Seth was watching her. “What was that?” he asked. “Someone who thinks this is the kind of thing that stops,” she said. She kept writing.
The following morning, Ren arrived at Professor Marsh’s classroom five minutes early and took a seat in the front row, not behind the pillar. The front row, where the sight lines were clear, and the light was good, and there was no structural obstacle between her and the board. When Marsh walked in, she noted this without comment. She set her briefcase down and arranged her notes. Students filtered in. The room filled. Marsh began the lecture.
Forty minutes in, she assigned a group problem and moved among the tables. When she reached the front row, she paused beside Ren’s desk. She looked at Ren’s notes. They were thorough, more thorough than the lecture required with additional annotations in the margins that indicated independent reading. The habit of someone who comes to class having already done the work and uses the lecture to deepen rather than establish.
“You’re the student who was placed in the back corner on Tuesday,” Marsh said quietly for Ren’s ears alone. “Yes,” Ren said. “How is your view from the front?” “Much better,” Ren said. Marsh looked at her for a moment over the top of her reading glasses. It was the look of someone who has been teaching long enough to read a situation in a small number of details. “Come by my office at five,” she said. It was not a question. “Yes,” Ren said.
Marsh’s office was on the third floor of the engineering building, a room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a window that looked out over the section of campus where the old gymnasium had been before it was demolished to make way for the Stole Athletics Center. Marsh had a framed photograph of the old gymnasium on the wall behind her desk. Ren noticed it when she walked in. She suspected it had been placed there deliberately.
Marsh poured two cups of tea without asking whether Ren wanted one and set one in front of her. “You’re being talked about,” Marsh said. She sat across the desk, both hands around her own cup. “Among the faculty, I mean, not loudly, but I hear things.” “What are they saying?” Ren asked. “That a transfer student has filed a misconduct complaint against Derek Stole and that the situation is being watched carefully by the athletic department.” She paused. “And that the student in question has an unusual quality of stillness about her that several people have independently remarked upon.”
Ren wrapped her hands around her tea. “I have been a professor at this institution for thirty-one years,” Marsh said. “I have watched Derek Stole move through four years of undergraduate education in a way that has left damage in its wake that this institution has consistently declined to address. I have written three letters to student affairs. I have attended two faculty senate meetings at which the pattern of certain complaint resolutions was raised. I have been told each time that procedures were followed.” She looked at Ren directly. “I am tired of procedures being followed,” she said. “I am interested in the right thing being done.”
Ren looked back at her. “I am going to ask you something directly,” Marsh said. “And I would like you to answer directly because I think you are someone who can.” “Go ahead,” Ren said. “Do you have what you need to make this work, not to file a complaint that has been done before and it has not worked. Do you have what you need to make this actually work?”
Ren thought about the video from the cafeteria, the video from the courtyard, the threatening text with its timestamp and unknown number. Tusk’s contact in Columbus. Fuller’s commitment to keep the hearing on schedule. Seth’s account. She thought about what was still missing. “Almost,” she said. “There are two things I still need.” “What are they?”