The Undeniable Psychic Torment of Opening AO3 on Your Laptop in the Front Row
By Nancy Feng | Photo by Maddie Lam
I rock up to my fuckass 9 am. At the beginning of the semester I thought sitting in the front row would make me more alert, less likely to doze off or get distracted because I was forced to give the professor my full attention. I thought it would be good for me: academic warrior arc!!!!! I was so, so wrong.
The class? Insipid. The professor? ASININE. I mentally lambast myself for ever having even registered for this class. Cue uninspired droning and black-and-white slide deck for 80 entire minutes. Kill me.
I get to class around 1 minute and 15 seconds late. The professor, one of the I-have-tenure-and-therefore-am-untouchable types, shoots me an I’m-better-than-you look. I roll my eyes and sit down in my accursed non-assigned self-assigned seat. Well and truly, fuck this noise.
Professor takes approximately five years to boot up the slide deck. I am reminded that no matter how much tenure one can have, general competence can yet elude you. Professor starts a series of slides that are indistinguishable from those past, and I flip open my 2017 Macbook Air to start begrudgingly taking notes.
Oh, the horror…Oh! For I have made a grave and humiliating mistake! I am not welcomed by the embrace of a crisp, empty Google Doc or the socially acceptable Messages or Blackboard app, but rather the AO3 page (Rated Explicit, tagged every method of sex imaginable) for The Bunion’s RhettxBaldwin smut!!!!!! Horrified, I slam my laptop closed with such force the titanium sides crack, but it’s too late.
“OH MY GOD!!!! THIS BITCH IS ON AO3!!!! THIS DEGENERATE BITCH IS READING PORN ON AO3!!!!!!” The girl who sits behind me shrieks, pointing a shaking finger. I believe this is what the kids would call a negative aura moment.
“No, wait, please-”
A chorus of “PERVERT!!!!!!” rings out over the entire class. The previously sleepy lecture has now crowded around me in a ring, professor included, to induce a Cersei-Lannister-style shame-ritual. “PERVERT, PERVERT PERVERT!!!”
“It was work for a club, I didn’t even write it! You have to believe me, please!” I sob to deaf ears.
It is finished. It is done. It’s never been more over for me. I leave the class with a hung head and a printer-paper red “A” stuck to my back with masking tape.
The next morning I get an email:
OFFICIAL NOTICE OF PERMANENT EXPULSION
Student: Nancy Feng
Student ID: (F)U69420
Get out.
It is with a heavy hand that the Dean’s Office of this vegetable institution has chosen to expel you, effective immediately, from Boston University on the grounds of Inexcusable and Outlandish Sexual Deviancy.
After thorough investigation, we have found that your conduct has crossed all conceivable boundaries of what is even remotely considered “appropriate” within this esteemed campus. You are simply too cringe for us to allow your presence at BU.
Therefore, this notice serves as a final and irreversible decree: you are hereby banned from all campus grounds and functions. We would like to wish you luck in your future but we cannot find it within ourselves to do so authentically.
With hate,
Dr. Melissa L. Gilliam