Forevermore Read Free Page A

Terrence are out front. Show us what you’ve been doing so we can start earning some bucks.”
    I never minded when Caleb or Briony called me Livy, just when everyone else did. They let me live with them, so they could call me anything they wanted. Plus they meant it affectionately not like they thought I was still a baby.
    I smiled at Willa and headed back out with Caleb. He and Hank were always really nice to me. He didn’t seem to mind that I was more than a year younger and a girl. He treated me like a brother would. It made me feel good to be around him. It would take my mind off of having to deal with the mean girls tomorrow.
     

M / 3
    The student stared at me with eyes pleading, but they lacked sincerity. Oh, he wanted his grade changed. That was sincere enough, but his ask didn’t have the conviction of someone who understood he’d screwed up and needed a pass. He just wanted me to change his grade without having done anything to fix his case study. He thought by scheduling the appointment and coming in to see me that I would do as he asked. Some professors did that. They didn’t like denying the request or didn’t want to do the extra work to help the student get a better grade. I wasn’t like that.
    My eyes shifted to check that my office door was still open. I usually conducted these types of appointments in my classroom, but it was in use and he didn’t want to wait. They never wanted to wait when their GPA was on the line. He was graduating at the end of the term, and this paper’s C was threatening to bring his current A in the class down to a B+, which didn’t sit well with him. I rolled my chair a foot closer to the door. He wasn’t crowding me. I set up the chairs in my office specifically to keep students from crowding me, but he was pretty eager about me changing his grade.
    “See what I did here?” His finger pointed to an aesthetically pleasing section in the paper. He formatted his papers exactly how I liked them, but he’d dropped the ball on content this time. “I posited that the belt speed kept the line from maximum efficiency. I bet no one else did that, Prof.”
    Everyone else had done that. It was an operations management class. Factory output was always the first item analyzed. “It isn’t enough to state the theory. You need to prove it. You should have noted the actual speed. Then if it was increased by X amount, it would have resulted in an increase in X number of units each day.”
    “But,” he sighed and couldn’t come up with another argument, much like his lacking paper.
    “You had a project due in another class and slapped this together at the last second because you can write these things in your sleep, right?” I guessed.
    He shrugged. It was funny how college age men could become exactly like my teenage stepson when called on their crap.
    “It’s easy to let things slide in the home stretch, especially when you know a certain subject comes easy to you.” I tried not to let my tone slip into lecture mode. “Your conclusions are all correct, but you don’t have any analysis or proof to back them up.”
    “What can I do? I can’t let my grade slip in this class, Professor D.”
    Now we were getting somewhere. The pleading had turned to reason, and his eyes showed his honesty. I always had extra work for anyone wanting to improve their grades. The University of Virginia was hard enough, the graduate business program one of the best. They’d done the hard work getting accepted. The least we as professors could do was help them to achieve the best grades their level of work commanded.
    I turned back to my desk and fingered through the shelves until I found the case study I always kept available for extra work. I pulled a copy from the shelf and handed it to him. “By Thursday’s class. Do a thorough job this time, and it gets added to your grade count to help minimize the effect of the C on this study.”
    His shoulders fell a bit, but he bounced back pretty