"Oops! The Chicken Boy Is The Billionaire's Son"

Chapter 7: Mr. Zain

The Thursday morning sun was aggressively bright, pouring through the high windows of the Braxton College engineering building. 

Outside, Boston looked like a postcard. It was crisp, clear, and perfectly indifferent to the fact that Nathan Walters’ life had been set on fire the night before.

Inside Lecture Hall 402, however, the atmosphere was toxic.

The Computer Architecture Design class was technically in session, but nobody was looking at the smartboard. Mr. Zain, a balding, thirty-something adjunct professor desperate for tenure, was half-heartedly drawing a diagram of a multi-core processor architecture. 

His voice droned over the microphone, but it was entirely drowned out by the low, relentless hum of ninety students gossiping.

The entire campus had only one topic on its mind. 

Demo Day.

Underneath the desks, phone screens were glowing. Group chats were moving so fast the notifications sounded like a swarm of locusts. Memes were already circulating. 

Someone had taken the blurry footage of Nathan holding the cardboard box and poorly photoshopped a KFC bucket over his head. 

Another video on TikTok featured the exact moment the featherless chicken jumped onto the stage, set to a trending, mocking audio. It already had nine hundred thousand views.

But the real center of gravity in the room wasn't the memes. It was the middle row.

Mark and Amanda sat there like royalty holding court. Girls in the rows behind them kept leaning forward, trying to catch snippets of their conversation, their eyes wide with naked envy. 

Amanda had ditched her usual campus clothes. She was wearing a pristine, cream-colored cashmere sweater that screamed 'new money,’ and her hair was perfectly blown out.

And why wouldn't she look perfect? The morning news cycles were already going into a frenzy. A Braxton student building a functional Quantum-Bridge? 

A five-billion-dollar valuation offered live on stage by Dr. Sage Walters? Tech blogs were calling them the "Billion-Dollar Couple." Silicon Valley scouts were flooding the university's switchboards, begging for interviews.

Mark had his arm draped heavily over Amanda’s shoulders, his fingers lazily playing with the collar of her new sweater. He was leaning back in his chair, not even pretending to take notes, soaking up the jealous stares of the guys and the admiring glances of the girls. He had won. He had the girl, the machine, and the future.

Then suddenly, the heavy acoustic door at the front of the lecture hall creaked open.

The chitchat and whispers from them students  died instantly. It didn't fade out; it just snapped shut. Ninety pairs of eyes shifted from the middle row to the front door.

Nathan walked in.

He looked terrible, but not in the way they expected. He wasn't crying. His shoulders weren't slumped. He was wearing a plain, faded black t-shirt and his usual worn-out jeans. 

The right side of his jaw was painted with an ugly, purplish-yellow bruise where Mark had punched him in the parking lot. His lip was quite swollen.

He stood at the front of the tiered room, his beat-up backpack slung over one shoulder, and quietly scanned the rows for an empty seat.

It was like an alien had just walked into a room full of humans. Nobody breathed.

Nathan’s eyes moved past the front rows and landed dead center. He saw Mark’s smug, punchable face. And right tucked under Mark’s arm, he saw Amanda.

For two seconds, the rest of the room faded away. Amanda’s eyes met his.

Nathan waited for something.,. anything. A flicker of guilt. A momentary dropping of her gaze. The slightest tightening of her jaw to show that she remembered the six months they spent eating cheap ramen on the floor of his basement, coding until their eyes burned.

But no.. She gave him nothing.

Amanda just stared back at him with a blank, mildly annoyed expression, like he was a stain on a rug she was forced to look at. Then, she casually turned her head, whispered something in Mark's ear, and looked at her phone.

A cold, heavy knot unraveled in Nathan's chest. Standing there, under the fluorescent lights, he finally understood. He hadn't just been betrayed; he had been a mark. She hadn't fallen out of love with him. She had never loved him at all. She was an actress who had finally clocked out of a terrible shift, and Mark was just the guy signing her paycheck.

But even more unbelievable, she was a notorious thief!

Nathan reached into his pocket. His thumb brushed against the cold, sharp edge of the solid-black metal card resting inside his wallet. Five hundred million dollars was sitting in his pocket. He was not exactly moved by that figure. He had seen his father handle billions of dollar deals when he was much younger. His father was literally a trillionaire. And now, that title belonged to him.

Suddenly, Amanda didn't look like a goddess anymore. She just looked incredibly, pathetically cheap.

"Well, look who crawled out of the coop!"

The voice belonged to Mark’s roommate, a lacrosse player sitting two rows down.

The silence shattered. The entire lecture hall erupted into heavy, ugly laughter. It bounced off the acoustic panels, loud and suffocating.

"Hey Walters, where’s your billion dollars?" a girl shouted from the back.

"Did you bring breakfast, or did the chicken run away?"

"Careful, don't get too close to him, he smells like ice cream and fucking… bird shit!"

They were collectively tearing him apart, fueled by the safety of the crowd. Mark took the lead, leaning forward over his desk, his voice cutting through the noise.

"I'm surprised they let you past the front gates, Nate!" Mark called out, grinning from ear to ear. "Did you tell security you were here to scrub the toilets in the east wing? Because you see,.  I spilled some coffee earlier, and you missed a spot."

The class howled. Students were literally hitting their desks in amusement. Somme even fell to the ground, clutching their stomachs tightly. 

Nathan just stood there. He didn't flush red. He didn't clench his fists. He just watched Amanda sitting there, perfectly silent, letting the boy beside her publicly humiliate the man she had called the love of her life twenty4 hours ago.

At the front of the room, Mr. Zain finally decided the disruption had gone on long enough. Or, more accurately, he saw an opportunity to score some points with the Principal’s son.

Mr. Zain tapped his dry-erase marker against the whiteboard. "Alright, alright. Settle down, everyone. We are discussing processor architecture, not poultry."

The laughter dialed down to a low simmer of giggles and whispers.

Zain turned his attention to Nathan. The professor crossed his arms over his chest, a condescending smirk playing on his lips. He looked at the bruise on Nathan's face and let out a theatrical sigh.

"Chicken boy," Zain said, his voice amplified perfectly by the lapel mic. "Why are you late to my class?"

The class lost it again. Even Amanda let out a short, breathy laugh, covering her mouth with her hand.

Nathan remained entirely still. He didn't shift his weight. He didn't blink. He just stared at the professor angrily. The stoicism on his bruised face was entirely out of place for a kid who was being bullied by an entire room.

When Nathan didn't answer, Zain’s smirk widened. He paced a few steps toward the podium, leaning his hands on the wood.

"Cat got your tongue, Walters?" Zain mocked, his tone dripping with fake academic strictness. "Or did the shock from last night's little theatrical performance fry your vocal cords? I ask you a question in my classroom, I expect an answer. I don't care what delusions of grandeur you suffer from outside these walls. Here, you are just a student. A late, incredibly disruptive student. It is extremely rude to ignore your lecturer."

Zain looked up at Mark, sharing a brief, knowing look of solidarity with the billionaire's son, before turning back to Nathan.

"Now, are you going to apologize for interrupting my lecture and go sit in the back, or do I need to call campus security to have you escorted out... again?"

The room was buzzing with anticipation. They were waiting for Nathan to break. They wanted him to scream, to cry, to run out of the room so they could film it and post part two of his breakdown.

Instead, Nathan took a single step forward.

When he finally spoke, his voice wasn't loud. It wasn't shaking with rage or thick with unshed tears. It was completely, terrifyingly flat. It was the voice of a man who owned the building he was standing in. 

"Mr. Zain," Nathan said very flatly. 

"You have acted highly unprofessionally," Nathan continued, looking the professor dead in the eyes.

Zain blinked, his smirk faltering for a fraction of a second. "Excuse me?"

Nathan didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "A professor's duty is to instruct, not to facilitate the bullying of a student to curry favor with the Principal's son. You have degraded the standard of this institution."

Someone in the back row let out an exaggerated "Ooooh," but it faded quickly as Nathan kept speaking, his tone dropping a degree colder.

"And for that," Nathan said, "you will be fired from this school indefinitely. I will make sure of that."

The lecture hall went dead silent.