Filed to story: Shhh Professor! Please Don’t Tell! Novel Free
Jackson. Jackson Steele.
I walked across campus after speaking with him in the hallway, my eyes on the sky. It looked as though it might snow soon. The air felt alive, trembling with anticipation, waiting for something.
Well. It was probably just me.
I felt alive and trembling with anticipation.
I took a stroll under the trees. My backpack was heavy, and I set it down under one of the tall oaks. I wandered around, my arms crossed, feeling the cold wind on my face and treading through the frosty grass.
Then, a snowflake. It landed on the sleeve of my coat. I looked up, and flakes of white were twirling through the air over my head. They kissed my face.
I closed my eyes. Right now, everything felt like a miracle. Right after Christmas, I was going to the place I had wanted to go my whole life with the man I loved.
The man I loved?I opened my eyes. The snow had begun to dust the grass and the fingertips of the tree branches.
“I love him,” I thought. “I don’t care what anybody says. I do. And I think he loves me, too.”
I rose up on my toes and practically danced back to my backpack. I slung it onto my shoulders. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. I pulled it out. I frowned a little as I read the notification. An email from John Spaulding, the head of the history department. I opened it and read it. He wanted to meet with me to talk briefly. He didn’t say about what.
Why did he want to talk with me? I felt an odd sense of foreboding.
“He’s probably going to meet with everyone who signed up for the Egypt trip,” I told myself, brushing my apprehension aside.
He’d listed his office hours at the end of his email. He was there now.
“I’ll go talk to him now,” I thought, trying to deny the fact that I was anxious to be sure what it was about.
I dropped my backpack off in my dorm room, changed out of my hoodie and into a sweater, and walked across campus to the history building.
Professor Spaulding’s office was on the top floor, at the end of a hallway that smelled like cough drops and pine. His door was ajar. Feeling nervous, I stepped up to it and knocked.
“Come in.”
I’d only seen Professor Spaulding briefly a few times. I’d met him when I took a tour of the campus before applying, and I saw him around the history building sometimes. He was a thin middle-aged man with thinning hair. He wore thick glasses and a pale yellow bowtie spotted with navy polka dots. His clothes were clean but faded, as if he had been sitting in his dusty office for thirty years and had become a little washed out from the light, like an antique book.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Ellie Anderson. You just sent me an email, asking me to talk with you.”
“Ellie,” he said briskly, setting down his pen. He smiled. It was a kind smile, but looked flabby, as if it had been very sincere once but now just didn’t have enough juice anymore. “Thank you for meeting with me. You’re very prompt.”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering how to ask how long this meeting would take without sounding rudely impatient.
“Please, sit down,” he said, gesturing to a chair in front of him.
That was the answer then. It wasn’t a quick question or two. Of course it wasn’t. He could have asked me something like that over email.
I sat down. I swallowed. I stared at the antique etching of the New York Hippodrome that was hanging on the wall behind his head.
Professor Spaulding glanced out the doorway, as if he wanted to be sure that no one was in the hallway. As if he wanted to be sure that no one would overhear us.
That was definitely a bad sign.
“Ellie,” he said again. I found it odd that he was taking a paternal tone with me when he’d only met me the one time and almost certainly didn’t remember me. “Ellie, I’m not quite sure how to put this.”
Oh no. My stomach twisted.
“There have been rumors going around that Professor Steele is involved with one of his students,” he said.
My stomach was on the ground, scooting around under my chair, trying to wiggle out of the room. I suddenly couldn’t make eye contact with him anymore.
“Okay,” I said vaguely.
I found, unexpectedly, that the knowledge that my fears about gossip were true didn’t bother me. Not for myself. I didn’t feel ashamed, or worried about what people thought of me like I had before. But I was suddenly tense, wondering what this might mean for Jackson.
What was Professor Spaulding trying to do? Just glean information? Did he know it was me?
“Do you know anything about this?” he asked.
“I have no reason to believe that Professor Steele has become involved with any of his students,” I answered honestly.
He hadn’t. Because I had told him no.
I was suddenly overwhelmed with relief and sadness at the same time. Relief that nothing had happened. Sadness because I now knew that nothing could. My heart ached.
“Really?” he asked. He sounded surprised, but as though he believed me. “You’re sure?”
I collected myself and looked right into his eyes. “I’m sure,” I said.
“Well, I’m very pleased to hear that,” he said, casually breaking the eye contact and straightening some papers on his desk. “I wanted to be sure. It’s important that nothing of that kind happens.”
He made eye contact with me again.
I swallowed.
“It’s a college, sir,” I said. “Rumors are bound to get started. Friendliness misinterpreted. Everyone wants to talk about Professor Steele. Someone probably just made this up.”
He smiled, a mechanical gesture. It wasn’t unfriendly, just over-rehearsed.
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “I just wanted to be sure before he came on this trip to Egypt with us. It’s important that nothing untoward happens on an academic trip.”
“I don’t see why it would,” I said, my stomach still flopping like a dying fish. “The rumors are about a specific student, right? Not that Professor Steele is a philanderer in general.”