If I could find this in an hour with an access code they barely monitored, then so could anyone else. Which meant one of two things: either they thought no one would dare look. Or they didn’t care.
I sat there, laptop closed, my mind reeling. I shouldn’t look anymore. But curiosity was a sickness. I should’ve stopped there and walked away. Pretended I hadn’t snooped, told Dante what I uncovered, and let him know what was happening.
Instead, I kept digging.
I opened my laptop and went back to the files labeledFinancial Aid, and soon I was seeing that they weren’t just stipends. Some were larger — tens of thousands wired out under the guise of scholarships. But they weren’t going to new scholarships.
They were going to players — players who were already on full scholarships.
I scrolled further and froze.
Buried in the metadata was a link. Not another file, but an archived blog post. The kind of thing most people would miss, if they weren’t already looking for shadows.
Wrighton’s Hidden Ledgers: What Are They Covering Up?was a blog post written by Hadley Peterson.
My stomach dipped.
The blog post had been published early last year. The page was stripped bare, nothing left but a headline and an error message. But the internet never forgets, and the cached version is loaded in fragments.
Scholarships to students who didn’t exist. Payments that never hit real accounts. Academic funding was diverted into ‘anonymous donors’ for athletics.
Hadley had been asking the same question I was asking now: why were the numbers so clean when the records behind them were anything but?
The post ended with a note that made my throat go dry.
Update: Administration has asked me to remove this post pending review.
No follow-up. No second piece. Just silence. Her blog hadn’t been updated in months. That was what happened when you asked the wrong questions here.
I sat back hard in my chair, the edges of the laptop pressing into my palms.
Someone had already dug. Someone had already tried to shine a light. And someone had shut her down fast.
Now I knew two things. The money wasn’t just covering grades. It wasbuyingsilence. And Hadley Peterson had maybe already paid the price for asking the wrong questions.
I knew I should stop and bury what I’d found. Instead, I copied the link, tucked the fragments of Hadley’s post into my notes section of my laptop, and contemplated telling Dante right away, or marching straight into the one place guaranteed to make my stomach turn.
My phone buzzed, and I jumped, already nervous about someone realizing what I’d learned.
Dad: You missed the art show. Can we please talk?
Decision made, I packed my things quickly. Yes, we could, Dad. Just not about what you think it’s going to be about.
Dean Cole’s office smelled of polish and corruption. I knew I was being dramatic, but I think I was justified, considering the circumstances. Dark wood, deep carpet, shelves lined with books that were more for display than reading. My father didn’t look up from the papers on his desk when I came in.
“You came,” he said, like it was the only thing that mattered.
I closed the door behind me, my pulse thudding. “What is this?” I asked, tossing my phone on his desk, open to the blog post.
That got his attention. His eyes flicked over the page, then up to me, cool and unimpressed. “Where did you get this?”
“Don’t play dumb. It was buried in the academic files. Scholarships that don’t exist, money that disappears into ‘future projects,’ students who never got a cent. And this—” I jabbed the headline with my finger — “a blog post written by Hadley Peterson. Why did it get buried?”
His mouth thinned. “You shouldn’t be digging where you don’t belong, Savannah.”
“Idobelong,” I snapped. “I’m your liaison. I tutorstudents. I’ve spent the last hour up to my neck in their grades and schedules, and now I see it’s not justtutoring— it’s protecting an entire system oflies. How far does it go, Dad? Did you know about all of this?”
He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands like this was just another negotiation. “You don’t understand the pressures a university faces. Donors expect results. The NCAA expects compliance. Sometimes you have to move pieces on the board to protect the whole.”
