Before You Print My Name

The first student to cancel asked whether the refund came from me or the college.

“The appointments are free,” I said.

He stood on the other side of the writing center desk, holding his laptop against his chest. Until thirty seconds earlier, he had wanted help cutting three hundred words from a history essay.

“Right.” His eyes went to the sign with my name on it. “Never mind.”

Behind him, a girl waiting for the next tutor closed her document.

I turned my screen a little farther from the room. Her name and appointment notes were still open underneath his.

“Dana can find you another time,” I told him. “You don’t have to explain.”

He looked relieved, which hurt more than an argument would have.

When he had gone, the girl held up her phone.

“Is this actually you?”

The picture was my staff photograph, taken against a wall the college insisted was white. Under the fluorescent lights it had been the color of old oatmeal.

SOMEONE’S BEEN SELLING HARROW ESSAYS.

Below that, my name.

Someone had added a price list. It offered services I had never provided, at rates higher than my entire weekly pay.

I read it twice, looking for a joke I had missed.

“That’s my photograph,” I said. “The rest isn’t true.”

She lowered the phone, but not before I saw the link underneath it.

The Alder.

I had picked up the student paper on my way in, because its crossword was the right size to finish over a bad coffee. It lay folded beside the appointment sheets.

I hadn’t opened it.

“Can you still look at my introduction?” the girl asked.

I put my phone face down.

“Yes.”

For the next twelve minutes, I helped her move her argument from the last paragraph to the first. She had written about responsibility in a nineteenth-century novel. I resisted several unhelpful suggestions.

When she left, Dana Reeves came out of her office carrying the center’s blue water jug.

She put it down without filling it.

“Nora.”

“Please don’t ask whether I’ve seen it.”

“I was going to ask if you want someone at the desk.”

That nearly undid me.

I took the paper into the little room we used for quiet appointments. Dana waited while I read.

The headline was smaller than the one on the phone. It said application material had circulated outside the Harrow Fellowship process. It said the college was examining the feedback stage.

It didn’t say I had sold anything.

It did describe a final-year student who handled anonymous written reviews on Tuesday and Thursday shifts. It named my course, the room where I worked, and the week I had taken an extra shift.

There were four student tutors. Three were second-years.

The story described paid reviews, then explained that passages appeared in a shortlisted applicant’s public sample. Those sentences sat close enough together to introduce themselves.

At the bottom was the name Miles Hart.

“They asked the center for comment on Friday,” Dana said. “I answered questions about how the program worked. I didn’t know they were putting those details together.”

“Did they ask for me?”

“Not by name.”

My hands were steady until I tried to fold the paper.

Dana took it before I tore it.

“Your next appointment isn’t for forty minutes. I’ll cover the desk.”

“Am I being taken off?”

“I’m covering forty minutes. Those are different things.”

I wanted the distinction to feel reassuring.

She pushed a tissue box toward me. I took a tissue to wipe the coffee I had spilled on the table.

“Save the post,” she said. “Before it changes.”

I saved it, with the date and the account name still visible. Then I closed the app before I could read what strangers thought of my face.

On the walk across campus, Elena texted to ask where I was. I typed three answers before settling on the name of the building.

Do you want company?

I did. I also wanted to arrive without someone else’s worry beside me.

Let me talk to him first, I wrote.

She sent a thumbs-up, followed by a complaint about her film-night projector. I kept that message on the screen until I reached the stairs. It was a relief to have one problem I wasn’t at the center of.

The Alder’s office occupied two rooms above the campus print shop. The stairs smelled of warm paper and somebody’s breakfast.

On the landing, a man was arguing with a stapler.

“You have one job,” he told it.

“So do you, apparently.”

He looked up.

Brown hair fell across his forehead. He held the stapler in his left hand, with a spot of blue ink at the base of his thumb. There was something irritatingly composed about his face, even caught in the middle of losing to office equipment.

“Can I help?”

“Are you Miles Hart?”

He put the stapler down.

“Yes.”

I opened the paper on the nearest desk.

“Nora Reed. The only final-year tutor in the room you helpfully identified.”

His gaze dropped to the article. Then he looked at me properly.

“Come in.”

“I am in.”

“Farther than the doorway. So you’re not having this conversation in a corridor.”

I had prepared for denial. Practical consideration was harder to stay angry at, so I made an effort.

Inside, three mismatched chairs faced a desk covered in proofs. A half-completed crossword was pinned to the wall.

He moved a stack of papers off a chair but didn’t touch my arm or steer me toward it.

I stayed standing.

“You said I sold essays.”

“The article didn’t say that.”

I held up the post.

He read it. His expression changed.

“No. It didn’t say that,” he repeated, more quietly.

“They found me using what you did say.”

He looked back at his own page.

I watched him reach the description of my shifts.

“Yes,” he said.

The answer arrived so quickly I had nothing ready for it.

“You knew there was only one person that could be.”

“I knew we weren’t naming the tutor. I should have checked whether the other details did it for us.”

“They did.”

“I can see that.”

He pulled out his phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“Tess. Our editor. I report; she decides what goes on the page.”

“You didn’t need her permission to ruin my morning.”

He stopped with his thumb above the screen.

“Would you rather I wait until you’ve said what you came to say?”

I hated that I had to think about it.

“Call her. Put it where I can hear.”

He did.

Tess Bell answered on the fourth ring. He told her I was there and described the identifying details before mentioning the post.

He didn’t call it an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Tess asked to see both. Then she asked if I would stay long enough to give her an account.

“I have a job,” I said.

“You can send it later,” she replied. “Miles, don’t promise a wording until I’ve checked it.”

When the call ended, the room seemed too quiet.

From below came the slow, regular clatter of the printer.

“What did you think paid review meant?” I asked.

“The activity summary used that label.”

“The college pays me for work. The students don’t. A review is an hour on my timesheet, not a product someone buys from me.”

He wrote that down.

“You could have asked me.”

“I should have.”

“Try a different answer.”

For the first time he looked away.

“I sent questions to the center. I accepted the reply about procedure as enough. I wanted the piece ready for Sunday.”

There it was. Nothing grand enough to be satisfying.

He had wanted to finish.

“I had an application to finish this weekend,” I said. “For Harrow. I spent Saturday deciding whether a sentence sounded too pleased with itself. Apparently I was worrying about the wrong sentence.”

He glanced at the paper between us.

“I didn’t know you were applying.”

“There are several things you didn’t know.”

“Yes.”

I sat down because my legs had begun to feel unreliable, and I refused to give them anything more dramatic to do.

He shifted his chair back, leaving the desk between us.

“There’s something I can show you,” he said. “A short passage. The person who provided it agreed I could use it to check where the wording came from. I can’t show you their whole file.”

“I haven’t asked for their file.”

“I know.”

He opened a verification sheet, checked it, then turned the screen.

The surrounding lines were covered.

I recognized the sentence before I finished reading it.

Count the journey twice: once in minutes, once in wages.

I had written it in a comment box on an anonymous draft in September. The applicant had measured a clinic visit from arrival to departure. I had asked them to account for the bus journey and a missed shift.

I remembered being pleased with the instruction. Clear, for once. Something the writer could use.

“Where else did you find this?” I asked.

Miles watched my face.

“In the public sample for a shortlisted Harrow applicant.”

He opened a second window, on Harrow’s public shortlist page. The sentence was there too. Above the sample was the name Owen Beck.

I had never sat down with Owen Beck. I hadn’t written his application. The anonymous draft I remembered had not come with a name.

“Is that your wording?” Miles asked.

I looked at the sentence again.

Saying no would have been easy for about three seconds.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s mine.”