling program had worked. Our local state college had accepted Kat as a freshman, but because I didn’t think that she was emotionally ready for college, I’d gone with her.

Alma Greyn’s class had been the only one we hadn’t taken together because Kat had come in as a Freshman where I’d been able to skip into Sophomore status. For four years after this incident, Kat had been terrified of doing something wrong and getting kicked out of college. We’d fought it, but it followed us everywhere. We had professors test us with monitored quizzes and tests, but there hung over us a stigma that they assumed we were cheating before we proved that we were not.

Kat had stuck out the class even though Greyn had refused to grade any of her papers above a C. No one would do anything about the prejudiced grading even after we’d gotten Kat tested for autism. Kat had said things the wrong way in the emails she and Greyn had exchanged. She’d sounded defiant and arrogant. Greyn had refused to talk to Kat about anything from that second week forward, referring every question through the Code of Conduct office.

“I hope you’re all looking forward to the fun we’re going to have this semester,” Alma Greyn was stating, her eyes glowing with the assertion that she was right no matter what.

I’m not Kat. If Kat had been there in that classroom, she’d have been shaking with terror at facing this woman again. You might be thinking that I’m just an overprotective mother who couldn’t let her kid make her own mistakes. Sure. Some readers might think that. We even have a review that insists that my daughter is insufferable. What my daughter is, is brilliantly autistic. That’s why I homeschooled. I didn’t want to run her ego through the vicious school system that had shredded me.

“Not likely,” I muttered just loud enough to be heard.

“Do we have a problem?” Alma Greyn’s stern gaze met my homicidal one and it is a testament to her idi-fucking-otic ego that she didn’t flinch.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Yes,” I told her flatly, my eyes dead.

“Good,” she replied, her mind changing my answer to something she could accept.

I gave a very low chuckle that had a few other students sliding a few inches away from me on the hard wooden benches that lined the edge of a classroom that looked nothing like a college classroom. A fire pit sat in the middle of the room, a cauldron hanging over the pit. And still, this woman stood as if she had a blackboard at her back and chalk in her hand. The books in our hands were a weird version of the book she’d written and used as required reading material. I’d only been able to read a few chapters of what was more like a thesis than a textbook. There were three-page paragraphs that meandered all over the place trying to insist that video games were great ways to study human psychology. This textbook had looked like it’d been written by AI, purple prose so rampant as to make the material almost unreadable. And this was an English teacher?

Kat hadn’t even read her papers to me, because those were the rules of the code of conduct. I read the papers and Alma Greyn’s comments and grading of them after the fact, sending papers and grades all the way up to the Dean of Liberal Arts. Again and again, they dismissed us, as Kat became more and more despondent and paranoid. Kat had started to have panic attacks every time she had to write a paper. Any paper. We raged and then begged them to be fair. They were immovable.

Was it my fault for getting her into college so young? The content of the courses was easy, but the politics was demoralizing for me as an adult. It crushed Kat. She drew up into herself. I told her to drop the class, but she couldn’t stand the thought of having to take it again from some new professor who would just do that same thing. I stood by her, and never once did we cheat in any of our classes. We were a ready-made study group between us, but our papers were so very different and our writing styles so distinct that later professors didn’t question us for cheating the way Alma Greyn had.

I leaned back against the wall at our backs, crossing my arms over my chest. I might have to have my butt on this bench and attend this class, but if all went even a little well, this version of Alma Greyn wouldn’t live long enough to grade a paper that couldn’t be written on the material that didn’t exist in this world. The bravado that Kat had shown upon coming to this world had been a façade that I knew all too well. All that ego was a thin veneer over terror. Terror that had been grown in Alma Greyn’s classroom. It’s a very small way that Kat’s autism made her socially awkward, something that Alma Greyn didn’t care about at all.

All I cared to know about this woman was that she’d intentionally continued to try to crush Kat, knowing Kat was autistic, knowing that Kat had simply made a mistake, and even after Kat had apologized and proven that she was the one writing the papers. This woman had crushed a twelve-year-old autistic kid because Alma’s ego couldn’t accept any blame for the basic misunderstanding that Alma had blown out of proportion.

I understood the psychology of Alma’s mistake, but I also understood that Alma had had the backing of the whole college. Kat only had me. I’d been helpless to protect Kat and I’d failed to make any of it better. Maybe if you’d seen Kat’s hands shake as they hovered over her keyboard. Maybe if you’d spent four years nurturing a very insecure young storyteller only to have them crushed over this woman’s ego. If it was your kid.

Will +1

When this college had started their routine on me for my disabilities a year later, I’d thought I could make a difference. I’d thought that this time they’d gone too far. My physical disabilities were well documented, and surely they couldn’t deny me accommodations. They had. They’d done it to me just as they’d done it to Kat. I’d fought because of what they’d done to Kat because I thought this time, with the law on my side, I could win. It hadn’t worked out that way.

Reliving those college days in this world had my hands shaking. I had a fifty-some-year-old mind and ego that had been honed over years of adapting to a world that didn’t have a place for people like me no matter the laws that were supposed to protect us. I’d been trying to show my daughter how to stand in the face of adversity when my own mind had closed in on me and I’d blacked out in a hallway. Still, I’d thought for sure that this time my pain could be used for good in something they couldn’t deny.

Will +1

But they had denied it. They’d trumped up a dozen code of conduct violations, taken pot shots at my GPA, and they’d gotten away with it completely by the time I was graduating. I’d taken the heat because as long as they were going after me, they’d stopped going after Kat. At the time, I’d been looking at my life being mostly over and I was okay with falling on my blade if it meant Kat would survive the experience.

The pain of injustice is amplified in an autistic mind. This is something we can fight, but never win. Injustice in a neurotypical mind is something that can stir the blood, but it passes. In an autistic mind, it is crippling. We tend to look on the bright side of almost everything with a single-minded intensity, until we hit the wall of unfair. Then we crash with as much intensity as we sought out everything else.

This is where people run from the dirty truth of how hard it is to navigate in a world that doesn’t want us. When we are uplifting, Kat and I’s autism is almost invisible and easily passed off as us being a little quirky. When we finally relax enough or get tired enough to say something without scripts, the world notices that we are different. I didn’t look autistic any more than I look physically disabled. This new world might have healed my body of the crippling fatigue and pain, but it hadn’t changed how my mind thinks. If it had, I would never have had a mind that could defeat Fizzbarren.

At least there are a few people who can overlook our idiosyncrasies and enjoy us for who we really are inside. Those people get a glimpse behind our masks and scripts. They either love us or hate us for those glimpses. You did that. I explain our past now only to justify what I did to Alma Greyn. The world would see Alma Greyn as having made a tiny mistake that was understandable in the situation. My point is that the Alma Greyns of this world go on like they haven’t just destroyed a person. Make no mistake that she did destroy Kat. Just because Kat was strong enough to get back up again, doesn’t make that devastation justified or worth it or any less crippling. Kat got back up because I kept getting back up and she wanted to be as strong as me.

When a dog shits on the carpet, you have some tangible piece of shit to shove their nose in and show them what they did wrong. When Alma Greyn destroyed my daughter’s ego, I fixed it. I spent years gently helping that little girl get back up. Our whole family helped Kat and I get back up every time the college came back in to crush us further. They will want to take credit for our strength because they were our adversity, and they think a person cannot be strong without that kind of diversity. This is the last and most absurd fallacy that we, as human beings in a world full of asshole powerful people, have been brainwashed to accept. I’m here to say that we would be as strong if not stronger without their abuse, and I would go further to say that their abuse is never justified.

Will +2

I was supposed to sit here and gloss over how hard our lives were and make light of our diversity so that readers wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. According to my own rules, I was supposed to act like I have it all together. This is your fault actually. You. You know I’m talking about you. In this moment I both love and hate you. I love you because you kept reading even when things got a little rough here and there. I love you because you accept me and my family as human beings. And I love you for letting me open up and be real even as I hate you for the very same thing.

There is a rule in writing that your villains can only be punished if you have shown how they’ve earned their punishment. Readers, like you and like me, want to see justice and I think that’s because there is so little justice in our real worlds. In order for me to show you what I did to these people, I had to show you how they deserved it. To do that, I had to admit what they’ve done to me and to Kat. Only now can I get to the justice aspect of it and I can only mete out just enough justice to fit the crimes they’ve committed. So, I had to open all that shit up and let you see that something broke me and mine into little bitty pieces. I guess it helps that she kicked the dog, but I’m getting ahead of myself.