Page 57 of Hushed
so it’s not a blanket thing, is what im saying
I read it three times sitting on the end of my bed with my boots still on.
If the Army has an exception. The Army, which will write you up for a haircut. The Army, which has a form for the form. If they can look at two people and say this started before, so it’s different, then a school where the worst thing that happens is a bad grade absolutely has to have one too. They can’t just say never. There’s no such thing as never. Somewhere in the history of Fairhaven University a professor’s wife went back to school, and somebody had to write down what to do about it.
It takes me eleven minutes to find the faculty handbook on the university website. It’s a PDF from 2011 and the search function is garbage.
It takes me until two in the morning to find the sentence.
Relationships that predate the instructional relationship are not prohibited.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. One line in a section called Professional Conduct, sitting between a paragraph about outside consulting and a paragraph about email retention, and nobody has touched it in years.
I read it maybe forty times.
Predate the instructional relationship. Not predate enrollment. Not predate employment. The instructional relationship—which started the first Monday of the semester at nine in the morning when he walked through that door and saw me in the third row. And we predate that. By a whopping twelve days, but I’ll take it.
He isn’t trapped. He’s just never read his own handbook.
So now I need the date. Not my word for it and not his. Something with a timestamp on it that nobody can accuse either of us of inventing.
It takes me fifteen minutes of scouring the archives of every news outlet in DC to come up with the name of the woman who put a microphone in our faces in a parking lot. Alyssa Bentham, I discover, is a reporter for WWAH.
It takes me another fifteen to get through the WWAH archive, which appears to have been organized by nobody, for nobody.
And there we are.
One minute and eleven seconds. His hand in mine. My mouth on his forehead. Both our first names, out loud. It’s on the station’s own server and it has a date on it that nobody can argue with. A real, datable event, and it happened before I became a student or he became a professor.
I copy it to my computer.
I give myself exactly two minutes.
Then I lie back on the bed with my phone on my chest and think about how to tell him, and every version I come up with, I say it and he says Levi, you don’t understand, and I don’t have an answer to that except a PDF and a video file, and you can’t hand a man a document and make him believe something.
So he’s going to have to want to believe it first.
And I’m going to have to turn for now into right now.
I don’t need to go to the Book Nook on Saturday morning, because my big plan was just to disrupt that date bullshit. I can bring this to his office hours like a civilized person.
It is the last thing I think of before I fall asleep.
When I wake up, it’s already morning and my phone is buzzing.
Kev
I told my friends about the DH merch. They said I’m full of it, so I need something to prove it’s a thing.
I sigh and look at the time.
09:31.
I blink at the time. Holy shit. I never sleep in like this. I was hoping that I would sleep long enough that the temptation to crash Bastien’s little get-together would be dealt with. But now I have just enough time to eat a protein bar, dress, and show up at the Book Nook with plenty of time left over. And Kevin wants his Drunken Honeybees merch. This is not a joke. He has asked me four times. The campus store discontinued it years ago in favor of Hornets gear, which is bland as hell and looks like every other school in Virginia, and the only place in this town that still stocks a Drunken Honeybees anything is the Book Nook.
It is one block from my apartment. It would be strange not to go and check it out.
I put on a shirt that clings a little tighter than something I’d wear to class and a pair of jeans that flatter me, and my combat boots.
