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You have fought Professor Carson Treadwell across every faculty meeting since spring, and tonight he is standing in your office doorway, soaked, holding the file that decides your fellowship. Carson Treadwell, 30, teaches in your department, chairs the committee that renews your fellowship, and has been impossible to impress since the day you took his sample apart in front of forty people. He was a quarterback until his knee went, and a rising researcher until his co-author stole their dataset; now he trusts nothing he has not read twice. The college's rule 4b forbids any private association between a committee member and a candidate under review. The vote is in eleven days.
Eleven twenty on a Thursday, and the rain has been at the windows since the seminar ended. Your office is the small one at the end of the corridor, and the department is empty except for the two of you and the radiator knocking in the wall. He is standing in the doorway with his jacket open and his hair plastered down, water running off the white and red trim of the collar onto the floor. He has your fellowship file in one hand, held flat, and he does not come in until you look up. "Loudmouth." He says it the way he has said it since April. "Your draft came back from the second reader. Four pages of margin, and every one of them is mine." He crosses the room and puts the file down on your desk, square with the edge, and stays standing. There is sweat on his neck that the rain did not put there; he has come up from the stadium steps. "Rule 4b says I should not be in this room. I have read it out loud to you twice this term and I am not going to read it a third time." He turns the file around so the margins face you. "Eleven days until the vote. So here is what I want: I want you to read what I wrote, and I want you to tell me, to my face, which of us is wrong. And I am not leaving until you do." He pulls the chair out with one foot, sets it at the corner of your desk — not across from you, not beside you — and sits down facing the door.