2. Extra Credit
Extra Credit
The fluorescent lights in Halcyon Academic made everyone look guilty.
Talia stood at the front of the cramped conference room with a yellow legal pad tucked under one arm and watched three hockey players avoid eye contact with varying degrees of skill.
The room smelled like dry-erase marker, old carpet, and the burnt bitterness of coffee she’d reheated twice and still forgotten to drink.
Through the narrow window in the door, students blurred past in the hall, backpacks bumping their hips, the university moving around this little pocket of tension like blood around a clot.
Noah Mercer took up more space than the others without trying.
That, Talia suspected, was part of the problem.
He sat angled in a molded plastic chair that should have looked ridiculous under him and somehow didn’t.
Jeans. Gray Wolves hoodie this time, sleeves shoved up to his forearms. The tape around his left thumb was fresh, clean white against tanned skin, wound with the kind of repetitive precision that meant ritual as much as support.
His expression was calm, open, almost pleasant.
Public face.
She knew one when she saw one.
The freshman beside him—Cole, according to the attendance sheet—had his knee bouncing hard enough to make the table tremble. Dylan Avery sat on the other side with his arms folded too tightly over his chest, trying and failing to look bored.
Talia set three photocopied policy summaries in front of them. “Before we continue, I’m going to explain what heightened oversight actually means, since rumor appears to be doing a terrible job.”
Cole swallowed.
Noah leaned back a fraction. “Generous of rumor.”
She ignored that. “Irregular tutoring records from last semester triggered a review. That review expanded when logged attendance, session notes, and assignment-support documentation failed to match in multiple cases. Until the discrepancies are resolved, men’s hockey is subject to additional compliance check-ins, documentation verification, and random spot review of academic-support records. ”
Dylan frowned. “Random spot review sounds like you’re raiding our backpacks.”
“It sounds,” Talia said, “like exactly what it is. If support is legitimate, records will reflect that. If records don’t reflect that, we find out why.”
Cole’s voice came out thin. “Are we, like… in trouble?”
“In this room? Not automatically.” She clasped her hands loosely in front of her.
“But if anyone falsified attendance, completed work they should not have completed, or directed students to misrepresent the nature of academic support, then yes. That is trouble. Institutional trouble. Eligibility trouble. Potentially team trouble.”
The word team landed with the weight she expected.
Noah’s jaw shifted.
There it was. The tiny tell under the smile.
He said, “You’re talking like the verdict is in.”
“I’m talking like records are inconsistent.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t. Which is why we investigate before concluding. You’ll notice that is the opposite of a verdict.”
His gaze held hers, steady and blue and irritatingly direct. “Then why does every guy in this room feel like he’s already been found guilty of something?”
Because institutions were clumsy and fear moved faster than facts.
Because eighteen-year-olds heard words like audit and review and imagined handcuffs.
Because the athletic department had spent years teaching them that any outside scrutiny was betrayal.
Because men like Noah Mercer got very good at stepping between younger players and consequence until they no longer knew where the danger actually was.
Talia kept her voice even. “Feeling scrutinized is not the same thing as being wrongly accused.”
Cole looked from one of them to the other like a fan at center court, head turning with each exchange.
Noah rested his forearms on the table. “With respect, Dr. Shah—”
“Usually a dangerous opening.”
Dylan made a startled sound that might have been a laugh before he killed it.
One corner of Noah’s mouth twitched. He recovered fast. “With respect, if you bring in a whole group of players and tell them eligibility could be affected, you’re not exactly creating an atmosphere of trust.”
“Trust,” Talia said, “requires accurate records.”
“And respect requires not treating nineteen-year-olds like they’re one wrong answer from a public execution.”
The room went still.
He hadn’t raised his voice. That was the thing. Noah Mercer didn’t throw himself around verbally. He tightened. Focused. The temperature changed around him anyway. Protective instinct lived close to the surface on him, she thought. Not performative. Reflexive.
It would have been easier if he were just arrogant.
She picked up her legal pad. “No one is being publicly executed in Halcyon Academic on a Wednesday afternoon. You can stop auditioning for that analogy.”
Dylan snorted aloud.
Noah looked at her for a beat too long, as if deciding whether to be offended or impressed. “You always this warm?”
“You asked about the atmosphere.”
Cole’s knee was still bouncing. Talia softened her tone by a degree when she addressed him. “This review exists because discrepancies exist. If your paperwork is accurate and your work is your own, oversight is inconvenient. That’s all.”
Cole nodded too fast.
Noah caught it. Of course he did. His body angled almost imperceptibly toward the freshman, broad shoulders turning like a shield. “He gets it.”
Talia’s gaze sharpened. “I’d like to hear whether he gets it from him.”
Cole looked trapped.
Dylan muttered, “Jesus.”
Talia pulled one folder free. “Cole, your file shows three writing-support sessions in April attached to a comparative literature response paper. The tutor notes say ‘organizational assistance, argument refinement, final polish.’ Can you tell me what that looked like in practice?”
Cole licked his lips. “Um. We talked about the essay.”
“How?”
He glanced at Noah.
Noah didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His whole face changed by less than an inch, but Talia saw it: the reassuring calm, the silent go slow, answer carefully. So practiced it might have been muscle memory.
Her pulse gave one annoyed kick.
Cole dragged a hand over his hair. “Like—I had a draft. We went over it.”
“Did you write the draft yourself?”
“Yes.” Too fast. “I mean. Mostly. Yeah.”
“Mostly?”
“No, I wrote it.” He stared at the table. “I just had help with making it sound… better.”
Talia sat down across from him. Deliberate. Bringing herself level. “Help from the tutor?”
“Just normal help.”
“What does normal mean to you?”
Cole’s breathing went shallow. He looked nineteen suddenly in a way no jersey ever could have hidden. “Like they, uh, they moved some stuff around. Fixed some sentences. Wrote out—”
Noah cut in smoothly. “He’s telling you they gave feedback on structure. That’s standard.”
Talia turned her head.
Noah met her eyes without flinching. “You know that.”
“Noah,” she said, and did not bother correcting the use of his first name this time because the sharper point mattered more, “I asked him.”
Cole shrank an inch.
Noah’s expression stayed composed, but she saw the flash underneath it now. Anger, yes. Not at Cole. At her. At the room. At the entire machinery of this process grinding over his players. “And I’m clarifying because he’s nervous.”
“I’m aware he’s nervous.”
“Then maybe don’t push him like he’s under oath.”
“He may eventually be, in administrative terms.”
Dylan sat back in his chair. “That sounds insane.”
Talia kept her attention on Noah. “Did you just intervene because he misspoke, or because you knew where he was going?”
His eyes cooled. “You really think I’m here to coach lies?”
“I think,” she said carefully, because words mattered and she wanted this one on the table between them where he couldn’t pretend not to see it, “you are deeply invested in making sure the people around you feel protected. I’m still determining whether that protection leaves room for truth.”
The silence after that was so dense she could hear the building itself: a vent rattling overhead, a printer coughing somewhere down the hall, footsteps outside the glass.
Noah leaned back slowly. The movement was controlled enough to be its own answer. “That’s a hell of a thing to decide about someone you don’t know.”
“Yes,” Talia said. “It is.”
Cole stared down at his own hands.
Talia shifted her focus back to him, gentler now. “I’m going to ask the question one more time. During those sessions, did a tutor ever contribute language that ended up in your submitted assignment?”
Cole swallowed. “A couple phrases, maybe.”
“Did they write sentences for you?”
His face flushed red all the way to the ears. “Not like—okay, maybe once? I don’t know. They said what I was trying to say and I wrote it down.”
Dylan muttered a curse.
Noah closed his eyes for one second.
There it was again—that private flash beneath the public steadiness. Not outrage for himself. Not embarrassment. Calculation, concern, the immediate painful work of triage. How bad is this, who gets hit, how do I keep the blast radius small?
Talia had spent years studying systems that ate people by rewarding silence and punishing the wrong form of honesty. She knew the look of someone trying to hold a leaking wall up with his bare hands.
It did not make him less dangerous to the truth.
She wrote a note in the margin of Cole’s file. “Did anyone tell you that was allowed?”
Cole shook his head. “They just said everybody needed support and if we were trying, it was fine.”
“Who said that?”
Cole froze.
Noah’s voice came quieter, and somehow that was worse. “Careful.”
Talia’s gaze snapped to him. “No.”
The word cracked in the room.
He went still.
She held his eyes and felt her own heartbeat low and hard under her ribs. “You do not get to tell him to be careful when the entire point of this process is that someone has taught too many students caution instead of candor.”