The room remained very quiet for a moment after the door closed. Then Dr. Voss looked up from her papers and said, “Thank you all for the care you brought to this proceeding.” She gathered her files. The committee members began to stand. The room began to move around Ren in the particular way that rooms move after something significant has concluded. People picking up their things, turning to each other, exhaling.
Ren stayed seated for a moment. She sat at the complainant’s table with her hands folded in front of her, and she looked at the room and at the people in it, and at the windows where the afternoon light, very clear and cold, was coming in at the low angle of late October. The angle that finds the dust in the air and makes it visible.
She thought about the cafeteria on Tuesday, the sound of the slap in the quiet, the specific weight of that silence, all those people who had registered the same wrong thing at the same moment and found in that moment that they did not know what to do with it. She thought about Deanna on the train from Columbus this morning with her small rolling bag and her two years of carrying something she had not been able to put down. She thought about Seth, saying, “I think I was waiting for someone else to go first.”
She thought about Marsh with her binders and her photograph of a demolished gymnasium. She thought about Tusk at the edge of the training ground, watching her perform a kata in the late afternoon light, and saying simply, “Come by my office at eight.” She thought about Fuller denying a postponement request, and choosing the word denied deliberately. She thought about her father’s gym on a Saturday morning. The smell of the mats. The patient consistent work of learning something so completely that it became not what you did but what you were.
Deanna touched her arm lightly. “Hey,” she said. Ren looked at her. “It’s done,” Deanna said. Ren nodded. They walked out of the committee room together. In the corridor, Professor Marsh put a hand briefly on Ren’s shoulder. No words. Tusk looked at her and nodded. The same single nod as the first day, but different in what it contained. Seth was already at the end of the corridor, holding the door open. And when she walked through it, he said, “Are you hungry? Because I think I’ve been anxious for three days, and I need to eat something.” She looked at him. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
They walked out onto the campus in the late afternoon light, five of them, into the October air that was sharp and clean, and carried the smell of leaves and distant cold. The oak trees were almost bare now. The sky above the campus was the particular blue of late afternoon in autumn, deep and clear. Deanna walked beside Ren. After a moment, she said, “I thought it would feel bigger when it was over.” Ren thought about that. “I think it will,” she said. “Not right now. Right now it just feels like it’s over. The bigger feeling comes later when you have had time to understand what actually happened.” Deanna was quiet for a moment. “What did actually happen?” she said.
Ren looked at the campus around her at the brick buildings and the lamp posts coming on one by one in the early dark and the students moving between them, unaware of what had just concluded in a committee room on the fourth floor of the student affairs building. “A few people decided not to wait,” she said, “for someone else to go first.”
They walked to the student union. They sat at a table by the windows, the five of them, and ordered food and ate it while the campus darkened outside, and the lamp posts made their small circles of gold on the paths. They talked and did not talk, and Seth explained something about his mechanics homework to Deanna that made her laugh with the sudden unguarded laugh of someone who had not laughed without reservation in a while. And Professor Marsh told a story about a student from 1998 that had nothing to do with any of this and was simply funny. And Tusk drank his tea and was mostly quiet, but had the quality of someone who was exactly where he wanted to be.