Two men standing outside the business school glanced at Jordan, then at one another, both trying not to smile. Jordan kept walking. October wind pushed leaves across the brick paths. His mechanical engineering lecture was in Harrington Science Hall, a 12-minute walk from the bus stop. By the time he reached the building, he had already heard the phrase twice.
Easy target. Once whispered behind him, once muttered by someone he couldn't identify. Jordan pulled open the heavy glass door. Inside, fluorescent lights washed the hallway in a cold white glare. Students crowded around bulletin boards and charging stations.
Coffee smelled faintly burnt. Jordan entered room 245 minutes before class. The talking dropped. Not completely, just enough. His usual seat was halfway down the third row.
Something white was taped to the back of it. Jordan stopped. A printed screenshot, his own face. Logan had captured the moment Jordan turned away from Tyer. Someone had enlarged his body until the proportions looked ridiculous, added cartoon arrows, and printed easy target across the bottom in thick black letters.
The room waited. Jordan could feel it. 30 adults pretending to look at laptops while waiting to be what the large black man would do. He looked at the paper, then at the tape, then at the trash can near the door. He removed the page carefully so it didn't tear.
Folded it once, walked to the trash, dropped it in, returned to his seat. No speech, no glare, no performance. A chair squeaked behind him. Someone whispered, "Man." Jordan opened his notebook.
His hands were steady inside. They did not feel steady. Professor Hayes entered less than a minute later, carrying a leather satchel and three folders. Rebecca Hayes was 51, sharpeyed and economical with words. She had spent more than 20 years teaching engineering students that a structure rarely failed where an untrained person expected it to fail.
She placed her materials on the front desk. Her eyes moved across the room. They stopped briefly on Jordan. Then she began class. Load paths," she said, writing the words across the board.
"Every force goes somewhere. Weight doesn't disappear because you don't see where it's traveling." Jordan stared at the sentence. For the first time that morning, he almost laughed. Not because it was funny, because some days life had no sense of subtlety.
The lecture moved into beam reactions and stress transfer. Jordan took notes. Numbers helped. Numbers didn't smirk. A column did not care what neighborhood you came from.
Steel did not ask whether your mother cleaned hospital rooms. Concrete did not laugh because you rode the bus. Either the calculation worked or it didn't. Halfway through class, a folded piece of paper landed beside Jordan's notebook. He looked at it.
No name. He opened it beneath the desk. You going to bodyslam the professor if you fail? Jordan stared at the words. His chest tightened.
He folded the note slowly. Not because it mattered, because everything mattered now. He wrote the date at the top of a clean page in his notebook. Monday, October 19th. Mechanical engineering 402.
Anonymous note during lecture. Exact wording. He copied the sentence, then placed the original in the pocket inside his backpack. When class ended, students moved quickly toward the doors. Jordan remained seated, waiting for the room to thin.
He did not notice Emily Collins standing near the back. Emily was 23, a journalism senior with a canvas messenger bag and a habit of observing rooms before entering conversations. She had come to speak with Professor Hayes about filming several engineering students for a campus life project. She had also seen the printed meme. She had seen who taped it there.