Chapter 10 : Office Hours

Chapter 10: Chapter 10 : Office Hours

When Ethan pushed the door open, Noah was sitting on his bed, holding a yellow sticky note.

"Somebody came by for you," Noah said. "A lady with glasses, from some school office. She stood in the doorway for like three minutes looking our room over, left to right, then told me to pass this on."

He read off the note. "Thursday, ten a.m., Carrington Hall, second floor. Associate Dean Richard Sterling. ’Regarding Sunday’s cash event.’" He paused. "She also said don’t be late."

Noah held out the note. He’d gone a little pale. "Cash event. Man, this is disciplinary, right? Isn’t it?"

Ethan took the note and stuck it to the edge of the monitor.

"It means," he said, "somebody important watched the whole thing."

That night, once Noah started snoring, Ethan opened the comments under the video.

Two thousand and some. Most of them were arguing about who won. The rest were roasting the boyfriend who took the two hundred. Ethan skipped all of that. He scrolled down, hunting for a different kind.

what school is this??

SCU?? where is that, never heard of it

ok SCU is officially on my list lol

my mom says no to any school where girls pour water on their boyfriends. applying anyway

He copied each one into a blank document. By one in the morning, it ran four pages.

Then he messaged Maya.

Ethan: Can the site tell where visitors are coming from?

Maya: Server logs. IP lookup. Give me ten minutes.

She needed seven.

Maya: All 50 states. 31 countries. Top five after California: Texas, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Florida.

Maya: Why.

Ethan: To keep my scholarship.

Maya: Your reasons keep getting worse.

The next morning, Ethan got to the second floor of Carrington Hall eight minutes early.

The outer office had one desk, and behind it sat a woman in her mid-forties with reading glasses hanging from a thin chain around her neck. The nameplate said BRENDA MILLER. She didn’t look up.

Ethan remembered her, vaguely. Sophomore year, the first time around, he’d stood at this same desk with an add/drop form, and she hadn’t looked up then either.

"Sit. He’s on a call."

Ethan took one of the plastic chairs along the wall. He had on the one shirt with a collar, the folder on his knees. Inside were last night’s four pages of comments, printed at the library that morning for forty cents.

The clock on the wall hit ten, then ten-oh-seven. Brenda’s typing never stopped.

The inner door opened. A man in his fifties stood in it, gray suit, tie knotted dead center, and gave Ethan a single nod. Ethan knew the face. At his first freshman convocation, he’d been one of the row of men in ties up on the stage, and he’d given a speech about the Code of Conduct that Ethan had slept through the second half of. Ethan followed him in.

Richard Sterling’s office was squared away to the inch. Two diplomas hung at exactly the same height. On the bookshelf, a photo of him shaking hands with the university president. Three fountain pens lay in a row on the desk, caps all pointing the same way.

In the middle of the desk lay a printout of a YouTube page. Ethan knew the thumbnail at a glance: the girl with the water bottle, the soaked boy. Stuck to the page was a Post-it in handwriting that wasn’t Sterling’s. !!! — D.W.

"Vice President Whitfield has sent me this three times." Sterling sat down. He didn’t ask Ethan to. "Three exclamation points each time."

Ethan pulled out a chair and sat down anyway.

There were other things on the desk. Hendricks’s incident report. A photocopy of Kevin’s Welcome Week sign-up sheet, the last line smudged where the ink had still been wet. A printout of the website, a Pelican Pizza banner across the top.

Sterling picked up the Post-it and turned it face down.

"You first, Mr. Cole." He picked up a fountain pen. "I’m listening."

Ethan opened the folder and slid the four pages across. "These people are all asking the same thing. What school is this. The site’s logs show visitors from all fifty states in four days."

He waited for Sterling to turn the first page.

"A private university spends around two thousand dollars to bring in one freshman. Say only one viewer in a thousand is a high school kid who ends up applying. This video has already saved the school tens of thousands of dollars."

Sterling heard him out without interrupting once. But the moment the word admissions came out, his pen stopped on the page.

"Admissions is Vice President Whitfield’s business." He set the pen down, very gently. "In this office, we keep a different set of books."

He pulled the photocopy of the sign-up sheet out and set it in the center of the desk.

"Let’s start with Mr. Morales. On paper, Sunday’s event was his. The registration was filled in after the fact. Officer Hendricks is quite clear on that in his report. The ink was still wet."

"Student Government’s prize budget for the entire week, two hundred dollars, was handed out as a cash buyout at an unapproved money game."

He glanced at his watch. "As of nine o’clock this morning, Mr. Morales is suspended from Student Government pending a conduct hearing."

"Kevin got pulled into this by me."

"I know," Sterling said. "But it’s his name on the form. Which, as I understand it, was the whole idea."

Ethan didn’t answer. That one had been cut with his own knife. When he’d pushed the credit onto Kevin, he’d known the responsibility went with it. He just hadn’t expected anyone to send Kevin the bill this fast.

"Then there’s you."

Sterling raised one finger. "One. Use of the university’s registered marks in a video that carries a commercial sponsor."

A second finger. "Two. Five students filmed and published without a single signed release."

A third. "Three. A cash prize game held in public. You may call it a sweepstakes. A conduct board may not."

He put his hand back down on the desk.

"You’ll take the video down from YouTube and from the website by five o’clock tomorrow. There will be no reveal. If it’s still up at 5:01, I refer you to the Student Conduct Board for conduct detrimental to the university, with my recommendation for expulsion."

"Expulsion," Ethan said. "For a video."

"For a pattern of judgment."

Sterling leaned back. If anything, his voice got gentler.

"I’m not unreasonable. Take the video down, and I’ll reduce Mr. Morales’s matter to a written warning. He keeps his seat in Student Government. You keep your scholarship. Everyone goes back to class."

Ethan leaned back in his chair too, one arm resting on the armrest, and just looked at him. He was in no hurry to say anything.

He’d sat across from plenty of men like this. But something was off. Numbers that good should have made any administrator with an eye on the school’s image soften, or at least start bargaining. Sterling had gone harder. There was something else sitting on the other side of the scale, and Ethan couldn’t see what.

"I’ll need some time to think about it," he said.

"You have until five tomorrow." Sterling was already looking down at the next file. "Not a minute more."

Ethan got up, pushed the chair back where it had been, and pulled the door shut behind him on the way out. In the front office, Brenda was still typing, not a beat off from where she’d been when he went in.

At the end of the hall, a door stood shut. The big corner office. There was a pale rectangle on the wood where a nameplate used to hang.

Ethan stopped at her desk. "Quiet floor today."

"It always is, after one of his meetings."

Ethan tipped his head toward the end of the hall. "Whose office is that?"

"Nobody’s. Not since June."

"Must be a lot of people who want it."

Brenda’s hands stopped on the keyboard. For the first time, she looked at him over the top of her reading glasses.

"The board votes in November. On whether Student Affairs gets folded in with Admissions." She paused. "And who runs it after."

Her hands went back to the keyboard.

Ethan stood there while the pieces lined up. Admissions belonged to Whitfield. The video was the best-looking number she had. And he’d just walked into Sterling’s office and added it up for him, line by line. He’d handed Sterling a full count of the other side’s ammunition.

No wonder.

What the board had actually decided that November in his old life, whether the two offices ever merged, Ethan had no idea. Back then he’d been a freshman who lived in the editing lab. Who ran Student Affairs had never once crossed his mind.

Brenda opened a drawer, took out a thin booklet, and set it on the corner of her desk. Student Code of Conduct. Eighty pages.

"You’ll want this," she said. "Most people never get past page ten."

"Thank you, Ms. Miller."

"I didn’t give you anything." She didn’t look up. "There’s a rack of them by the door. Anyone can take one."

Ethan took the booklet with him across the quad. The Student Government office was on the third floor of Hollis Student Union. Kevin was sitting in it alone with his laptop open to an email. The subject line was all caps. NOTICE OF INTERIM SUSPENSION.

He was still wearing the yellow polo. When he saw Ethan come in, he opened his mouth, and his voice cracked on the first word.

"I’m poli-sci, man. Student Government is the only thing on my résumé. If my mom finds out—"

Ethan pulled up a chair and read the email from top to bottom.

"Look at this line. Pending a hearing. Nothing’s final. Nothing’s even close to final." He turned the screen back toward Kevin. "Breathe. Your mom doesn’t need to hear about this yet."

Kevin took a breath. Then another one.

"Is Sterling always like this?" Ethan asked, like it didn’t matter much. "Or is it just a bad month?"

"Are you kidding?" Kevin perked right up. Nothing on earth stops a Student Government guy from sharing gossip.

"Everybody knows. The VP for Student Affairs retired in June, and Sterling’s been running the place ever since. He figures the job’s his."

"Then Whitfield goes to the board and pitches folding Student Affairs into Enrollment, with her running both. Vote’s in November. Those two haven’t been in the same room for more than five minutes since spring."

Ethan nodded and let it go.

He thought of the cop at the edge of the stage on Sunday. He’d had a vague feeling about the man the whole time. Sophomore or junior year, he’d parked in the fire lane behind the media building and come back to a ticket tucked under his wiper, and the officer writing it had worn a mustache a lot like that one.

"Officer Hendricks writes everything down, right?"

"That guy writes it down when he sneezes."

"Then go see him and ask for his log from Sunday. You’re the organizer on record. You have every right to read it."

"What’s in it?"

"If we’re lucky, a phone call."

Kevin didn’t follow, but he nodded anyway. "And the two hundred?"

"Leave the two hundred to me."

"What about you? What about the video?"

Ethan stood and slid the code of conduct into his folder. "I’ve got five people to go see."

"See them about what?"

"Autographs."

At the door, he glanced at the clock in the hallway. Noon.

Forty-five hours until the reveal went live, Saturday at nine.