Six Years - Harlan Coben Page 0,22

goody-goody or any of that, but I never text or e-mail and drive. Two years ago, a student at Lanford had been seriously injured while texting and driving. The eighteen-year-old woman in the passenger seat, a freshman in my Rule of Law class, died in the crash. Even before that, even before the wealth of obvious information about the downright stupidity if not criminal negligence in texting while driving, I was not a fan. I like driving. I like the solitude and the music. In spite of my earlier misgivings about technological seclusion, we all need to disconnect more often. I realize that I sound like a grumpy old man, complaining that whenever I see a table of college “friends” sitting together they are inevitably texting with unseen others, searching, always searching, I guess, for something that might be better, a perpetual life hunt for digital greener grass, an attempt to smell roses that are elsewhere at the expense of the ones in front of you, but there are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.

Right now I was flipping stations, settling on one that played 1st Wave music from the eighties. General Public asked, where is the tenderness? I wondered that too. Where is the tenderness? For that matter, where is Natalie?

I was getting loopy.

I parked in front of my housing—I didn’t call it my house or my apartment because it was and felt like campus housing. Night had fallen, but because we are a college campus, there was plenty of artificial illumination. I checked the new e-mail and saw it was from Mrs. Dinsmore. The subject read:

Here’s the student file you requested

Good work, you sexy beast, I thought. I clicked on the message. It read in its entirety:

How much elaboration do you need on “Here’s the student file you requested”?

Clearly the answer was, none.

My phone’s screen was too small to see the attached file, so I hurried up the walk in order to view it on my laptop. I put my key in the lock, opened the front door, and flipped on the lights. For some reason I expected, I don’t know, to find the place in shambles, as though someone had ransacked the joint, as they say. I had seen too many movies. My apartment remained, at kindest, nondescript.

I rushed over to my computer and jumped on the e-mail. I opened the one from Mrs. Dinsmore and downloaded the attachment. As I mentioned earlier, I saw my student file years ago. It was, I thought, a tad disturbing, reading professors’ comments that had not been shared with me. I guess at some point the school decided that it was too much to store all these old records so they’d scanned them into digital forms.

I started with Todd’s freshman year. There was nothing particularly spectacular there except that Todd was, well, spectacular. Straight A+’s across the board. No freshman got straight A+’s. Professor Charles Powell noted that Todd was “an exceptional student.” Professor Ruth Kugelmass raved, “A special kid.” Even Professor Malcolm Hume, never one easy with praise, commented: “Todd Sanderson is almost supernaturally gifted.” Wow. I found this strange. I had been a good student here, and the only note I’d found in my file was negative. The only ones I’d ever written were negative. If all was okay, the professor just left it alone and let the grade suffice. The rule of thumb in student files seemed to be, “If you have nothing negative to say, don’t say anything at all.”

But not with good ol’ Todd.

First-semester sophomore year followed the same pattern—incredible grades—but then things changed abruptly. Next to second semester was a big “LOA.”

Leave of Absence.

Hmm. I checked for a reason and it only said, “Personal.” That was bizarre. We rarely, if ever, leave it at just that—“Personal” in a student file—because the file is closed and confidential. Or supposed to be. We write openly in here.

So why be so circumspect about Todd’s LOA?

Usually the “personal” reason involves some kind of financial hardship or an illness, either the student’s or a close family member’s, either physical or mental. But those reasons are always listed in the private student files. None was listed here.

Interesting.

Or not. For one thing they were probably more discreet about personal issues twenty years ago. But second . . . well, who cared? What on earth could Todd’s taking time off as a sophomore have to