“Wednesday?” Colton’s voice was tacky with sleep. “I want to tell you everything.”
“I wish you would.”
“I can’t,” he said. “It hurts too much.”
“Tell me what happened to you, at least.”
A beat of quiet passed. Then another. She thought, maybe, he’d fallen asleep. Instead, he spoke, low and drugged. “I dragged myself out of Hell to you.”
Delaney was the first to arrive at Godbole the next morning. She’d woken to an email from Whitehall, the message brief and perfunctory and, she felt—though she may have been projecting—deeply displeased. She hadn’t submitted a written form detailing her intention to miss class, and she hadn’t emailed with an excuse. She just hadn’t shown up at all.
And now she was going to grovel. She stood in the elevator and stared at her reflection. A thousand disapproving copies of Delaney Meyers-Petrov stared back. She shut her eyes. Colton’s voice, sleep-addled and strange, played on a loop in her head.
“I dragged myself out of Hell to you.”
When she finally reached Whitehall’s office—the only spot of dark in all of stark, polyhedral Godbole—she’d nearly sweated clean through her turtleneck. The day was warm for October, but the bruises dotting her throat had deepened to angry purple contusions, and so she had no choice but to keep them covered. She pried off her coat, baked to a crisp beneath the magnified sunlight at the windows, and took a moment to readjust the gray tattersall of her skirt. By the time she knocked on the door, she’d managed to bully herself into a semblance of composure.
“Come on in.”
Whitehall stood sequestered at his desk, framed by his customary leaning towers of books. As always, Delaney was struck by the sheer cerebralism of him. He looked less like a professor and more like the caricature of one. Everything in his office was heavy and dark and old. The only pop of pastel came from a quaint but amateur painting hung over the back of his chair. It depicted a wooded glade, quivering aspens layered against an acrylic sunrise.
Moving through the room, she lowered herself into the wide leather wingback by the window. Light fell across her lap in caramelized swirls. At the desk, Whitehall removed his glasses and set to polishing them. “It’s not a habit,” Mackenzie said a few weeks back, as they exchanged notes in the student center. “It’s performance art. He thinks it makes him look scholarly.”
It worked. He looked every bit a scholar. He also looked, Delaney thought, angry. Some of her confidence began to wane. She wished she’d brought him beignets from the food truck by the quad. A white flag. A peace offering. Something that saidPlease don’t be disappointed in me.
Inspecting his lenses, he said, “You are aware, Ms. Meyers-Petrov, of the ongoing police investigation out in Chicago, correct?”
Her stomach sank. “I am.”
“Good. Good.” He slipped his glasses back into place. “And are you also aware that Colton Price is considered a person of interest in the case of Nathaniel Schiller’s alleged hazing?”
Her blood iced over. “Excuse me?”
“Make no mistake,” he said, “I may look the doddering old fool, but I am certainly not one. I’ve known for a long time that there’s something of an unsanctioned old boys’ club here at Howe. It was bound to happen. You put a master key to the universe in the hands of men, eventually a few of them start to fancy themselves gods.” Whitehall pressed a hand to a thin stack of files. “And Mr. Price, campus prince that he is, has been their ringleader from day one.”
Delaney’s palms were slick with sweat. She tried to piece together a counterargument—a reason why the allegations couldn’t possibly be true—and came up empty. Colton Price had done nothing but keep secrets since day one. She’d let him ply her with bread crumbs, snatching up scraps of truth whenever he saw fit to share. Swallowing down lie after lie.
“All I’ll do is hurt you,” he’d said. Maybe she should have believed him.
“What happened to Nathaniel Schiller is deeply disconcerting,” Whitehall said, and it sounded as though he were speaking through a tin-can telephone. “Police are following every lead, but I’m being told that Nathaniel disappeared shortly after you and Mr. Price took it upon yourselves to plan a field trip out to Chicago.”
Delaney’s stomach plummeted. “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I truly am. If you’ll just let me—”
“The reputation of Godbole hinges entirely on the conduct of its students,” Whitehall continued, carrying on as though she hadn’t spoken at all. “People don’t like things they can’t categorize. Can’t put into a box. What we do here at Godbole doesn’t fit into any of their neat little molds. Because of that, we have a great deal more enemies than allies. There are people out there who would love to see us lose our accreditation.”
“I know,” she said, too quiet to hear. “And I’m incredibly sorry. I didn’t think it through.”
He regarded her over the rim of his glasses. “Am I correct in assuming you received a copy of the student handbook at the start of the year?”
The question caught her off guard. “Yes.”
“Then you’re aware,” he said, “that there are certain codes of academic conduct to which all students at Howe are expected to adhere.”
“Yes,” she said again.
He plucked a file off the top of the stack and thumbed through it. “While there are certainly no rules against engaging in a relationship with Mr. Price outside of class, it is in vehement opposition of the university’s code of ethics for a teacher’s aide to show favoritism to individual students within the confines of the classroom.”
Her stomach wavered. Her head was static. “He didn’t—That’s not—We’re not in a relationship.” As soon as she’d said the words aloud, they zinged back through her, arrow sharp and mortifying. She was certain none of the other freshmen had shared a bed with Colton. Hands entwined, knees kissing, listening to each other breathe in the flickering dark. “We’re friends,” she admitted, a little too weakly for her liking.
