Privilege by Mary Adkins

Author:Mary Adkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

14

Bea

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

Wrapped in a towel, her shower cap still on, Bea sat at her desk and read the decision quickly. Her first reaction was that it seemed fair and relatively inconsequential for him—he wasn’t suspended or expelled. He’d told his parents several days into the investigation, and while they’d insisted on bringing in a lawyer from Atlanta, he’d already been interviewed by the investigator by the time she arrived. The lawyer, a middle-aged woman always in hose and a tailored skirt suit, made a lot of loud noise about this, of course, along with everything else—the time line, the lack of evidence, the presence of alcohol. If there was a stink that could conceivably be made, this woman made it. Ultimately, though, the case seemed to have come down to his word against hers, and reading through the report, Bea found that she sympathized with the Title IX officer for having to decide whom to believe. There was no way of knowing for sure what had happened, since only Tyler and Annie had been there.

Bea had helped Tyler think about how to present Annie’s behavior in a way that she could be viewed as unreliable. Bea hadn’t seen this as unethical in any way—first, because there was a bias against him going in, something even she had felt. Someone needed to help correct for it. Plus, everything he’d said about Annie in his interview and testimony was, it seemed, true, or at least he believed it to be so. He and Bea had never hinted at the idea of fabricating facts to improve his case. Tyler had seemed genuinely convinced it was a misunderstanding, and, as far as Bea knew, it was.

Yet there was a small part of her, a part she tried to dismiss, a voice she told herself was the bias talking. This part of her believed Annie Stoddard and had wanted Tyler to pay.

When she was with Tyler, she found it easy to be on his side. In hearing more about his background, she’d found that she related to it more than she cared to think about: the solitary early years of childhood, when she would turn the decorative throw pillows of her mother’s bed into friends, followed by the mixed bag of boarding school, where she missed her mother desperately but also was nurtured by the friendships she formed there. Spending time with Tyler and then in class or in discussion with Dr. Friedman, she’d felt at ease in her role.

The cognitive dissonance of it she had found challenging in private flashes—reading the full case report once a copy was provided to Tyler; noticing Annie was in her abnormal psych lecture, which she never had before; or opening the decision letter via email that morning alone, the light slicing through the window to cast a single orange cone across the room. Am I on the wrong side? she’d wondered briefly, fleetingly, in these moments.

How would her mother feel about what she was doing? She wasn’t

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