Page 49 of Give In to Me
Reviewer comments: Lacks rigor. Insufficient engagement with primary literature. Recommend substantial revision before resubmission.
I read it twice. Three times. The words are clinical. Professional. There’s no fingerprint on this email, no silk-wrapped knife, nowarm regards. Just a grade that doesn’t match the work, assigned by someone with the authority to assign it, and the message underneath the message is as clear as Agnes Cuthbert’s smile in a greenish hallway:
I saw you. And this is what happens next.
My phone is still warm from his texts. My wrist still carries the ghost of his thumb drawing circles. My lips are still swollen from kissing a man in a museum who heard me say his name and trembled.
And Agnes Cuthbert, who watched me leave his office with wet cheeks and mussed hair, who smiled at me in the fluorescent dark, who has the power to end my scholarship and my thesis and every reason my parents sold a tractor to send me here, has just put a grade in my file that says I’m failing.
I close the laptop. Keep my hands still. No circles. Just pressure.
The joy window is closing.
Chapter 9
THE LETTER IS ON DEPARTMENTletterhead.
Not an email this time. Paper. Thick, cream-colored, the kind the university reserves for things that matter like acceptances, commendations, formal proceedings. It’s sitting in my campus mailbox between a flyer for the spring blood drive and a note from the library about an overdue interlibrary loan, and the department seal is embossed in the corner, raised under my fingertip like a scar.
Dear Miss Lively,
This letter is to inform you that a formal review of your academic standing and scholarship status has been initiated by the Department Chair. You’re required to attend a review meeting on [date TBD] to discuss concerns regarding your recent academic performance, including but not limited to a failing grade in your most recent submitted coursework.
Please be advised that the outcome of this review may affect the continuation of your scholarship funding.
Regards, Office of the Department Chair
I read it in the mailroom. Standing between the wall of metal boxes and a recycling bin overflowing with campus newspapers, my bag on one shoulder, my coat buttoned to my throat because the building’s heating has been unreliable since November. My finger is pressed flat against the paper. Not circling. Justpressing, hard enough that the pad of my thumb goes white against the cream.
A formal review.
Agnes Cuthbert took the F—the impossible, fabricated, weaponized F on a paper my own advisor praised—and built a case around it. Filed it. Made it official. Gave it letterhead and a seal and the weight of institutional process, so that what was personal becomes procedural, and what was a knife becomes a policy.
I fold the letter. Once, twice. Tuck it into the back of my notebook, where Luciano’s notes live—the first summons, the napkin, theplease—and the proximity of those things, his handwriting next to her letterhead, makes something in my stomach turn.
My phone is in my pocket. I could text him. I could type three words—Agnes. Formal review.—and within the hour his men would know and he would know and something would happen, something precise and swift, because Luciano doesn’t tolerate threats to things he cares about.
I don’t text him.
Not because I don’t want to. Because the letter in my notebook is addressed toMiss Lively, and Miss Lively earned her scholarship with a 3.8 GPA and a thesis her advisor called exceptional, and Miss Lively doesn’t need a man to fight her institutional battles, even if that man drew circles on her wrist in a dark museum forty-eight hours ago.
My circle starts. Tight. Fast. The strap of my bag under my finger, wearing a groove.
I walk to class.
THE DEPARTMENT MEETINGis on Thursday.
I don’t know about it until I’m there, with my advisor, Dr. Malvar, mentioning it casually after our weekly check-in.
I walk to the conference room on the second floor of the humanities building with my notebook under my arm and my circle wearing through the leather cover.
The room is half full. A dozen scholarship students, most of whom I recognize from seminars and study groups. A handful of faculty along the back wall. Dr. Malvar in the corner, her face neutral, her hands folded. And at the head of the long table, Agnes Cuthbert, standing behind a chair she hasn’t sat in, her posture carrying the rigid composure of a woman who has dressed for a verdict.
She’s wearing ivory. A silk blouse with a collar that frames her jaw, a pencil skirt, heels that click once when she shifts her weight. Her hair is pinned. Her lipstick is the color of something expensive and unkind.
I sit near the back. My notebook is open. My finger starts a circle on the margin, and I watch Agnes arrange her papers on the table and I think about how this woman smiled at me in a greenish hallway and how that smile had teeth.
“Thank you all for being here.” Agnes’s voice fills the room the way a scalpel fills a surgical tray. “I’ve called this meeting to address some concerns about academic rigor within our scholarship program. Standards that, frankly, I feel have been allowed to slip.”
