Chapter Twenty-Two
Leo
I had a hundred different scenarios for how I would confront Carla about what she was doing, but I ended up waiting for our meeting about the first issue of the Benton Daily Journal.
I met with Carla in her office. She was sitting at her desk, which was immaculate, compared to my own desk. I couldn’t tell from her expression whether or not Seth had showed her the article that Tessa had written.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” Carla said. “I know that we’re both busy, but I think it’d be good if we got on the same page. No pun intended.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
“Honestly, this whole thing seems a little rushed to me. We’ve got, what—three and a half weeks until the semester ends? I think it would’ve been better if we had some more time to really dedicate to this, but Shannon wanted to get the ball rolling on this now.”
“It’s a little bit rushed,” I said. “But Shannon’s the boss.”
“So, before we really get started, is there anything you wanted to address first? I know you’ve got a lot of magazine experience, so I imagine you’ve got some input into all of this. I’ve received maybe half a dozen or so submissions so far, so maybe there won’t be that many for us to go through. Which would be good, I must admit.”
I laced my fingers together and rested them against the back of my head. Carla, Carla, Carla.
“We’re probably only going to get a handful of articles that are even ready to be published,” I said. “So we’ve got that going for us. And speaking of articles, there’s nothing else you wanted to discuss first?” I asked.
“In regards to the paper?”
“In regards to . . . anything.”
She frowned. “I think it’s best if we just try to stay on topic here. I’ve only got about 45 minutes, and then I have another meeting I need to get to. I’m sure your schedule is equally as busy.”
“Actually it’s not; I guess I don’t have the jam-packed social calendar that you must have. But I thought there might be something in particular you wanted to talk about first before we started figuring out just how this newspaper was going to be run.”
She gave me the sort of look I could imagine her giving her most petulant, pain in the ass students. “Would you care to be a little more specific?”
She wasn’t going to admit to anything unless I called her out on it, point blank. Fair enough.
“Sure,” I said. “I can be really specific, if you want. How did Seth like that article that Tessa wrote for him? The one that he’s going to submit to the first issue of the Benton Daily Journal, in hopes of seeing his name in print? Which will be kind of funny, seeing as he didn’t even write it. Though I’d hope he’d have the sense not to submit an article like that, with his name on it, because everyone in the fucking world would know that there was no way in hell he wrote it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Leo.”
I nodded. “I can see how you’re going to play this,” I said. “And maybe you think that if you do a good enough acting job, that I’ll actually buy it, but I’m not going to. I know that you’re the one behind all of this. There’s really no point in pretending otherwise.”
Her expression faltered. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” she finally said.
“See, I think you do,” I said. “I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, because you were the one who wrote those letters to Tessa. I really don’t think Seth would have the . . . shall we say . . . gumption to do something like this on his own. Seth just wants to play basketball. But for Seth to play basketball, he’s got to keep the grades up. And for him to be able to do that, he’s got to be able to actually write a paper that will get him better than a C. And you seem to forget, Carla, that I had him in my class. I know what kinds of papers he writes. He didn’t write that paper.”
For several long seconds, we both stared at each other. The air thickened between us, but she was the one sweating, not me.
“What exactly is it that you’re proposing, then?” she asked.
“So it really was you. Carla, I’m surprised. I wouldn’t think you’d have something like that in you. Blackmail. Encouraging your son to hand in papers that he didn’t write. Would you ever put up with something like that if one of your students tried to do that? I think not.”
She leaned her elbows on the table and then rested her face in her hands. She stayed like that for several seconds. Then, she took a deep breath and sat up.
“I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand,” she said. “You, with nothing to really tie you down. You’re not married, you don’t have any kids, before this job you were traveling all over the place, going wherever you wanted, when you wanted. Must’ve been pretty nice.”
“Yeah, it was great,” I said. “But this isn’t about me.”
“I know. I’m just bringing it up for context, because the fact is, I don’t think you can truly understand. You don’t know what it’s like to be a single parent, to have a career, to be doing your best to hold it all together while at the same time trying to ensure that your kid also stays on the right track. Seth doesn’t realize this, but it’s unlikely that he’ll ever play professional basketball. It’s something that he’s wanted to do since he was a kid, and he’s always been very good at it, but not good enough to be able to make a living from it.”
“It’s a very small percentage of people that have the skills to make a living from an activity most people do recreationally,” I said.
“A fact that I’m well aware of. But how do you tell that to a kid whose only dream has been to play basketball professionally? I’ve tried to talk to him about it. I’ve tried to put it nicely, I’ve tried to suggest that he have an alternate plan in case the basketball doesn’t pan out. But he doesn’t want to hear that. He keeps his grades up as high as they need to be in order for him to continue playing, but that’s it.”
“Well, shouldn’t that be enough then? For him to graduate?”
“But I want him to do well enough that he’ll have other options available. What if he decides he wants to go to graduate school? What if he finds something that really interests him, but he can’t get into grad school because he only did the bare minimum now?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course, but I shrugged. Carla was clearly delusional about her son, but I was beginning to realize that’s just how parents were. Like Tessa’s parents, thinking they were doing her this huge favor by cutting her off just because her grades weren’t perfect. But it was all coming from the same place—Carla wanted the best for Seth, Tessa’s parents wanted the best for her. They just had no clue how to go about ensuring that.
“That’s all well and good,” I said. “And I’m certainly not going to try to tell you how you should be raising your son. Like you said—what would I know about that sort of thing anyway? But how did you know about us, anyway?”
“It was obvious, Leo. That day I came into your office to borrow that book?”
“We weren’t doing anything.”
“You might as well have been. That outfit she was wearing?”
“So you surmised all this based on an outfit?”
“I figured if there was nothing going on between the two of you, then she’d just ignore the letter. But she didn’t. And that’s how I knew.”
“You do realize that Seth could probably get expelled for this. And you could probably lose your job.”
“I’m sure that was something you realized too, when you were deciding to get involved with a student. Sometimes we do things without fully thinking about the consequences.”
“You could say that again.”
We seemed to be at an impasse. “Tessa’s not going to write any more papers for Seth. You can go tell whoever you want about us, but she’s not going to be doing that anymore. She’s got enough on her plate as it is; she doesn’t need to be graduating college for him, too. Why didn’t you just write them yourself? I mean, does Seth think that the homework fairy is just making these papers magically appear or something?”
“I have too much on my fucking plate to be writing my son’s papers!” she snapped. “I’m trying to hold things together the best I can, but I certainly don’t have time to be writing any papers.”
“Yet somehow you expect Tessa to.”
“She found enough time to have an inappropriate relationship with you. And the papers she’s written so far have been quite good. So it looks like I wasn’t wrong about her being able to handle that.”
“You might not have been wrong, but your son should really handle his own shit. That’s the sort of example you want to set? That’s what you want him to think is okay?”
Carla closed her eyes. “This is obviously not going how I had envisioned it.”
“I understand how you feel,” I said. “I wasn’t exactly planning on getting blackmailed, either. So what would you like to do about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I take it you haven’t seen the article that Tessa wrote.”
“I was going to check that email later tonight, when I finally had a minute to myself.”
“It might not be something that you want published. It’s quite good, but I think it’ll be fairly obvious that Seth didn’t write it.”
“What is it?” Carla asked suspiciously.
“It’s an expose, of sorts. Names have been changed, all that shit, but it’s obvious that what she’s writing about actually happened. Inappropriate relationships between students and their professors, other faculty finding out yet choosing not to go to the dean but to rather use their knowledge to their own advantage . . . that sort of thing.”
Carla cringed. “Are you kidding me?”
“Nope. So if it’s really Seth’s dream of seeing his name in print, he might just have to write an article himself. Or maybe you could do it for him.”
She was quiet for a moment. I think she was realizing that it would be best, for everyone involved, to just walk away from it all, pretend like she had never figured it out in the first place. Because though she could get both Tessa and me into a world of trouble, she herself would also get into trouble, too.
“I think there’s really only one clear option here,” she said.
“And that would be?”
“To just put this all behind us. I’m willing to do that if you are.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say. I think that would be best, too. In fact, we don’t ever have to talk about this again.”
She hesitated, her mouth set into a thin line. Clearly, she wasn’t happy, but we both knew this was the best deal either of us was going to get. And she was far more attached to this job than I was; I didn’t really give a shit whether I got fired or not.
I held out my hand. “Should we shake on it?”
She reached over and took my hand. “Fine,” she said.