middle of the garden, in the middle of campus, still holding hands with him, for Chrissakes!
“Be that as it may,” I say, pulling my hand from his clasp. “I must know about the file! Is it in your office?”
“No,” he says mechanically, but he is in as much of a hurry to get back to the Observatory as I am.
“Hey, sir, you’re going in the wrong direction!” some students shout across at us. We are swimming against the current because everyone is now streaming toward the stadium for the evening game.
I am almost running now to keep up with his long strides.
“Anna, go and powder your nose!” he says curtly when we have reached the first-floor hallway.
“Unfair!”
“Boo-hoo. That’s tenure track for you.” He pushes his hands into his jacket pockets for his keys. “Off you run. Will you be at the—and you needn’t make Bambi eyes at me, Miss Lieberman! I’m immune to ’em! Well,” he corrects himself punctiliously, “maybe that’s overstating the case. But I don’t hold with corrupting vulnerable young women, and I won’t let you read that file. Stop that!”
He turns away from me, and I can see his ears have gone red. I only did as he said—opened my eyes at him, fluttered my lashes, pushed out my lower lip, and pouted.
“What if I sit across the room from you, and you just tell me whether it’s there or not?”
This makes him laugh, but he is still barring my way into his office. Just as well that the hallway is empty and nobody can see our ridiculous mating dance. Non-mating dance.
“What if I sit across the room, with my face against the wall and my eyes closed?”
“Anna—”
“If I touch you, you can scream,” I challenge him quietly.
Our knees almost do touch as we sit at his low sofa table perusing the file that records the alleged sexual assault of one Nicholas George Eagleson upon one Mary-Lou Tandy. The scenario, it seems, was humdrum. A dorm party, drugs and alcohol, the assumption of implied assent on the part of the male. What makes this worth breaking into offices for is the eye-witness and ear-witness reports that—if genuine and accurate—seem to leave no doubt that Mary-Lou resisted him and that she had severe bruising on her arms and the inside of her thighs afterward.
“‘They always say no. They have to, because of their reputation. If they let you feel them up, it is okay to go ahead anyway.’”
Giles looks up from the sheet he is reading, the vertical groove between his eyebrows deep and angry. “What?”
“Said one Tommy-Lee Konig, twenty-one, student of geography.”
“It’s incredible that this was kept inside the college.” He surveys the evidence. “It’s as conclusive as it can be, short of a video film. He would almost certainly have been convicted.”
“Would be convicted, you mean,” I correct him. “This would still stand up in court, in this state. It wouldn’t in New York, you see.”
Giles sneers in triumph, and for a moment I can see how much he truly hates Hornberger.
“‘And that’s what I love about the Soooouth…’”
Chapter 23
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST end-of-grading-period party that I have been at, and maybe it is just me, but it seems to me that we have all gone a little crazy.
“No shoptalk!” Erin declares when we arrive. “Whoever mentions the Observatory, or essays, or students—”
“Studnets!” Eugenia interrupts her. “Nine times out of ten when I type the word, it comes out as ‘studnet’! I just call them ‘studnets’ now.”
“Nomen est omen,” I say darkly. “Very appropriate, under the circumst—”
“SHOP!” Tim shouts. “SHOT!”
“What?”
“Down in one, please, Ms. Lieberman. Doctor, I should say, a.k.a. Anna-Banana, but don’t call her that, she doesn’t like it!” Tim, already a little ahead of the rest of us, hands me a small glass full of some colorless liquid. Egged on by the others, I shrug and down it without asking what it is. It is straight vodka.
“Fix your hair in bunches with little butterfly clips, and you don’t look old enough to drink that.” Vern, Eugenia’s husband, looks into my eyes just a second too long. I am tired of jokes about how young I look, so I smile and say nothing.
“You are the baby here, aren’t you, Anna?” Erin is our kind hostess, so again I smile and say nothing. But Erin doesn’t allow people to slip from her grasp. “How old are you? Absurdly young, I remember that from your application.”