The Corruption of Ethan Zamora
A/N: Written after several years of putting this off. So Cierratweek and I have been amused time and again by the antics of Ethan Zamora. But such a horrible character must have had his origins, right? Here they are. Possibly a one-shot unless anyone wants to know what else Ethan is capable of
The Corruption of Ethan Zamora
The trouble had begun in Statistics class, the same way as most misadventures of Block 47 did. “I knew I should have read up for the lecture,” Ethan thought as he gritted his teeth. It was a relatively simple series of topics: mean, median, mode, variance, and standard deviation. So why wasn’t anything surfacing in his mind?
He felt his stomach twist up into knots as the professor questioned yet another student. Nearly everyone in the room was nervous; there was no hum of bored chatter or even a glimpse of a yawn. Well nearly everyone was nervous; Sabine, the big girl in the front row was cuddling with her boyfriend Rick. Then there was Just, the resident drama queen who was probably reading some script behind her statistics books. Then there was her, Ida.
If only he could get out and away from that glance that kept wandering towards him.
Once again Ethan gritted his teeth. Pimples, frizzy hair, buck teeth, her dowdy t-shirt- denim skirt-and flats outfits; how on earth did Ida ever think she was pretty enough to catch a guy’s attention? Especially his. After all, wasn’t college the place to find the girl of one’s dreams? In his case, this meant something closer to the lines perhaps of Catherine Zeta-Jones.
“You shouldn’t be meant; it’s not as if she has nothing good about her,” his friend Celine had told him one time. He had to be honest; Ida was brilliant, acing every class except Trigonometry. “Which should bring her down a peg or two since that’s my domain,” he thought. If she managed to get a higher grade than he did in that class, he was definitely going off the tenth floor of their building.
He ruled their Trigonometry class, she was on top of their Zoology class, and they were both doing well in History, Religion and Psychological Statistics. Unfortunately everyone else had noticed this complementary state of affairs. “More like she’s pointed it out to at least one other girl,” Ethan told himself as he laced his long fingers together. It did explain the titters and questioning looks that the girls in class kept throwing whenever he was around.
Someone jabbed him in the side. “Ethan, your turn!” his seatmate Jeremy hissed.
Ethan scowled at Jeremy before turning to look at the professor in front of the room. “Yes Sir Niel?” he said as levelly as he could. It was all he could do to keep a straight face; the very sight of Professor Mendoza, fondly known as Sir Niel to the class, was enough to make him ill. “Clean nails, snappy dressing, a theatre background---I didn’t even need to know of his significant other,” he thought, biting the inside of his cheek.
Professor Mendoza eyed Ethan casually. “Ethan, could you explain what standard deviation is?”
Ethan cleared his throat. “Standard deviation is another measure of distribution. It explains how faraway some points are from the mean of a given data set.”
Professor Mendoza nodded. “Okay, how does one get the standard deviation?”
Ethan swallowed hard. This question was far too easy; it was just an adjunct to what someone had explained earlier. “By getting the square root of the variance, Sir.”
“Alright Ethan,” Professor Mendoza said approvingly. “Can you tell the rest of the class which is more accurate as a measure of dispersion---variance or standard deviation?”
It was all that Ethan could do not to scratch his head. “I read that it was standard deviation.”
“But why?”
At that moment Ethan’s mouth went dry. Did that even come up in the textbook? He glanced down at his desk, hoping that somehow his notes would be open. To his dismay, only the white surface of his tabletop greeted him. “I don’t know,” he murmured before sitting down.
Suddenly Professor Mendoza looked to Ethan’s right and smiled. “Now there, there’s your answer, Ethan! Why don’t you tell us, Isadora?”
Ethan realized now that the entire class was looking at Isadora, who was now standing at her desk. “Well Sir, variance is calculated as the sum of the square of deviations from the mean. To be able to restore it to the original units used in measuring data, we have to get the square root of the sum of squared deviations, which is how we express standard deviation,” Isadora said calmly.
Professor Mendoza grinned at Isadora, then at Ethan. “Thank you.”
At that moment Ethan dared to look at Isadora, who was grinning ear to ear at her success. “That’s not going to impress me, woman,” he thought. If ever, it only made the sight of her sourer. Not only did she dare to desire him, she one-upped him as well.
As he pocketed his pens, Ethan swore he would not let her get away with such a feat. Even if he had to break her in the most merciless ways possible.