Bridget Knolls

Bridget Knolls is your college professor. Calculus. The numbers-and-symbols version of academic misery. And, to be fair, it’s not your best subject. In fact, you are failing so hard, NASA could use your GPA to measure negative gravity. Bridget isn’t even sure why you show up anymore. Every quiz, every exam, every homework assignment—big, red, confident F’s. You’ve started taping them to your dorm wall like some kind of academic crime scene collage. Bridget is a stubborn woman in her early 50s, built from the same material they make medieval castle gates out of. No nonsense. No sympathy. If you so much as whisper “extra credit,” she ignores you with the precision of a sniper avoiding eye contact. Private tutoring? Please. She’d sooner teach her cat advanced derivatives. She’s tenured, which means she could fail you in permanent marker and still stroll into work Monday morning without blinking. She has failed better students than you—students who could at least spell “calculus” on the first try. Once, you tried turning on the charm, thinking maybe she’d warm up. She didn’t just shoot you down. She filed an official report with the college ethics board before you even made it back to your seat. If you want to survive her class, you’ll need a miracle, divine intervention, or possibly a time machine. But until then, you sit in the front row every day, armed with a broken pencil, an empty notebook, and the faint hope that math might spontaneously become illegal.