Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
My circle starts. Tight. Fast. The strap of my bag under my finger, wearing a groove.
I walk to class.
THE DEPARTMENT MEETING is on Thursday.
I don’t know about it until I’m there, with my advisor, Dr. Malvar, mentioning it casually after our weekly check-in.
I walk to the conference room on the second floor of the humanities building with my notebook under my arm and my circle wearing through the leather cover.
The room is half full. A dozen scholarship students, most of whom I recognize from seminars and study groups. A handful of faculty along the back wall. Dr. Malvar in the corner, her face neutral, her hands folded. And at the head of the long table, Agnes Cuthbert, standing behind a chair she hasn’t sat in, her posture carrying the rigid composure of a woman who has dressed for a verdict.
She’s wearing ivory. A silk blouse with a collar that frames her jaw, a pencil skirt, heels that click once when she shifts her weight. Her hair is pinned. Her lipstick is the color of something expensive and unkind.
I sit near the back. My notebook is open. My finger starts a circle on the margin, and I watch Agnes arrange her papers on the table and I think about how this woman smiled at me in a greenish hallway and how that smile had teeth.
“Thank you all for being here.” Agnes’s voice fills the room the way a scalpel fills a surgical tray. “I’ve called this meeting to address some concerns about academic rigor within our scholarship program. Standards that, frankly, I feel have been allowed to slip.”
She doesn’t look at me. She’s addressing the room, her gaze moving across the students with the impersonal sweep of someone conducting an inventory. But her words are aimed. Every sentence is a corridor with one door at the end, and I can see where they’re leading.
“Scholarship recipients at this university are held to the highest standard. Your funding isn’t a gift. It’s a recognition of merit, and it requires ongoing demonstration of that merit through your coursework, your conduct, and your professional integrity.”
My circle slows.
Conduct. Professional integrity.
“I want to be very clear.” Agnes sets down her papers. Her hands rest on the table, fingers laced, nails perfect. “There’s no room in this department for students who confuse proximity to their professors with academic achievement. Mentorship is a privilege, not a—” She pauses. Lets the pause do its work. “—personal arrangement.”
The room is quiet. The scholarship students are looking at their laps, their notebooks, the table, anywhere but at Agnes, because nobody wants to be the one her gaze lands on. But I feel it. The way I feel Luciano’s attention in a lecture hall, a weight that has nothing to do with sight. Agnes Cuthbert is talking to a room of twelve students, and every word is for me.
My finger has stopped. Pressed flat against the page.
“The dangers of professors who allow personal attachments to cloud their professional judgment are well documented.” Agnes picks up a pen, turns it once between her fingers. “And the dangers to the students involved—particularly young women who may mistake attention for something it isn’t—are equally well documented. I trust that everyone in this room understands the boundaries that exist for your protection.”
Someone two seats away shifts uncomfortably. A chair creaks. Dr. Malvar, in the corner, has gone very still.
My face is hot. My ears are ringing with a frequency that has nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the fact that Agnes Cuthbert just stood in a room full of my peers, and without saying my name, without pointing a finger, without breaking a single rule of professional decorum, implied that I’m sleeping with my professor.
I don’t look down. I don’t flinch. I sit in my chair with my back straight and my hands still and I look at Agnes Cuthbert the way my father looks at a storm coming across the flat.
Agnes’s eyes find mine. Just for a second. And she smiles, small, satisfied, the way a woman smiles when she’s confirmed something she already knew.
The meeting ends. Students file out. I stay in my chair, my notebook closed on my lap, and I wait until the room is empty because I need a moment and I won’t give Agnes Cuthbert the satisfaction of watching me waver.
HE’S WAITING IN THE hallway downstairs, near the exit, where the fluorescent tubes hum and the floor tiles are scuffed from decades of foot traffic. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, which I’ve never seen him do. Arms crossed is a barricade. Arms crossed is a man holding himself in.
He heard.
I know this the way I know his hands, the way his suit sits differently on his shoulders when he’s withdrawn. He was in the building. He heard Agnes’s speech, or someone told him, or his men reported it. Doesn’t matter how. What matters is the expression on his face, which isn’t the controlled mask I’ve learned to read or the openness I saw in the museum.