Scandalous

Chapter 30

The day before Thanksgiving break had its own specific atmosphere — the particular, slightly loosened quality of a school that knows it is hours from a week of not being a school and has begun, at every level, to let go of its weekday tension in increments. The students moved through the corridors with the energy of people completing a formality. The teachers maintained their professionalism with the slightly effortful quality of people who were also, privately, counting down.

Nathan taught his morning classes with the focused competence of a man who had decided, somewhere around the third week of term, that he was going to do his job properly regardless of whatever else was happening around it or inside it. This had served him well. He taught. He asked the right questions and waited the right amount of time for the answers and pushed back when pushing back was warranted. Second period had a good twenty minutes on Kafka's Metamorphosis — the question of whether Gregor Samsa's transformation was punishment or revelation, which produced the kind of argument he liked, the one where students were actually disagreeing with each other rather than with a safe, abstract position.

He collected the marked rough drafts from his bag and returned them at the end of the period. He placed each one face-down on the relevant desk as he moved through the rows, the standard distribution of returned work. He got to the back left corner.

He set her pages down without looking at her.

He was back at the front of the room when she turned them over. He had his back to the class, writing the discussion question for the next session on the board. He did not look to see her reaction to the marks and the comments, which was the professional thing, and also the thing a man does when he is fairly certain that looking would tell him something he does not currently have a use for.

The chime rang. He dismissed them.

He moved through the rest of the day. By three-fifteen the school had the hollow, anticipatory quiet of a building that knows it is nearly done — the hallways emptying with the particular efficiency of students who have somewhere to be before a week away. Nathan was marking the last of a set of comprehension responses in Room 214 when his phone showed the notification:

ALL STAFF — MANDATORY MEETING, AUDITORIUM, 3:30PM. ATTENDANCE REQUIRED. — HEADMASTER CALDWELL'S OFFICE.

He looked at it.

He gathered his things.

Daniel was in the corridor outside the auditorium when Nathan arrived, reading the same notification on his own phone with the expression of a man who has received information he wasn't expecting and is deciding how to feel about it.

"Did you know about this?" Nathan asked.

"I know as much as you know," Daniel said. He pocketed the phone. "Which is that Caldwell apparently needs all of us in a room before we're allowed to leave for the holiday." He looked at Nathan. "Didn't we just have a staff meeting? The second Tuesday, wasn't it."

"Third," Nathan said. "Yes."

"So this is—" Daniel gestured at the auditorium doors "—something else."

They went in together.

The auditorium was filling with the unhurried, slightly confused energy of a faculty that has been called together without explanation and is now doing what faculties do in the absence of information — generating theories and exchanging them in the low, overlapping murmur of people who are trying to read the situation before the situation is explained to them. Nathan and Daniel took seats in the fourth row, roughly centered, which was Daniel's preferred position at any gathering and which Nathan had adopted by proximity.

Around them: the chemistry department clustered in a group to the left, Mrs. Chung and two of the English department colleagues in the row ahead, Henderson from Physics arriving late and slightly breathless in the way Henderson arrived at things. The general assembly of Crestwood's teaching staff taking its seats with the collective expression of people who have been interrupted at the end of a day before a holiday.

"Rumor from the front office," said a woman from the History department leaning across from the adjacent seat, directed at Daniel, "is that it's administrative. Something about the league."

"The league," Daniel repeated.

"The academy network. The sister schools." She sat back. "That's all I heard."

Nathan looked at the stage. The podium. The two chairs to the side of it where Caldwell and his assistant Ms. Pryce were not yet sitting because they had not yet appeared.

He looked at nothing.

He thought, briefly and without intention, about the marked pages he'd put face-down on the back left desk this morning. The comment he'd written at the bottom of the last page in his own handwriting. Follow it. Don't decide in advance. The specific quality of writing that he'd spent past midnight reading.

He stopped thinking about it.

The side door opened. Headmaster Caldwell walked in followed by Ms. Pryce, and the murmur of the room adjusted itself into the particular, expectant quiet of an audience registering that the event is beginning.

Caldwell was a man in his late fifties who had the specific bearing of someone who had spent a career in institutional authority and had grown comfortable enough in it to wear it without performance. He was not theatrical. He did not build to things. He crossed to the podium, adjusted the microphone, and looked at the room with the expression of a man who is about to say something he would have preferred not to have occasion to say.

"Thank you all for coming in on short notice," he began, "and particularly on the day before break. I'll be brief — I know you all have places to be."

The room waited.

"This afternoon I received communication from the headmaster of Hargrove Academy in Scottsdale." A pause. "As some of you may know, Hargrove is part of our academy network — a sister institution with comparable enrollment and comparable standing. The communication concerned a situation that is currently under active investigation." He looked at the room with the direct, measured eye of a man delivering information he is choosing his words around very carefully. "It has been reported that a member of Hargrove's teaching faculty has been engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a student."

The sound that moved through the room was immediate — the specific, low collective response of a room receiving information of this particular kind. Not loud. Not theatrical. The sound of people processing, of exchanged glances, of the slight physical adjustment of those who were surprised and those who were not entirely surprised and were not going to say so.

Nathan did not make a sound.

He sat with his hands in his lap and his eyes on the stage and his expression in the arrangement of a man listening carefully to information being delivered, which was what every other person in the room was doing and what his face was doing and which bore no relationship whatsoever to what was happening in his chest.

"Nothing has been confirmed," Caldwell continued. "The investigation is ongoing and it would be inappropriate to speculate. I am not here to speculate." He placed both hands on the sides of the podium with the air of someone transitioning to the real purpose of the gathering. "I am here because this situation — regardless of its outcome — is a reminder. Of our responsibilities. Of the standards this institution holds and expects of its faculty. Of the lines that exist for reasons that matter."

He looked at the room.

"I'm going to ask Ms. Pryce to go over the professional conduct guidelines that were issued at the beginning of term. Not because I believe anyone in this room requires remediation. Because it is appropriate, given the circumstances, to hear them stated plainly."

Ms. Pryce stood. She was a compact, efficient woman with a clipboard and the bearing of someone who had written these guidelines and took them seriously. She looked at the room.

"Arms length," she said. "In any interaction with a student in a non-classroom setting — a corridor, a shared space, a one-on-one context — you maintain physical distance consistent with professional conduct. This is not ambiguous."

Nathan looked at the back of the seat in front of him.

"Physical contact." Ms. Pryce continued. "An open palm on the outer shoulder of a student is the extent of permitted physical contact in any circumstance. Nothing else. No exceptions."

He thought about a library in the fourth week of term. The specific, brief warmth of his hand on her knee. The moment he had sat with for three days afterward and which had never left entirely.

"Alone with a student," Ms. Pryce said. "You are not to be alone with a student in a closed-door setting without prior administrative approval. If a student requests a one-on-one meeting, this must be conducted with an open door or in a visible shared space."

He thought about Room 214 at half past six in the evening on a Tuesday in October. The banker's lamp. The door he had not thought about leaving open because it had not occurred to him to think about it, because he had been thinking about the conversation.

"No hugging," Ms. Pryce said. "No physical expressions of encouragement or comfort that involve bodily contact beyond the stated guideline. This includes gestures that may seem innocuous — a hand on a forearm, a pat on the back."

He looked at the seat back.

"In the event of an altercation between students, staff are not to intervene physically. You contact security immediately. You do not put yourself between students. This protects you as well as the students."

She went through four more items with the same direct, unambiguous delivery — the rules as they existed, stated plainly, without the softening of routine delivery that usually made them sound like formality rather than substance.

Caldwell returned to the podium when she had finished.

"One more thing," he said. He looked at the room with the particular quality of a man delivering the thing he actually came to deliver, the item that all of the above had been leading to. "These students — I want you to hear this clearly — come from families of considerable means and considerable influence. The parents of the students at this institution have resources, legal and otherwise, that most people do not. They have networks. They have reputations to protect and the means to protect them."

He paused.

"I am not saying this to frighten you. I am saying this because it is a reality and you should understand it. An accusation — not a conviction, not a confirmed incident, an accusation — directed at a member of this faculty by one of these families has the capacity to end a career. To end more than a career." He looked at the room without flinching. "You are professionals. You are good at your jobs. Protect yourselves by knowing exactly where the lines are and staying on the correct side of them." A beat. "If you look at one of these students in a way that a parent decides they don't like, that family has the ability to make your life very difficult. Keep this in mind."

The room was completely quiet.

"Thank you for your time," Caldwell said. "Enjoy the break."

The faculty moved toward the exits in the particular way of people who have been given something to think about and are thinking about it — quieter than the arrival, the conversations in the corridor lower and more specific than the pre-meeting murmur. Nathan walked with Daniel, which was the path of least resistance and the one he took because stopping and standing somewhere by himself was not a thing he was going to do right now.

Daniel walked beside him without speaking for a moment. Then he said: "Hargrove. I know one of their staff from the conference in September."

Nathan said nothing.

"Not well," Daniel said. "But you hear things at conferences." He glanced at Nathan. "Are you alright?"

"Fine," Nathan said. The word as a single, level syllable.

Daniel looked at him for a fraction of a second with the attention of a man who has known Nathan for eleven years and is reading something in the word fine that is not what the word said. He said nothing further about it. They walked to the car park. Nathan's car was on the far side.

"Have a good break," Daniel said, at the point where their paths diverged.

"You too," Nathan said.

He walked to his car. He got in. He put both hands on the wheel and looked at the windscreen and did not start the engine for a moment.

They can destroy your life if you look at their child weird.

He heard this in Caldwell's voice, measured and direct. He heard it again.

He thought about the rules that had been stated. The arms length. The open door. The approved one-on-one. The open palm on the outer shoulder only.

He thought about every room he had been in with Shae Madison that had one door and it had been closed. He thought about the piece of notepad paper he had handed to her in a car park at half past six on an October evening and the specific justification he had constructed for it. He thought about two words on a phone screen at nine-twenty at night. He thought about a grocery store aisle and his eyes completing their transit before the oversight system engaged.

He thought about eleven pages of a story about a girl in a library and the comment he had written at the bottom in his own handwriting at past midnight.

He thought: nothing has happened.

He thought: this is what happened before something happens.

He started the engine. He drove home through the Pasadena streets in the particular, low light of a late November afternoon, and he thought about Caldwell's voice saying an accusation — not a conviction — has the capacity to end a career, and he felt the weight of that land in the specific part of him that still responded to facts stated plainly.

He pulled into the driveway.

He sat in the car.

He was a teacher. She was his student. She was seventeen years old. He was in a room full of colleagues this afternoon when the rules were read aloud and he had sat through each one with the specific interior experience of a man who knows exactly which rule is being read at any given moment because he has been conducting his own audit against them for two months.

He thought: I have not done anything wrong.

He thought: I have not done anything wrong yet.

He got out of the car. He went inside. He hung his keys.

The house was quiet. Maryanne was working.

He went to the kitchen and made coffee he didn't particularly want and stood at the counter and looked at the garden and thought about what it meant that the word yet had arrived in that sentence without being invited.