Chapter 496 | The Panel

Chapter 496: 496 | The Panel

The Dean’s conference room smelled like carpet cleaner and someone else’s coffee, and the table was long enough to land a small plane on.

Jordan sat against the wall in the second of six chairs, in the navy shirt Chloe had ironed at seven that morning while telling him not to touch anything. Her last text was still open in his pocket. complete sentences. then stop talking. you’re not a hero, you’re a witness. She had quoted Delgado back at him, which meant she’d listened to his account of office hours harder than he had.

At the head of the table, Associate Dean Patricia Okafor squared a stack of paper with two taps. She was small, grey-haired, and wore reading glasses she looked over rather than through. On her left sat Professor Hammond from Philosophy, who had the air of a man who’d been promised this would take an hour. On her right, a student from the Academic Senate in a PCA quarter-zip, taking notes on a legal pad as if it might be graded.

"This is a review, not a trial," Okafor said at 10:01. "Everyone hears everything. It saves time and it discourages embroidery." She glanced at the far end of the room. "Mr. Pruitt is observing at the family’s request. He will not be addressing the panel."

Mr. Pruitt, grey suit, no tie, a leather folio he never opened, inclined his head like a man who was not there.

Cameron sat at the table across from Delgado. He’d gotten a haircut and a navy blazer that looked like it had been bought by someone who wanted a jury to like him.

The chairs by the wall held the rest of them. Isabella Rossi with a manila folder on her knees. Tanner Morrison, buzz cut, a borrowed tie, hands the size of dinner plates folded in his lap. And at the end, Eliza Hartwell, in a cream sweater, honey-blonde hair pulled back, phone face down on her thigh. She’d nodded at Jordan once in the hallway. He’d nodded back. That was the whole conversation.

"Mr. Mitchell. Your complaint."

Cameron was good. That was the annoying part. He was easy and warm and reasonable, and he smiled at the student rep like they were in the same fraternity. He talked about compliments. He talked about "a rapport that made the rest of us uncomfortable." He said "she likes him, everyone saw" twice, and the second time he said it like he was sorry to have to.

"I’m not saying anything happened," he said. "I’m saying it’s a pattern. He doesn’t come to section, he gets a ninety-four. I show up and I get a seventy-eight. He’s a teacher’s pet with a trust fund. I’d just like the grading looked at by someone who doesn’t have a favorite."

Pruitt wrote nothing down.

"Professor Delgado."

Delgado wore burgundy again. She had a single sheet of paper in front of her and didn’t look at it.

"The written portion was graded against the rubric posted on the course site on January twelfth. The timestamp is in your packet. The oral portion was scored by the class. I praised Mr. McKnight’s closing because it was good. I have praised Mr. Mitchell’s work when it was good. I paired students by argument, not friendship, so that each of them would have to think. That’s all I have."

Okafor wrote one word. "Ms. Rossi."

Isabella opened the folder. Her voice was the same one she used for section, pleasant and exact, a voice that had explained the difference between correlation and causation to a hundred and forty freshmen without once raising its temperature.

"These are the attendance logs for Sociology 1, section B. Mr. McKnight is enrolled in it. He missed seven sections in a row. All of them, until February second." She slid the page across. "If this is favoritism, it’s poorly executed."

The student rep laughed and turned it into a cough.

"I graded the written portion myself, not Professor Delgado, against the posted rubric. My comments are attached. And on the night the scores were posted, Mr. Morrison emailed me, unprompted. One line." She read it. "If anyone asks, I thought the grading was fair. I’ve kept it."

Cameron’s smile stayed exactly where it was. It just stopped meaning anything.

"Mr. McKnight."

Jordan stood up, because sitting felt like hiding, then remembered nobody else had stood up and sat back down. Hammond’s mouth twitched.

"Did Professor Delgado ever single you out?" Okafor asked. "Praise you, contact you, treat you differently from other students?"

Jordan thought about what he could say. Something about Cameron in the stacks with a fist in his collar. Something about December. A paragraph about what kind of person files a complaint against a woman for doing her job.

Complete sentences. Then stop talking.

"She called my thesis adequate in front of the whole class," he said, "and told me to go to section. I didn’t go for a month."

There was a short silence.

"Thank you," Okafor said. She sounded like she meant it.

That was it. True, boring, and from the look on Cameron’s face, devastating. Somewhere in Jordan’s pocket the phone gave a single warm pulse, like a hand on the shoulder.

"Mr. Morrison."

Tanner unfolded himself. He read his statement off a printed page in a slow, flat voice, the voice of a man who had practiced it in an In-N-Out parking lot at one in the morning. We wrote half each. Our argument was weaker. I thought it was fair then. I think it now. Then he took his phone out, found the screenshot, and read it aloud without looking up.

"You’ll regret this. That’s from Cameron. February second, ten-fourteen PM. After I said no."

"Man," Cameron said. "Come on."

Tanner put the phone away. "We lost fair," he said, to nobody in particular, and sat down.

"Ms. Hartwell."

Eliza turned her phone face up. Jordan saw a white document on the screen and nothing else.

"I wrote some things down," she said. "So I’d say them the same way I remembered them."

Her voice was the polished one at first, pleasant, a half-beat late. Then it wasn’t.

"On January twenty-second I asked Professor Delgado to switch my partner. Away from Jordan. She said no. She said, ’Argue with people who make you uncomfortable.’ If she was doing him a favor, she would’ve let me leave." She scrolled. "She’s never said anything to him in front of me that she didn’t say to everyone. She told him he was lazy, once. Not in those words."

Cameron shifted in his chair. "Babe."

Eliza didn’t look at him.

"On February seventh, Cameron asked me to sign a statement saying she favored Jordan. I said I was there and she was fair. He said he didn’t need me to sign. He said he needed me to shut up." She took a breath that Jordan could hear from four chairs away. "Five days before that, the night the scores went up, he said, ’I’ll make something up about her.’"

Every drop of color left Cameron Mitchell’s face for a better neighborhood. At the end of the room, for the first time all morning, Mr. Pruitt opened his folio.

"Thank you, Ms. Hartwell," Okafor said.

The panel took twenty minutes. Jordan spent them in the hallway counting ceiling tiles. Eliza sat at the far end of the bench with her phone in both hands. Cameron stood by the window and talked to Pruitt in a low voice, and Pruitt mostly listened, and once, very briefly, looked at his watch.

At 11:48 they were called back in.

The complaint was dismissed. Okafor read it in one breath, like a weather report. No finding against Professor Delgado. And a referral, separately, to the Office of Student Conduct, "regarding the preparation of a statement the complainant appears to have known was false, and pressure on a witness."

Cameron stood up so fast his chair hit the wall. He looked at Eliza, who was still sitting. He waited one second for her to stand up too.

She didn’t.

He left without her. Pruitt followed at a professional distance, already on his phone.

Delgado gathered her single sheet of paper and stood. At the door, Jordan heard her say to Isabella, very quietly, "It doesn’t fix March." Isabella touched her elbow once and said nothing, and Jordan filed it under things he didn’t understand yet.

Cameron was waiting in the hallway by the elevators. Alone now. The haircut and the blazer still looked expensive. The rest of him didn’t.

He didn’t grab Jordan’s shirt. He didn’t raise his voice. He just smiled, the big easy lacrosse-captain smile, and pressed the button for the elevator.

"Enjoy Friday, McKnight."

The doors closed on him.

Jordan stood there for a while. Then he took out his phone in the stairwell, where nobody could see the gold.

? SIDE QUEST COMPLETE ?

Character Witness — 4/4

?? +5 Quest Tickets

?? Title Unlocked: [Credible] — People are slightly more inclined to believe you when you tell the truth. You still have to tell the truth.

(System Note: Credible is not a personality. It is a start.)

He read it twice. Then he read the word Friday in his head a few more times, and none of them made it smaller.

A text slid down over the gold.

Kyle: GYM 2:30?? MAYA SAYS YOUR GUARD IS A RUMOR