The campus was going about its day. Students crossed the courtyard. Someone was laughing somewhere out of sight. The trees were the same trees, the path the same path, the sky the same overcast grey it had been all morning. None of it had changed. The world had not paused for the contents of that room. It had continued while she sat across from three people with folders and received the shape of her consequence, and it was continuing now, indifferent and unhurried, exactly as it would continue while she served her suspension and fell behind her friends and returned as a junior to a campus that had already moved on.
She stopped walking. Just for a moment. In the middle of the courtyard path she stopped and stood still and breathed in the cold air of the morning and let herself feel it the
