My Future Self Called To Save My Ruined Life Chapter 05

My Future Self Called To Save My Ruined Life Chapter 05

A month later, I arrived in Havenwood.

September in New England meant gray skies and drizzle, with the smell of wet pine and lake water carried on the wind.

I dragged two suitcases out of the airport and took a deep breath of the air of a new place.

No one was there to pick me up.

No one was waiting.

But I’d never felt so free.

Week one: I threw myself into the English environment, staying in the library until closing time

every night.

Week two: I figured out the AI Lab application process.

I needed a professor’s recommendation letter and a completed independent mini-project.

Week three: I went straight to Professor Kleinman.

His office was at the end of the fourth-floor hallway in the computer science building.

The door was half-open, revealing stacks of papers and whiteboards covered in dense equations.

I knocked three times.

“Professor Kleinman. I’m Jessica Hartley, first-year AI track. I’d like to apply to join your lab.”

He looked up, sharp eyes behind his glasses.

“First-year?”

He frowned.

I placed my prepared project folder on his desk.

“This is a small-scale NLP sentiment analysis model I built in my spare time. I scraped and cleaned the dataset myself. It achieves eighty-seven percent accuracy.’

He didn’t speak.

He flipped through the pages.

By page three, his brow relaxed.

By page five, he took off his glasses and looked at me again.

“What’s your undergrad background?”

“Fairview State University. Computer science. First in my class for four consecutive years.”

He closed the folder and tapped the cover.

“Lab meeting on Monday. Sit in. If you can keep up, I’ll give you a trial slot.”

I barely stopped myself from grinning.

“Thank you, Professor. I won’t disappoint you.”

The moment I stepped out of his office, I clenched my fists so hard my nails bit into my palms.

My future self was right.

This lab was my launching pad.

Meanwhile, news from home trickled in.

Zoey texted me: [Jess, guess what? Savannah failed her capstone defense. She’s delayed!]

I played her voice memo.

Zoey’s voice dripped with glee.

“Her advisor tore her model apart. She couldn’t answer a single question during the defense. She

broke down crying on the spot.”

“And Liam―his grad advisor found out about his academic integrity issues. He got reassigned to

the most niche field. He’s basically a lab grunt now. Absolutely miserable.”

I listened without much reaction.

Not satisfaction.

Not pity.

Just the quiet acknowledgment that actions had consequences.

Zoey sent one more.

“Oh, and Liam posted something on his story the other day. ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.””

“Savannah commented with a broken heart emoji. Someone screenshot it and put it in the class

Discord. I died laughing.”

I didn’t open the screenshot.

I replied with two words:

[Don’t care.]

Then I closed the chat and went back to my model code..

There was no room for them in my world anymore.