Roommate Dated Seven Guys at Once, Caught Something, Blamed My Pad

The radiator in Hamilton Hall never worked before nine in the morning, so the auditorium smelled like wet wool and old paper when I walked in for Biology 214. I chose a seat in the third row, center section, exactly where I always sat because the projector did not wash out my notebook and the professor could not pretend she did not see my hand. Jordan sat two rows behind me with her back to the wall and her legs stretched across three seats. She had been doing that since October. It was her way of marking territory without saying a word. I did not turn around. I had learned not to. My phone buzzed against my thigh. My mother wanted to know whether I had mailed the insurance form for my father's cardiology appointment. I typed yes and put the phone away. The envelope was still in my backpack because I had forgotten to drop it at the campus mailbox, and I did not want to lie to her twice in one morning, so I decided I would do it after the quiz. Professor Yanow started his lecture on bacterial resistance, and I wrote down everything. I needed an A in this class. The Lockhart Scholarship covered tuition and the dorm, but it required a 3.9 cumulative average and a faculty recommendation, and Professor Yanow's recommendation was the one I needed most. He did not like students who missed lab or asked for extensions. He liked students who wrote down the difference between a plasmid and a prion without blinking. Halfway through, Jordan leaned forward and tapped my shoulder with two fingers. She always touched people like she was knocking on a door she already owned. "Lena," she whispered. "Do you have a pad? I started." I did not look at her face, but I heard the soft strain in her voice. The kind of strain that made people want to help her. It was her best weapon, and she knew how to use it. I had two pads in the front pocket of my backpack. I had bought them the week before, the same brand my mother used, the same brand I had used since I was fourteen. I carried them the way some people carry aspirin or a phone charger, because you never knew when you would need one and someone else might need one too. I unzipped the pocket and handed one back without turning around. "Thanks," she said. "You are a lifesaver." I went back to my notes. I did not think about the paper wrapper. I had opened the box the same week and used one the day before. The wrapper on the one I gave her was closed, because I had taken it from the middle of the box where nothing had been touched, but I did not examine it. I did not consider that anyone would ever ask me to prove something so ordinary. Three days later, the Dean of Students called me into his office. His name was Dr. Albert Cole, and he had a framed photograph of his golden retriever on the desk behind him. He asked me to sit and offered me water. I declined. I had a lab practical at two, and I was calculating how long this would take. "Lena," he said, "Jordan Ross has filed a complaint against you. She says you knowingly gave her a contaminated hygiene product in class on February ninth. She has been diagnosed with a bacterial infection, and her family is requesting a formal review of your conduct and your scholarship status." I stared at him for a moment. The room was too warm, and the radiator was making a clicking sound like a clock that had forgotten how to keep time. "What?" I said. "Her statement is that the pad you gave her was already open, that the wrapper had been torn, and that you must have known it was not sterile. She said you have had tension with her since the fall semester. She believes this was deliberate." "That is not true," I said. "I gave her a closed pad from a new box." "Did you keep the wrapper?" "No." "Did anyone else see you hand it to her?" I thought about the auditorium. Two hundred students, most of them looking at their laptops or the back of someone's head. Jordan had whispered. I had handed it back over my shoulder. There was no camera in that room. The building was old enough that the only camera on the floor was the one above the east stairwell, and it did not face the classroom. "No," I said. "She asked. I gave it. That is all that happened." Dr. Cole nodded slowly, and I understood that he had already decided something. Not that I was guilty. But that he had to do something, and the complaint had arrived with a doctor's note, and the doctor's note had a diagnosis, and a diagnosis was something he could put in a file. "Until the review is complete," he said, "your access to the Lockhart Scholarship disbursement is frozen. You can continue attending classes, but you cannot represent the university in any official capacity. That includes the honor society gala." I had been elected to the honor society in January. It was the only recommendation besides Professor Yanow's that I had, and I had worked for it. I had written the essay, sat for the interview, and shaken hands with the chair. It was mine. "I need that disbursement for March housing," I said. "The dorm payment is due on the first." "I understand this is difficult," he said. "But the review takes priority." I walked out of his office and down the stairs. The east stairwell camera blinked at me from the corner of the landing. I stopped for a moment and looked up at it, and then I kept walking. I did not know how to prove something that had never occurred, but I knew that somewhere in the student records system, someone had opened a file with my name on it, and that file was now more real than anything I had actually done. Jordan was sitting on the bench outside the science building when I came out. She had a coffee in one hand and her phone in the other. She looked up when I passed, and her face did the thing it did when she wanted people to see how sorry she was. "Lena," she said. "I did not mean for it to go this far. I just had to tell the truth. I know you did not mean it." "You know I did not do it," I said. She looked down at her coffee. "I do not know what you meant. I only know what happened to me." I kept walking. I had a lab practical, and I was not going to be late. But I felt the envelope in my backpack, the one for my father's cardiology form, and I thought about how strange it was that a piece of paper could carry so much weight when it was addressed to someone who would never open it. I mailed the form that afternoon. Then I went to the library and sat in the back corner and opened my laptop, because I had two weeks before the review hearing, and I had no idea what I was going to say.