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I sit very still.

This thing that happens in my chest when I get a question wrong in front of someone whose opinion I value, a small drop, and I have felt it maybe five times in my life, and I am feeling it now at a magnitude that I’ve not felt it before.

“When did it begin?” Priya says.

“February.” My voice comes out level, thank God. “It became more in February. A few weeks into the assignment.”

“And the tutoring continued.”

“Yes.”

“Sessions, paperwork, the hours you logged and were paid for.”

“Yes.” I avert my eyes.

“Did it affect the instruction?” she asks flatly, like a vitals check. “Did you inflate anything, sign off anything that wasn’t done, give him anything another student wouldn’t get?”

“No!” And this, at least, is something I can stand on. “If anything, I was harder on him. He did the work. He really, really cared about improving his grade.”

“I believe you,” Priya says and sighs. “That’s not the point. The point is that I didn’t get to know. You decided—by yourself—that it was fine. Maybe it even was fine. But it wasn’t only yours to decide, Bea. That’s what a conflict of interest is. It makes you look guilty even if you’re not.”

I look at Priya’s plant in the corner.

“So,” Priya says, and her voice shifts and she sounds tired. “Here’s where we are. You’re out of the LA program, effective this morning. That part isn’t a discussion; I signed the paperwork before you walked in, and given the semester’s nearly done, the practical effect is small. If anyone official asks me, the separation was by mutual agreement, which as of two minutes from now, I’d like to be true.”

“It’s true,” I say. “I’d have resigned in this chair.”

“I know you would.” She squares the folder again. “The harder part is the letter.”

The committee letter. The composite, the one the whole junior year funnels into, the one her office writes between May and July, the one with the section that isn’t about grades.

“I’ve started drafting yours,” Priya says. “I started it in March, actually, because yours was going to be easy. Top of the cohort, the LA work, the way the other students ask you things. You’re a natural leader. I had a sentence in there that said Beatrix is the student I point to when I explain what this Learning Assistant program is for.” She looks at me. “I matched him to you, Bea. Out of nineteen LAs. Because you were the one I trusted with a boy the whole world was watching. So, you’ll understand that this isn’t only a paperwork problem for me.”

“Priya —”

“Don’t apologize yet,” she says. “Here’s what I have to figure out. The professionalism section of that letter has to be true. All of it has to be true. And as of yesterday, the truth includes a serious, undisclosed conflict of interest, but it also includes everything else I know about you. I know you’re a good student. But I also know you clearly have an issue with judgment, or disclosing things, which could be a huge issue in a hospital environment.”

I pinch my lips together to stop myself from crying.

“I don’t know how I’m going to write your letter, to be honest.”

“What can I—” I stop. “Is there anything you need from me?”

“Two things.” She holds up one finger. “A written account. Plain, dated, complete, in your own words, no lawyering. When it started, what you disclosed and didn’t, what the sessions were. Have it to me by Friday.” A second finger. “And go nail your MCAT. You’ve got—what, less than two weeks?”

“Yep.”

“Then the most useful thing you can do for your file is to be excellent. Get your head down and prove you’re as good as I think you are, Beatrix.” She opens her laptop, meaning the meeting is over.

I thank her as I leave her office and go for a long walk around campus.

There’s a garden behind the gym I’ve never been into. Today I go. Wildflowers, mostly, and a hand-painted sign that says HOME FOR THE BEES.

Sydney would say it’s fate. She thinks everything is fate.

I sit on the low wall and let their sound take up all the room in my head, and my dad says, in the voice I’ve been slowly losing, Bumblebea. A bee garden. Perfect place for you to think, my girl.

He’d have found that unbearably funny.