The bell went and the room turned into a market.
That's the only word for it. A thousand people had just been told that being alone is worth one and a half times as much as being sensible, and about eight hundred of them immediately started negotiating anyway.
I got up while the noise was still building and went for the side door at the back of the lecture room, which is the one nobody uses because it comes out by the maintenance stairs and adds four minutes to any journey worth making.
Four minutes is nothing. Four minutes is cheap.
I have been taking that door since October and it has never once failed me.
But It failed me today.
"...?"
There were people in the stairwell.
_..._
...What?
Maybe forty of them, packed onto a landing built for six, and not one face I could put a name to.
Their uniform trim were in the wrong colours for my class, which meant 1-C and below, the streams I have never in my life shared a lecture room with.
