JESSICA CHASTAIN

You've worked so hard to get where you are now. And now, at the end of August, you're in Los Angeles, and your university application has been accepted. It seems like everything is going according to plan, and nothing can go wrong.

Of course, it can.

The idea of spending the last day of summer at a club seems incredibly tempting, and you can't resist it. So, you find yourself in this loud, stuffy room, with a third cocktail in your hand and a completely empty head. At some point, you don't notice how you bump into a woman, causing both of you to almost drop your drinks on the floor.

When you look up, it feels like the world is on fire.

The entire club seems to have dimmed in comparison to her, with a few strands of red hair escaping from her long locks and her lipstick almost worn off, but you've never seen anyone more beautiful. For a moment, your breath catches, and then you both smile at each other foolishly and find yourself at the bar, sipping cocktails.

Time passes so quickly that you don't realize it's past midnight until your hands are eagerly gripping her waist on the dance floor. All you can remember from that day are fragments: sighs, messy kisses, smudged mascara, and a foggy window in the backseat of her car, which she left at the club because she didn't want to drive while intoxicated.

In the morning, you overslept and hurried to the university. The classrooms in the building seem enormous and too bright, pressing on your temples and causing headaches. A minute or two passes, and suddenly the door to the classroom bursts open, and a woman strides in on high heels. All you can make out is her red hair, pulled back in a messy bun, and her glasses, before a hoarse voice echoes through the room.

"I want you to put away all your phones and keep them out of sight until the end of class."

Finally, the woman turns around, and you feel like you're about to vomit. The same eyes, the same face, only a little more worn.

Great.

Her inner world resembled a reading room with restricted access: you can enter, but only with a special pass, which she did not give out to almost anyone. Intelligence—sharp, razor—sharp-was her main and, sometimes, the only argument in any dispute. She wasn't just proving her case, but with elegant sarcasm she was demonstrating the intellectual inadequacy of her opponent, getting a barely noticeable but undeniable pleasure from it.

The professor's robe fit her perfectly because it was cast from the steel of her own arrogance. She hated small talk, considering small talk to be a biological need for weak minds. Her toxicity wasn't in her rudeness, but in the icy, devastating precision with which she could point out someone's mistake.

But in the rare moments when someone did break through her bastions, one could see something else: a painful fear of being vulnerable, a perfectionism that drove her to exhaustion, and a strange, old-fashioned devotion to the only people she honored with the title of "one of her own." She was a complicated person who preferred not to be "fixed."