A Fugitive Truth by Dana Cameron Read Free Book Online Page B

have been nothing at all. I don’t recall much of the specific conversation, only that he was calling to let me know that the last of my letters of support had been received and that I would still be responsible for the classes that my colleagues and graduate students were covering during my brief leave. Again, these were reminders that no one working for tenure needed to be given, especially not someone as type-A as I am.
    It was the last two things he said, after twenty minutes of listening to himself talk, that put me into shock.
    The first was that he’d been having a look at my tenure portfolio, and—confidentially speaking, of course—he was almost convinced that it might just be enough. Almost.
    The other thing was his mentioning that he’d been good friends with the Shrewsbury Foundation’s director, Evert Whitlow, when they’d been at prep school together. He asked me to give Ev his best regards.
    I didn’t even get a chance to ask what he’d meant about my portfolio before he hung up. I think I’d remembered to tell him, in the slender openings he’d left for my part of the conversation, that I was having lunch with Mr. Whitlow later in the week. I think that I’d been able to form complete sentences, even while I was on autopilot, the bulk of my brain trying to come to grips with the fact that he’d called me up to cast doubts on my tenure hopes. I hung up automatically, hoping that I’d made inoffensive and polite noises in all the right places. But at some point during the conversation, my eyes had closed so tightly that I was seeing stars and my fists were clenched so hard that the nails bit into the meat of my palms.
    He’d called me up to play with me. The dean was twitching the bait, reminding me that my continued presence at Caldwell College in Maine was on the line, just as I’d gotten away from those worries for the moment to submerge myself in my own work, real research for a change. Until now I’d thought of him as a balding, second-rate Dickensian villain, a pain that came with the territory. But I knew from my experiences with him over the past several years, that his call wasn’t just insensitivity, wasn’t just social maladroitness, he was genuinely screwing with my head, now that he was in a real position to do so.
    Congratulations, Dean Belcher. You’ve just been promoted to sadist, first class.
    I looked down and realized that I’d wrapped the phone cord around my hands and was pulling so hard that I’d managed to straighten some of the curls out. I unwound the cord from my hands carefully, noticing how I’d managed to cut off the circulation in them without even thinking about it: The ends of my fingers were red and cold and there was a deep, white groove where the cord had bitten into my flesh. My hands were trembling, and I tasted bile at the back of my throat, the way I do when I’ve been hit too many times at my Krav Maga class and I’m ready to tear the lungs out of my instructor Nolan’s chest if he’d only let me get close enough to do it. I knew from experience that it was a bad place to be, and I felt powerless to do anything about it.
    I let go of the last of the cord and turned around to go to my room. I nearly ran into Jack, who suddenly appeared on the stairs, just about eye-level with my fists. He stumbled backward and would have fallen, had I not steadied him by grabbing his shirt.
    “Oh, my God! What is this?” Jack said. “I thought it would be quiet out here.” He had been wearing his headphones and must have been scared to death to see me appear suddenly.
    I flushed at being caught acting so. “I’m sorry, Jack! I…don’t know what came over me. Yes, I do, it was my dean. I apologize.”
    “Hmmph.” An opportunity presented itself and a sly look crossed his face. “Well, no harm done. Perhaps you would care to join me in a drop of something to calm the nerves?”
    I was about to decline, but I felt so guilty about having scared him that I