Page 21 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"Right," I said. "And this meets weekly. The chemist doesn't have one of these, by the way. I checked. The economist doesn't either. Just me. Which makes it less a procedure and more a standing surveillance order."

"The review is not my invention." He aligned the agenda with the edge of the blotter, one millimeter of correction, and I watched the hands do it, because some protocols fail quietly and mine had. "Our visiting fellow takes a scholarly interest in the college's procedures. She found our onboarding insufficiently attended. The recommendation named no one, and the Provost's office selected the pilot case, and the pilot case is the newest senior appointment, and that is you."

All true, I'd bet the notebook. All shaped. The little gray woman who eats nothing and reads the hall ordered my boss into a room with me, every week, on paper, for reasons of procedure, four days after — I looked at his face for the rest of that sentence and his face declined to finish it, and so did I.

"Fine," I said. "Item one. Teaching."

And here's the thing I have to write down, because the notebook is where I stop lying: the hour worked. Not the review, the review was boilerplate; I mean the two of us, in a room, with a task. He'd read my seminar plan the way he reads everything, which is to say more closely than I had, and he flagged the week I'd overloaded, the exact week, the one I'd been privately dreading, and slid one finger onto the page like a man indicating a structural fault on a drawing. "Your fifth week asks them for two impossible things at once."

"It asks them for effort."

"It asks them for Boethius and their first essay in the same seven days. One of the two will be done badly. You know which."

I did know which. I'd known in August. "You're supervising my syllabus now?"

"I am supervising your review." Beat. "The syllabus came up."

"Your seminar interest runs deep for a man with a college to run."

"Your seminar runs loud," he said. "I hear of it."

"You hear of it."

"The college is small," he said, "and the walls are thin," and there it was, the register we've apparently agreed on without negotiating it: every sentence with two floors, and both of us taking the stairs between them, and neither of us ever, ever naming the building. It isn't fencing anymore. Fencing has rules and a winner. This was more like two men carrying a pane of glass across a courtyard, very carefully, in conversation about the weather, both pretending their hands aren't full.

I dropped my end exactly once. Somewhere around the committee-load item I started a sentence I had no exit for: "For the record, about the other night, I don't—" and heard where it was going, which was nowhere with a floor, and landed instead on "—want the fifth week moved after all." A full second. Then: "No," he said, agreeing to the version I'd swapped in, in the tone of a man initialing an amended minute, and his eyes had read the original draft, and neither of us circulated it.

Forty minutes in, reaching across for the carafe, he stopped, and said, not looking up, "Friday night⁠—"

Two words. My heart did a thing I resented in real time.

"—the storm," he said, "reached your rooms? No damage?"

"No damage," I said, which was the biggest lie I've told on this campus, where I once told a security officer I was sure I'd seen nothing.

"Good," he said, and poured the water, and that was the closest either of us went to the wall, forty minutes with the pane of glass and nobody dropped it, and at five o'clock exactly he stood, and I stood, and he said, "Tuesday next," and I said, "It's not elective," and left, and in the corridor I had to stand for a second with my back against the cold stone like a teenager, taking inventory of my own pulse, disgusted with the entire man I have turned out to be.

Item thirty-seven: he was going to say something else after "Friday night." I watched him reroute it mid-span like a bridge crew. I have now spent one hour alone with him post-error and can report that the error is stable, structural, and in no danger of being repaired.

* * *

Wednesday and Thursday nights I did honest work, by which I mean I finally built the thing I'd been circling for a month.

Here's what I had. Leah Brandt went sideways on a Thursday; her email said so; her four missing minutes have an anniversary every week that she doesn't know she's observing. The whisper-fight was about who's sitting this term, present continuous, a schedule in progress. The gatehouse ledger lost a Thursday page. The light in the closed building moved on a Thursday. The wand was a Thursday, 2:14 a.m. My kiss — not relevant, Mercer — was a Friday, technically Saturday.

One weekday, recurring. That's not a pattern yet; that's a suspicion with a calendar. So I went and got the only archive nobody guards: attendance.

Departmental attendance registers live in the Letters office in a filing drawer that predates suspicion, and nobody has ever razored them, because nobody has ever thought of them as records of anything except who was hungover. I pulled every register I could reach going back two academic years, and I sat up both nights with graph paper and a ruler, weeks across the top, and I marked every Friday where a student who'd been solid all term went suddenly absent, or present-but-blank, the notation tutors use without thinking: present, no contribution. Quiet Fridays. Vague Fridays.

They cluster. They cluster the day after certain Thursdays, and the Thursdays repeat, and the repetition has a wavelength. Two years ago the quiet Fridays came every five weeks, regular as rent. Last autumn, call it four and a half. By last spring the gap was four, then not quite four. My own four weeks of term say the current figure is closer to three.

I sat looking at the graph paper at two in the morning with the ruler still in my hand, and I want to record the exact shape of the cold that went through me, because it wasn't the pattern. Patterns I can live with; a pattern is just a schedule wearing a mask. It was the trend. Whatever this college does to its students on Thursdays, it used to do every five weeks, and now it does it every three, and the line through those points isn't flat, and lines that aren't flat are going somewhere.

Grid started. Things that are actually happening, entry seven: the interval is real, it is measurable, and it is shortening.

One more thing, and I'm putting it down flat so I can't soften it later: the spring register for the graduate seminar, the one that would have Micah Vane's Thursdays in it, isn't in the drawer. Every other term of the last decade, present and correct and smelling of pencil. That one term: a paper sleeve, empty, with the term's dates on the tab in a tidy hand.

The editor got there first. The editor is thorough. The editor did not think of the other registers, which means the editor is human, which is the most useful thing I've learned all term.