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Mabel reaches for my hand before I can turn away.
“Callum.” I look at her. “Thank you for coming.”
“Always.” I squeeze her fingers, then let go.
As I walk into the corridor, I hear my mother say, “The chin is still going.”
“Catherine, I have a call button, and I am not afraid to use it to get you kicked out.”
The door closes on both of them laughing.
For a second, I stand there smiling.
Then I take out my phone.
Still nothing from Bea.
Chapter Forty
Bea
Iprepare for the meeting the way I prepare for everything. Thoroughly, the night before, instead of sleeping.
I write out what I’m going to say. I actually write it, longhand, on an index card, the way I used to write debate openings in high school, and then I rewrite it twice, and the final version is forty-one seconds long when delivered at a calm, professional pace into my bathroom mirror at one in the morning.
I sleep four hours and wake two minutes before the alarm, something that only seems to happen before important meetings or flights. I put on my best gray cashmere sweater and walk to campus the long way, which takes me past the Environmental Sciences building and its ridiculous living wall—five stories of planting that spent January looking sad, yet is now, apparently, thriving.
It looks beautiful, alive.
Priya’s office is on the second floor of a large building in the center of campus. I have been in it four times. The last time was when she recruited me to the LA program, you’re exactly what this program is for, Bea. Ah yes, for seducing and sleeping with the tutees. Well done.
“Come in,” she says. “Close it.”
There is a plant in the corner that looks happy and healthy and a photo of her at her own white coat ceremony, 2009, grinning ear to ear.
She doesn’t get up. She’s got two folders on the desk in front of her, squared off, and her laptop shut.
I sit, making sure to keep my back straight.
“Dr. Ahuja, before you start,” I say, “I’d like to say something, if that’s all right.”
She looks at me for a second. Then she leans back, and makes a small go-ahead motion with one hand.
Here goes nothing. I deliver the card.
“I know what’s online,” I say. “And I know how it looks. I’m aware that it’s… unconventional for a pre-med student to be involved with someone in the public eye, and I want you to know that I take the optics seriously, that I never sought any of the attention, and that the situation is already resolved. The relationship is over. I ended it yesterday. It will not be a factor going forward—not in my applications, not in interviews, not in anything. There won’t be a story, because there’s nothing left to make a story out of. I wanted you to hear that from me directly before you had to ask.”
I hold her eyes the whole way through, but her expression doesn’t change or give anything away.
“Beatrix, I could not care less who you date.”
I blink. Oh.
“I mean that,” she says. “You could be dating a pop star, a senator, or the entire offensive line, and it would not cost me thirty seconds of thought. Students have lives. You’re twenty-one. The internet being obsessed with your life is a misfortune, not a misconduct.” She taps the top folder once, with one finger. “That is not why you’re here.”
The room reorganizes itself around me, slowly, the way a diagram does when you realize you’ve been labeling the wrong structure.
“You’re here,” Priya says, “because in January, I assigned you a student. A student at academic risk, in a paid university position, under a program I run and personally vouch for. And at some point, in the weeks that followed—I don’t know when, and you’re going to tell me—you entered a relationship with him. While he was your assigned tutee. And you disclosed it to no one. Not to me, not to the program. This program offers partial credits; therefore, it has an official code of conduct which you signed.” She slides the top folder a half-inch toward me. I recognize my own signature through the cover page. “That is what we’re here about. So, I’d like you to put away whatever you prepared about pop stars, because frankly, Bea, the fact that you walked in here thinking the problem was his fame and not your position tells me you haven’t found the actual problem yet.”
