She looked at her watch. "Fifteen minutes late", she sighed, and she picked up her pace. She knew that the professor wouldn't mind, of course, but she was growing weary of coming in once everyone was already seated. All eyes would fall on her, and she would inwardly curl up in a ball to deflect all the attention. She did not look forward to a repeat of the experience.

She entered the room in a hurry, and was taken out of her temporary delusion that somehow no-one would notice. There they all sat silently, no one saying a word, but all eyes mutely fixed on her for that one moment that, perhaps more in retrospect than anything else, felt like an hour. She scrambled to the nearest seat she could find, but was shaking a little, and took a barely perceptible while longer to do so than one normally would. She thought she heard someone say "There she is", but maybe it was just her imagination. Either away, she cursed softly, but was relieved that she had finally made it. "I'll be on time next week", she said to herself.

It was as she was taking the book out of her bag that the professor said something she didn't catch. Everyone else laughed in unison, but she merely looked around in confusion. It soon died down, and gave way to rapt attention. "What were they laughing about?", she wondered.

A moment's thought convinced her that the wretch had actually made a comment about her, no doubt something hilarious about her not being on time. It seemed to make perfect sense to her at the time, and was far more appealing a thought than the uncertainity and all that came with it. "It's not my fault", she wanted to say, but she knew that would come across strange. "They wouldn't understand", she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes. She looked at the other people and thought them all to be sick to have laughed at her like that. As if they knew her or her reasons! She shut her book, and paid no attention for the whole hour. She merely sat thinking about what she should do. She felt like sitting in that same seat for the whole year, so that she would never be late again. Then she would be the one laughing at all of them when they crawled into the room.