Chapter 25

Charles and Julian are at Schenley for the next crisis. It’s the following morning, Thursday, one week from grad open house. They’ve come with a vague plan to ask more questions about Lu’s book deal, to figure out who knew what about it when. The atmosphere of the English department is crackling with hostile energy. No laughter or normal chatter emanates from the offices; instead, only low hushed voices can be heard in the otherwise silent halls. A couple of professors walk past each other and shoot brief withering glances at each other’s backs. Here and there, undergraduates are lined up for office hours, but they look uncomfortable. Even they can tell that something isn’t right—more not right than usual. Charles wonders how much they know, how much they’re enlisted in the departmental struggles. It seems impossible that they wouldn’t be affected in some way. Is there a battle every semester over how many classes each side gets to teach? Do they recruit undergrads like they do grad students—do the undergrads have to pick a side and stick to it? He shakes his head at the thought. Everything else aside, surely such a partisan stance would make it hard from them to fulfill their course requirements.

After Charles and Julian stop in at Piper’s office for a quick check-in, they go in search of Isabel, hoping for a discreet chat. They don’t have to go far. When they emerge from Piper’s office, they see her standing at one end of the hallway. She’s staring at something on the other end. They follow her gaze. It’s Francis Pace.

It ought to be one of those Western movie moments, all steely glares and “this town ain’t big enough for the two of us” vibes, but somehow it isn’t. It’s less melodramatic than that, less cinematic; there’s no ominous music and no sweeping sense of a good-versus-bad standoff. It’s just…deeply uncomfortable.

Everyone looks, though. Even the undergrads, even the one with his headphones in who’s been rolling his skateboard back and forth over a couple inches of floor, catch the sudden shift in the air as the professors watch each other from across the hallway. Charles looks back into Piper’s office; they raise their eyebrows questioningly, and Charles tilts his head: come see.

He feels Piper tense as they join him and Julian in the doorway. “Oh, shit,” they murmur, looking at Isabel. The scattered, vaguely artsy lit professor they’d met a couple weeks before hasn’t just changed; she’s all but vanished, replaced by somebody sharp and angry. Isabel’s mass of curly hair, the pen stuck behind her ear, and the tall scuffed boots make her look slightly unhinged now, rather than eccentric, when combined with the intensity of the glare she’s aiming at Francis Pace. He’s standing still, watching her, hands in the pockets of his gray trousers, a flecked wool sweater stretched slightly over his belly, his handsome face grave and mild under his red hair. Whereas Isabel is broadcasting, YOU FUCKED WITH ME AND I WILL FUCK WITH YOU, loud and clear, Pace’s energy gives off a quieter warning. His shoulders are tensed; Charles wonders if he knows what’s coming.

“I want a word with you,” Isabel says. Her voice cuts across the hallway. The undergraduates caught in between the two professors glance up at her and then quickly down, back at their phones or their feet.

Pace inclines his head. “Shall we talk in my office?”

Isabel snorts. “I’m sure you’d prefer that.”

Pace says, evenly, “We can talk in yours if you’d like.”

“No offices,” Isabel says sharply. “You know why.”

A frown flickers across Pace’s face, then goes. “All right,” he says slowly. “Well—”

She strides down the hall, suddenly; Pace flinches slightly as she bears down on him. She steps past the undergrads as if they’re not there—one of them quickly yanks his backpack out of the way—and doesn’t stop to acknowledge Piper, either, or Charles and Julian. She halts a foot away from Pace.

“This has gone far enough,” she says. Her voice is low, but not by any means too quiet for the others in the hallway to hear.

“What, exactly, are you talking about?” Pace hasn’t dropped his mild expression, but his tone is steely.

“You know perfectly well,” Isabel hisses. “You went to the dean. You went to Hanley and tried to sabotage my student’s book contract—”

Pace holds up a hand. “Wait, wait. You’re mistaken, Isabel.”

Her nostrils flare. “How dare you gaslight me—”

“Don’t accuse me of gaslighting,” Pace says sharply. “Explain what it is I’m supposed to have done, please.”

The air in the hallway feels thin and taut. Possibly everyone is holding their breath. Charles knows Piper is; he can see their pinched lips and clenched fingers. One of the undergrads, a girl with curly dark hair, glances between the professors and the open hallway behind her, as if hoping she can make an escape without drawing attention to herself. Charles recognizes her after a moment, from a photo Piper showed him after Jack’s murder—she’s Rachel Glass, one of the students who found Jack’s body and the head of the English Majors’ Organization.

But she and the others all seem glued in place as Isabel answers. “Hanley called me into his office yesterday. He had excerpts from Lu Fairchild’s dissertation. He had me read them aloud.”

Pace’s forehead crinkles.

“They were particularly explicit excerpts,” Isabel continues. “He called them pornographic. He accused me of allowing my students to pass off pornography as critical writing. He threatened Lu’s book deal with Horizontal Publishing—”

“Excuse me?” Pace cuts in. “He called her critical writing pornographic?”

“Yes, he did, and he said he would be reevaluating all my students’ writing—”

“Personally?” Pace asks. The mildness has vanished now; his eyes are as bright as Isabel’s.

“Presumably. And if you think that it’s all right to plant this homophobic bullshit in Hanley’s head, giving him permission to put his grubby bureaucratic fingers all over my students’ scholarship in the name of some sort of purity policing, just to score points with—”

“Isabel.” Pace says. Charles thinks—but can’t quite tell for sure—that he looks genuinely shaken. “Isabel. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She falters for a second. A curl of hair stands out from her face. She looks dangerous, and unstable, and beautiful.

“You’re telling me,” Pace says, “that the dean of Schenley called your student’s scholarly work on queer sex ‘pornographic.’ You’re telling me she has a book deal in the works that he’s somehow threatening because it deals with queer sex. You’re telling me that he’s going to come into the department and examine graduate students’ work to see if it meets his standards for scholarship.”

“Yes.”

No one is looking away, now. Charles thinks Piper has stopped breathing. The student with the skateboard has let it roll out of reach. Rachel, the curly-haired undergrad, has stopped making escape plans and is staring at the two professors, a disturbed expression on her face.

“Dean Hanley’s standards for scholarship are very conservative,” says Pace.

Fury flashes across Isabel’s face. “No shit, Francis. What did you think would happen when you gave him this kind of ammunition—”

“Isabel,” Pace interrupts, “I’ve published an article that spends six pages discussing the fact that nineteenth-century police would measure the anus of men suspected of being sodomites to determine whether they’d been sexually penetrated. Even if I were willing to raise the homophobic alarm to Hanley in order to sabotage Lu’s book contract—which I honestly knew nothing about—I’d hardly get away with it, would I? You’d simply point him right back to my article. We’d be in the same hot water.”

Isabel bites her lip for a moment, cheeks flushed, eyes briefly uncertain. Then she shakes her head. “You have tenure, Francis. My graduate students don’t. You’re not at risk. They are.”

Francis’ frown darkens and in a sudden contained explosion he says fiercely, “I have graduate students, too! Queer graduate students! You conveniently forget that, Isabel.” His fist clenches at his side, vibrating, as if his desire to lash out is held tight between his fingers. He hisses, “You are not more victimized than I am, Isabel, you are not more politically radical, you are not more precarious than me or my students—”

“Oh, please,” Isabel snaps back. “I know what side your bread is buttered on. Hanley likes you better, of course he does, you’re a white man—”

Pace’s features contract in fury. “You know perfectly well that as a queer man my privilege is contingent upon my willingness to conform to the norms of the institution, which I hardly think any administrator would accuse me of doing. I get stonewalled at meetings, Isabel, I’ve been called a troublemaker too—”

“Oh, good for you,” she says with icy sarcasm. “Political brownie points to you. Never mind that you’re well within the institutional norms of your field, never mind that the Victorianists welcome you with open arms because you don’t question disciplinary boundaries, because you play nice and safe within the parameters of the field—”

“I’m sick to death of this constant self-righteousness,” Pace snaps, louder than before. His fist is vibrating faster, like he’s having trouble keeping it closed. “This constant gatekeeping about what counts as radical queer work, it’s bullshit—”

His voice is spiraling out of control. Isabel is a ball of fury. The handful of undergrads in the hallway are deathly quiet; Rachel Glass looks near tears. A couple more people have stuck their heads out of offices. Piper is tensed, frozen. Charles feels the secondhand anxiety and discomfort acutely. Only Julian seems calm, watching with keen, steady eyes.

Isabel steps forward. Piper draws in a sharp breath.

“Excuse me,” says a voice from the end of the hall. Everybody’s heads snap to look.

The older white man standing there looks like the quintessential literature professor from the 1950s: graying hair, a brown suit jacket, a bow tie, and a face lined in a manner begging to be described as “distinguished.” Christopher Maynard. He clears his throat. Charles sneaks a glance at Isabel and Pace. They look annoyed, but also, perhaps, a little bit guilty.

“This is quite a loud discussion to be having in the hallway,” Maynard says. “It sounds very much like one better suited to a somewhere more private.”

Behind Maynard, Charles notices a young man lingering at the end of the hall, watching: Todd Burns, Maynard’s single graduate student.

Pace’s lips press together tightly. Isabel scowls at Maynard. But neither says anything, and their eyes travel to the undergrads clustered awkwardly in the hallway, eyes darting around for anywhere to look that isn’t at the feuding professors. It is so clear that Maynard is correct.

Isabel huffs and darts one last retort at Pace: “This isn’t over.” She sweeps down the hallway and slams her office door behind her.

“Now, Francis,” Maynard begins placatingly.

But Francis shoots him an angry look. “Don’t start, Maynard. We all know you’ll be pleased as punch with the dean sticking his grubby fingers all over us.” He turns and leaves, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

A horribly awkward silence fills the hallway for a long moment. Maynard’s gaze flickers to Piper and, next to them, Charles and Julian, then turns to the undergrads.

“I’m so sorry about that,” he says to them. “Bit of a departmental dispute. You all right, Elena? Max?”

The students nod.

“Happy to talk, if you ever need to. All right there, Rachel?”

The curly-haired young woman blinks rapidly, and Charles thinks he can see tears brimming in her eyes.

“Rachel?” Maynard sounds concerned.

Rachel, staring at the ground, gives a tiny nod. “I’m fine,” she manages. Maynard lingers for another moment, forehead creasing, but then Todd, his graduate student, steps further into the hallway.

“Professor,” he says, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but—your class starts in ten minutes.”

“Ah, yes,” Maynard says. “Thank you, Todd.”

He surveys the hallway one more time, a pensive look on his face, then walks away.

The silence, this time, is more like a collective sigh of relief. A couple of the undergrads, seated next to each other on the floor, exchange whispered what the fucks. Piper runs their hand through their short hair; Charles notices they are shaking slightly, but they give him and Julian a wan smile.

And then there’s a noise—strange and, for a moment, unplaceable. A kind of choked-off, vocalized inhalation. Charles looks. Rachel, the undergrad who found Jack’s body, is shaking. Not just a little, like Piper, but violently, her whole body trembling.

She makes the noise again, and again, and Charles realizes she’s struggling to breathe.

“Piper—”

But Piper is already hurrying toward her.

“Rachel,” says the girl named Elena, “are you okay?”

Rachel tries for a reply, but it comes out strangled, a mess of broken sounds. Charles thinks she’s trying to say, “I’m fine.”

“Rachel,” Piper says, looking her in the eye as best they can. “Rachel, I think you’re having a panic attack.”

Rachel shakes her head wildly. “I—I just—”

“It’s okay,” Piper says. “Come on. Into my office.”

Rachel resists for a moment, but her face is very pale, and she lets Piper lead her, trembling, into their office. Charles and Julian exchange a glance and step back till they’re just outside the doorway, giving her space.

Piper has her sit and tells her to breathe—coaches her through one strained breath at a time. “It’s okay,” they murmur over and over, and once she’s coherent enough to apologize Piper says it again. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“I can’t be here,” Charles hears her say, voice still wild and thin, “I can’t do this anymore—”

“Okay,” says Piper. “That’s all right. Just breathe.”

“It’s not, it’s not all right—”

“Rachel,” Piper says. “I’ve done this before, okay? I’ve had panic attacks before. I promise you can’t fix anything while you’re having them, all right, so all you need to focus on is breathing right now.”

Rachel puts a shaking hand to her forehead. “I feel—um—”

“Dizzy? Faint?”

“I think—”

“You can lie on the floor,” says Piper.

“But—”

“I’ve done it,” they say, smiling. “I lie on this floor all the time.”

Charles’s guilt at listening in on the girl’s distress reaches a level he can’t ignore. He looks to Julian. “Should we…” he murmurs. “Should we get someone, or…”

“Hang on one sec,” says Piper to Rachel. “I’m not going anywhere.”

They step out of their office. “Hey,” they say. “She’ll be okay. Once she’s feeling steadier I’ll take her to the counseling center. There’s nothing else you can do, I think.”

It’s a gentle dismissal. Charles nods. He turns to go.

Julian turns too, but then stops abruptly. “Are you—” He pauses for a second, then says, quickly, to Piper: “Are you all right?”

Charles looks at him, startled. Piper blinks.

“Well,” they say. “Uh…not really? But also, yeah, I’m okay for now. I should get back to—”

“Right,” says Julian. “Good.”

Charles follows him out, wondering when Julian had gotten invested enough—or comfortable enough—to start asking after the emotional wellbeing of someone he still considers a possible suspect. It makes him—oh, for fuck’s sake. It makes him want to kiss Julian.