Free This Glittering World by T. Greenwood

but he probably had an apartment off campus, a BMW, top-of-the-line skis. He probably woke up this morning with a bong next to his bed, smoking $500-an-ounce weed for breakfast. Ben was pretty sure Joe had a job all lined up working for his daddy or one of his daddy’s friends back in the valley after graduation next spring. School simply did not matter.
    Ben thought about Ricky, about him coming to Flagstaff to make a better life. About his not being able to afford to go to school. It was probably a prick like Joe who beat him up. Some entitled little shit.
    Ben kept talking, talking, talking. Emphasizing his points with random scratches on the whiteboard. Behind him he heard the clackety-clack of a BlackBerry and his neck stiffened. He stopped talking and turned around.
    Nestor Yazzie in the front was about to ask a question, but Ben held his finger up in a wait a minute gesture and looked down the rows to the back, where Joe was now sitting upright, hoodie pulled down over his head, hands in lap. Clackety-clack.
    Ben set his Expo marker on his desk and walked down the aisle between the seats. He got to Joe before Joe even realized that he was coming. He held out his hand, palm up, and said, “Give it.”
    Joe looked up from whatever electronic missive he was tapping out and said, “I’m done.”
    “Mr. Bello, I said give it to me.”
    “You’re not taking my phone,” Joe said.
    Ben planned on taking the phone, confiscating it until the end of class, and then giving it back when class was over. But as he stood there, he felt his skin prickling, anger swelling inside him. “Why are you here, Joe?” Ben finally asked.
    “What?”
    “I said, Why. Are. You. Here?”
    Joe shrugged.
    “You’re a waste of time,” Ben hissed. “A waste of all of our time. A waste of your folks’ money. A waste of fucking space. Give me the goddamn phone.”
    “Dude, chill out,” Joe said, setting it down, raising his hands in some sort of stupid surrender. “Forget it. It’s off.”
    Ben watched his hand grab the phone. He—and Joe—watched as he hurled it across the room. He—and everyone else in the class—watched in disbelief when it hit the back wall and shattered, its electronic innards splattered all over the floor.
    And then he went to the front of the room, picked up his briefcase, and said quietly, “There will be a test on Jamestown on Tuesday.”
    It took about ten minutes for word to spread across campus that Ben Bailey had lost it in his eight o’clock. His next class looked terrified. A few nervous whispers but not a single text message sent during class. Ben was feeling pretty good about himself as he made his way to the History Department to get his mail.
    The second he poked his head in to say hi to Rob, the interim chair of the department, he realized he’d screwed up.
    “Hey, Bailey, I just got a call,” he said, motioning for Ben to come into his office.
    “From?”
    “Martin Bello. His son is in your eight A.M. American history class? He said there was an altercation this morning.”
    Ben wondered how Joe had managed to get ahold of his father so quickly without his cell phone.
    Rob’s face was red, his already large eyes popping. “What the hell were you thinking, Ben?”
    Ben knew exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking he was sick and goddamned tired of getting paid $15,000 a year to stand in front of a bunch of entitled brats, compressing the entire early history of this nation into thirteen weeks as they slept or texted. He was tired of not being able to answer Nestor Yazzie’s questions because of the douche bag sitting in the back. He was tired of pretending that anything he had to say or think about America’s history had any impact on America’s future because obviously this was not the case. Because nothing had changed. Not here.
    Someone beat the shit out of Ricky Begay and left him for dead in the snow. And no one seemed to care.
    “Ben, I hate to do this to you, buddy, but