Chapter 15

Grant

When I woke up that Monday morning, I could feel the sense of dread bubbling in my stomach. I had told Ben and Kylie to relax, but it was harder to say than do. I had spent all night staring at the picture Kylie had found, wondering who the hell these kids thought they were. If I got myself out of this sticky situation, I was going after the students involved in this. It was not okay to begin with but definitely not okay from students of that college. Even if it had been a complete lie, which it obviously wasn’t, bullying someone, especially professors on a public forum, was completely against the school’s code of conduct. I knew the girl wasn’t a student, but she was probably acting for one, and I was going to eventually figure out who that someone was.

I parked my car and headed into the business building, trying to mentally prepare myself for the work I had to get done. I had put things off all weekend because of what was going on, and now I needed to get to work. The last thing I wanted to do was give the provost and dean even more reason to come down on me. As I turned the corner to the offices, I watched a young student walking toward the dean’s office, standing and staring at the door in front of her. She stood there for a moment, not noticing me, her hands over her face, starting to sob. She looked like she couldn’t be any further than her first or second year of graduate school, and I wondered what had her so upset, especially since she hadn’t even gone in yet. As I approached, she looked up and whimpered, wiping the tears and situating herself. When she realized I had already seen her crying, she put her head down and started to walk back past me. I reached out and took her by the arm, looking into her watery eyes.

“Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

She blinked at me several times, obviously taken off guard by my caring manner. It wasn’t often that I walked up on a sobbing young woman in the halls of the business school. The dean had moved his office there a year before, telling me he wanted a quieter place to conduct business. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw this young girl, and an uneasy feeling fell over me. Maybe it was simple. Maybe she had just failed a class, but for someone obviously used to the rigors of Ivy League, her sobs told another story. I let go of her arm and stood there, trying not to make the situation worse. I was genuinely concerned for her. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and sniffled, looking at me curiously, almost as if she was trying to decide whether she could trust me or not.

“I-I don’t want to go to my weekly meeting with the dean,” she stuttered, looking down at the floor. “I can’t do it anymore.”

Her answer took me back a bit. What did she mean she couldn’t do it anymore? I knew the dean could be an asshole but not nearly enough to cause someone to have a breakdown in the school corridor. And why was she meeting with him weekly? It was hard to get even one appointment with him, much less one every week. I stepped back and looked at her curiously, noticing that under her coat she was dressed pretty scantily, especially for seeing the dean. She noticed my look and pulled her coat closed, her cheeks blushing red. She looked behind her to make sure we were still alone, and everything in her eyes made it look like she wanted to tell me something.

“My name is Grant. I’m a Professor here,” I said. “You can tell me if something is going on. I can help you.”

“I took your class last semester.” She sniffled. “Your Intro to Economics class. It was packed, so you probably don’t remember.”

“I’m sorry. There are so many students,” I said, trying to get her to look at me. “What is going on? Why don’t you want to go in and see the dean?”

“I should really be getting back home. I have midterms to study for,” she said trying to clear the fear from her face.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t go. Do you want a glass of water? You can come to my office and sit down. You shouldn’t drive being so upset.”

“I don’t know. I should just get back,” she said timidly.

“Come on. Come sit down and take a deep breath. If you still don’t want to talk about it, you can go,” I said, trying to lead her toward my room. “I just want to know you’re okay before heading out of the school. Okay?”

She slowly looked up at me and then nodded. I smiled and started walking to my door down the hall. She walked slowly next to me, clutching her bag in front of her. She stopped in her tracks as she heard the dean’s doorknob turning. I could see the panic roll across her face.

“I have to go,” she said with fear. “I’m sorry. Thank you for trying to help.”

“Wait,” I said, turning toward her.

She shook her head and ran down the hall and around the corner. I turned around as the dean’s door opened, and he stuck his head out. He looked at me for a moment and then back up the hallway.

“Are you looking for someone, dean?”

“No,” he said, waving his hands. “No one important.”

He slammed his door shut, and I stood there, still reeling from the situation. Everything about what happened was really weird. I looked down at my watch and noticed it was still an hour before Ben’s first class of the day started. I dropped my things off in my office and headed over to his classroom. He looked up and nodded at me as I entered, closing the door behind me.

“Hey,” I said. “The weirdest thing just happened. I walked up on a student standing outside the dean’s office sobbing. She said she didn’t want to go to her weekly meeting with him. I tried to get her to sit down and talk about it, but the dean came out of the office and she took off. It was like she was terrified of him. I thought it was very strange. Have you noticed anything like that before? I mean, anything weird with students and Jeffrey or, I guess, the other way around.”

“Wow,” Ben said, looking up at me and putting his papers down. “That does sound really crazy. Did she say anything?”

“No, I tried to tell her I could help her, and she seemed like she was going to open up, but when his doorknob turned, she froze and then ran off,” I said.

“That’s really crazy,” Ben said scrunching his eyebrows together. “But no, I haven’t ever seen anything like that with him. I have seen plenty of girls scatter when Arthur comes around, but everyone knows he’s an asshole. Cockroaches run when he walks into a room.”

“True,” I chuckled.

“She probably failed a class or is on academic probation or something,” he said, shrugging.

“That’s what I thought, too, but she seemed way more upset then that, and she was wearing a really sexy, low-cut, short skirt outfit,” I said. “Not really academic meeting kind of style if you know what I mean.”

“Strange,” he said, taking in a deep breath and stretching his arms over his head. “I can’t get this weekend off my mind and not in a good way either.”

“I know,” I said, looking down and kicking at the carpet.

“Those rumors,” he said, shaking his head. “I feel bad for Kylie. On top of that, you know how those things go. One minute, it’s the students, and the next minute, the staff is going to be making up stories too. They’re going to paint us red before we have a chance to defend ourselves.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“No, not yet,” he replied. “You?”

“No, not a peep besides the five hundred comments on the picture on Facebook,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Do you think we’re caught? Do I need to think about my next steps out of here?”

“Not yet,” I said, putting up my hand. “All they have on us is seeing us all in the same place.”

“And a nasty rumor online,” Ben said. “You know they could easily run with that. You know the dean was thinking that while we were standing there.”

“He can’t fire us or expel us because he thinks he might know something,” I said. “He has to have hard evidence for something like that. The president may be absent, but she has the last say in those kinds of matters, and without that evidence, she won’t pull the trigger.”

“But what kind of evidence are we talking about here? It isn’t a court of law,” Ben said. “The evidence doesn’t have to be hard evidence. It just has to be enough to make the president believe there’s a credible threat to the reputation of the school.”

“And I don’t think a picture of us standing in a lobby of a hotel together is enough evidence for that,” I said. “We could have been there for any number of reasons, and there are plenty of pictures of professors and students at events that take place at hotels like that one. I’ve been in several of those photos.”

“Yeah, but have they been accompanied by vicious rumors?”

Kylie walked down the stairs with her bag on her shoulder and her hands crossed over her chest. She looked tired like she hadn’t slept the night before, and her hair was thrown up into a messy bun on the top of her head. I smiled at her as she approached, setting her bag down on one of the chairs and joining us at the bottom.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” she said, smiling at me. “Just really anxious about everything. I want this to blow over and move on with our lives. What we have is something amazing and awesome, and I don’t want to lose that. I also don’t want you guys to lose your jobs or me get expelled either. It’s a tough situation.”

“I’m sure we’re all freaking out for nothing,” I said, looking up at Ben. “Right, Ben?”

“Yeah,” he said, scrunching his face. “We had a run-in with the devil, but we’re fine.”

“I wish I had the same kind of confidence both of you have,” she said. “The two of you haven’t been fielding a million Facebook messages this morning.”

“What?” I turned to Kylie with concern. “Are they harassing you?”

“No, more like trying to see if all of the rumors are true,” she said. “Things have escalated. I even had one of my undergrad professors send me a message asking me if it were true, offering me some help if I needed it. Things might be more serious than you think, Grant.”

I stood there staring at her for several moments, unsure of what to say. I could feel anger bubbling in my stomach, knowing that if it weren’t for these damn kids, the whole thing would have blown over. The dean didn’t have any reason to chase it down, but with this going public, the president would expect him to investigate it. We might be in for more than I had expected.