20. Lynn
— ? —
Lynn
The hearing is held in the largest room the administration has, a wood-paneled chamber usually reserved for board meetings, with a long table at the front and rows of chairs that are, inexplicably, full.
Word travels. Of course it does. A scholarship girl, two of the most popular students on campus, and an assault on the shortcut path, by the time I limp in on my crutches, half the English department is here, a cluster of RAs, a reporter from the campus paper, and what looks like every person Brittany and Jessica have ever performed friendship for.
They’re already seated at the front, flanked by a lawyer their parents clearly paid for.
Brittany’s eyes are red-rimmed, she’s been crying, or doing an excellent impression of it.
Jessica has her hands folded in her lap like a girl in a church pew.
They’ve dressed for sympathy: soft cardigans, no makeup, the costume of the wrongfully accused.
When they see me, Brittany’s chin wobbles right on cue.
“Lynn,” she says, loud enough to carry. “Oh my god, your ankle. We were so worried when we heard-”
“Miss Taylor.” The dean of students, a tired woman named Okonkwo, doesn’t look up from her folder. “You’ll have your turn.”
I take my seat. My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs so no one can see.
You’re all right, Milo says, and I feel it through the space between us more than hear it. He’s standing along the back wall with the other faculty, arms crossed, face carved from stone. I’m right here.
The dean opens the file. “This hearing concerns an alleged assault on the evening of the fourteenth, and allegations that two enrolled students solicited it. Miss Crowe, you’re prepared to give a statement?”
“I am.”
“Then-”
“Actually.” Their lawyer rises, smooth as glass.
“Before Miss Crowe begins, I think the board should know that my clients have a very different account. They believe this entire matter is a fabrication - a scholarship student under enormous academic pressure, prone to what her own file describes as focus difficulties, seeking attention and a scapegoat for a fall she took alone.”
The room murmurs.
There it is. The old weapon, dressed in a suit. My ADHD, entered into evidence as proof I can’t be trusted.
A few weeks ago, it would have worked. I’d have frozen, gone gray at the edges, let my own history testify against me.
But I’ve spent these past weeks being looked at like I hung the moon. And I’m so tired of being the easiest person in the room to blame.
I stand.
“Can I ask Brittany a question?” I say. “Since we’re sharing accounts.”
The dean hesitates, then nods.
“Brittany.” I keep my voice level, almost pleasant. “When you heard about the attack - your words, a minute ago - who told you?”
She blinks. “I - everyone was talking about it.”
“Everyone was talking about it,” I repeat.
“By the next morning, sure. But you texted Jessica about it at 6:52 that evening.” I don’t have her phone, obviously.
I’m guessing. But I watched her face when I said the time, and it did the thing I needed it to do, that tiny flinch, the calculation.
“The attack happened at dusk. Campus security wasn’t called until after seven.
So I’m just trying to understand how you knew before the people whose job it is to know. ”
“That’s - I don’t remember the exact-”
“You don’t have to remember. It’s on your phone.
” I let that sit. “Here’s what I do remember.
Freshman year, you left a note in my backpack asking if I was ‘actually disabled or just dramatic.’ Sophomore year, you called my accommodations an unfair advantage in front of a lecture hall.
Three weeks ago, in Professor Draven’s seminar, you told me some people need to sit near the door in case they have ‘an episode.’” My voice doesn’t shake.
I’m distantly amazed. “You have documented, witnessed, years of wanting me gone. So when your lawyer says I invented a man with a knife for attention - I’d just gently point out that between the two of us, only one has a paper trail of wishing harm on the other. And it isn’t me.”
The room has gone very quiet.
Jessica leans toward the lawyer, whispering fast.
“Miss Crowe,” the dean says slowly, “these are serious accusations without-”
“They’re not accusations.” Milo’s voice comes from the back of the room, and every head turns. “They’re the preamble.”
He walks to the front. He doesn’t hurry, he never hurries, and he sets a slim folder and a phone on the table in front of the dean like a man laying down a winning hand.
“My name is Miles Draven. I teach in the mythology department, and I was the one who found Miss Crowe on the path.” He doesn’t look at the two of them.
He won’t even give them his eyes, and somehow that’s worse than if he glared.
“The individual who attacked her is named Dex Rowan. He’s currently in custody.
Before campus security arrived, he was, let’s say, forthcoming. ”
He taps the phone.
Dex’s voice fills the room, slurred and cocky and unmistakably his.
The recording clicks off.
Nobody breathes.
“That’s his voice, recorded on his own phone, timestamped an hour before the assault.
” Milo opens the folder. “This is his written statement, signed and witnessed, naming both students by name and describing two prior payments. And these” - he sets down a printed stack - “are the messages he was careless enough not to delete. ‘make it look like an accident.’ ‘we don’t care how just handle it.’ Sent from two numbers this office can subpoena in an afternoon. ”
Brittany is on her feet. “That’s - he’s lying, he’s obviously lying to save himself, we never-”
“Sit down, Miss Taylor,” the dean says, and there’s no softness left in it.
“You can’t believe a criminal over-”
“I believe the timestamps,” the dean says.
“I believe the two numbers. And I believe Miss Crowe knew about your text before security did, which you haven’t explained.
” She closes the file. “This hearing is adjourned pending the involvement of actual police. Miss Taylor, Miss Brooks - you’ll want your own counsel now. Not your parents’.”
The room erupts.
I don’t hear most of it. I’m watching the two girls who spent four years teaching me I was small realize, in real time, that the smallest person in the room just took the floor out from under them, and that she had help, and that the help is a man they spent a semester leaving cookies for.
Jessica looks at me. For one second, the mask drops all the way, and what’s underneath isn’t cruelty. It’s fear. The specific fear of someone who has never once faced a consequence and just met her first.
I hold her gaze until she looks away.
Then Milo is there, one hand at the small of my back, steadying me without making it look like he’s steadying me.
“You started that beautifully,” he murmurs, low enough for only me.
“You finished it terrifyingly.”
“We make a good team.” His thumb moves once against my spine. “Can you walk, or do I get to carry you out in front of everyone and ruin our entire cover?”
“Crutches,” I say. “Definitely crutches.”
He looks disappointed. He picks up my bag anyway, and my books, and my dignity where I left it three years ago, and he carries all of it out while I hobble beside him like a woman who just won something.
Because I did.
They were expelled within the week, the real police made short work of what the recording started. I never saw either of them on campus again.
But I saw Jessica’s face when the tape played. And some petty, unhealed, sixteen-year-old part of me is going to keep that forever.
By evening he has me installed in his quarters with my ankle up, and we are, predictably, already at war about it.
“Absolutely not.”
“Lynn-”
“I can manage stairs.”
I try to sit up to prove it. My ankle informs me, in the strongest possible terms, that I cannot.
“You can’t manage stairs.”
“I can hop.”
“You can’t hop up three flights of stairs with a sprained ankle that the campus physician explicitly said needs to be elevated for the next week.”
I glare at Milo from my position on his bed, where I’ve been trapped for the past twelve hours. My ankle is wrapped in an ACE bandage, propped on approximately seventeen pillows, and throbbing with the special kind of pain that reminds you every three seconds that you are, in fact, injured.
“So what’s your suggestion?” I cross my arms. “I just live here forever?”
“Yes.”
“Milo.”
“That’s exactly my suggestion.” He’s pacing the small bedroom, running his hands through his hair in a way that would be endearing if he weren’t being completely insane. “You stay here. I take care of you. Problem solved.”
“I have a dorm room.”
“On the third floor. With no elevator.”
“I have classes.”
“Which I can get you excused from for medical reasons.”
“I have a hamster.”
He stops pacing.
“Mr. Darcy,” I continue, pressing my advantage. “He needs to be fed. His water bottle needs refilling. His cage needs cleaning. I can’t just abandon him for a week.”
Milo weighs it for a moment.
“We move the hamster.”
“What?”
“We move you, and we move the hamster.” He says it like it’s a perfectly reasonable suggestion and not the ravings of a lunatic. “Everything you need. Clothes, books, the cage. We bring it all here.”
“Here. To your secret bedroom behind your faculty office.”
“Yes.”
“The faculty office that is in the faculty building.”
I list each impossible fact and he confirms it without a flicker, which is somehow worse than if he’d argued.
“Yes.”
“Where other faculty members work. During the day. And sometimes at night.”
“Yes.”
“You want to smuggle me and a hamster into a building full of my professors.”
He finally sits down on the edge of the bed, taking my hand.
“I want to take care of you,” he says quietly. “I want to know you’re safe. I want to be able to reach you if something happens. And I want-” He pauses, and whatever crosses his face, he swallows back down. “I want you close. While you heal.”