Ch. 3

3 weeks earlier

“I trust you’re having a happy holiday?” The spindly man sitting across from Sarah quizzed in a cordial voice that crackled with warmth, breaking his otherwise stoic exterior. A mop of spindly, greying hair sat atop an elongated face set with two wide eyes that gave Martin Garner the constant appearance of perpetual surprise. Combined with the near incessant wiping of the bridge of his nose, he reminded Sarah more of a child who wanted to leave a birthday party early than the head of the physics department at a university.

“I was, yes. Though, I don’t see why I had to come back in. Exams are over and my flight home leaves soon.” Sarah said, using the breathy, modulated overtones of her voice to counterbalance the annoyance that creased the usual serene dignity of her countenance.

“Ah, about that,” Garner muttered as he began rapidly thumbing through various folders and articles in the messenger back resting at his feet, “We both have some… homework ourselves over break it seems.”

It was another few moments before he produced what appeared to be a set of two folders, each marked with the schools’ seal and carefully bound in a line of white tape emblazoned with the words ‘dispose after reading’. Sarah caught the file as it was slid across the coffee table and took a summary glance around the room almost instinctively to make sure that nobody else was there, though it was a pointless gesture since they were in an office that could only accommodate two. Mr. Garners campus domicile was a veritable collage of personal effects interspersed with various archaic physics trinkets from the nearly mandatory Newtons cradles to springs affixed with weighted springs meant to demonstrate Hooke’s Law. To say it was disorganized was an understatement, as various piles of forms or ungraded term papers, clearly doomed to forever stay incomplete, formed monolithic walls around the odd office tool here and there. The only real open space in the cramped office was dominated by a dogwood coffee table and two aged sofas, the patchy leather surface appeared black in the awful amber of the desk lamp that was the rooms sole source of illumination.

Sarah pored over the contents of what she now realized was a dossier, drinking in the offset typeface that marred a yellowed sheet of paper. The first thing that struck her as her eyes flitted from a personal phone number to past addresses was how banal it all seemed. Obviously, the registrar and upper offices kept a record of emergency contacts as well as addresses for tuition billing, but why collect it all in such a sensitive format? This screamed of something much more thorough and personal than routine information collected by the schools admin. Who would go through the trouble of drilling this deep into the personal lives of the students here? The packet of documents paper clipped together underneath the initial smattering of information seemed to spit an answer in her face. Parts of her screamed to recuse herself from whatever situation this was. They rallied through her core and into the base of her neck, urging her to bid Garner and his families well wishes and to stand up and leave then and there. These were… all kinds of illegal.

“Dear god…” She trailed off in a muted whisper as she thumbed through contents, “Why is this transcript here? This violates all kinds of privacy policies.”

“From what I’ve been told, it’s a necessary evil.” Martin’s voice was also muted, hiding a slight tremble. He waited for her to finish going through the rest of the material, adjusting his spectacles to occupy his hands than anything else.

“And the administration knows about this?” She wondered out loud to herself, since the signature etched onto the release forms offered all the damning confirmation either of them needed. The unease building within finally escaped as she tore her eyes away from the folder and addressed her colleague, “Marty, how long have we been disclosing records of campus counselling sessions?”