Losing three successive races doesn’t provide him with any answers, but it does succeed in putting enough distance between himself and the rest of the day’s craziness that much of it begins to feel surreal. It is hard to worry about the loan collectors who might be back in a month to carve out his kidneys when Jay keeps insisting, in full seriousness, “Yoshi is my lucky charm, man. You’ve got no chance.” Jay is far more right about this than he can know.
When Cory bows out to take a call from his girlfriend, Mark excuses himself. He has a ratty laptop still, and he looks through his saved loan documents to figure out how much he actually borrowed from Premier College Finance. Fifteen thousand is the answer glaring back at him. He stares at it for a solid minute in the hopes that his eyes will readjust and the number will change, but it doesn’t. Fifteen thousand.
He leaves the document open as a reminder as he pulls up a browser window and searches local job openings—no BA required. The hourly wages are depressing. Even if he sells all his possessions and works eighty hours a week, he can’t earn fifteen thousand in a month. His laptop is only worth a few hundred, his outdated phone likely not even that. College textbooks are probably the most valuable things he owns, but he bought them used, and, even if he can sell them for the same amount, they’d probably only total five hundred.
He puts his phone on the table and stares at it for a long minute. Despite what he told the loan collectors, it’s not true that his parents can’t afford it. They could easily afford it, but getting it would require asking, and talking, and concessions that Mark doesn’t think he can make. He considers it, though. He considers it for almost ten full minutes before he tucks the phone away again and slouches up the staircase to the large hall closet, which is his bedroom for now.
He settles down on his makeshift mattress—an old comforter folded over on itself—and allows himself a moment of self-pity. Most of today’s events are, in some way, Mark’s own fault. He took out the loan without understanding the fine print. He agreed to Andy’s project without asking for the details. But those things wouldn’t be such massive problems if he was graduating with a job lined up, and that brings him back to the plagiarism charges, which are the one part that is absolutely not his fault. He really didn’t copy that paper. He’d slaved away on the research just like everyone else in the class, and, yes, maybe he’d gotten started on the actual writing portion later than he should have, but he’d thought it was at least a halfway decent paper. Probably a B+ paper.
In Professor Harcourt’s class, assignments were always due on Mondays at 8:00 AM, which was when she came into her office. She would put a folder in the file-holder on her door on the Friday beforehand, and, like everyone else, Mark had come by on Sunday night to put his paper in the folder.
Obviously, it wasn’t the most secure system, but Mark had never worried about it before. Several of his more dated professors over the course of his four years had had a similar submission process, and it’s only in retrospect that the system's flaws glare at him. Because there were a good ten hours, from the time Mark dropped off the paper to the time Professor Harcourt arrived at her office, when anything could have happened to it. The building has no security cameras except at the exits, and hundreds of people would have gone in and out during that period. Anyone could have walked by and swapped Mark’s paper out for the fake.
The question is why? It isn’t like Mark had enemies. Sure, he probably offended some people; there were a couple classmates that he didn’t much like, but dislike is one thing; getting him expelled is quite another.
Mark clearly remembers getting the paper back, seeing his name at the top but thinking the formatting looked odd. Even without reading any of it, it just didn’t look like the paper he remembered turning in three weeks ago. Still, he’d flipped to the last page, the page where Professor Harcourt wrote her comments and passed her judgment: A to F. But there was no grade there, just the words, “Come see me,” in swooping blue ink.
Then he’d read the paper.
It wasn’t his argument or his writing style. It was only tangentially related to his research topic. And, stupid him, he was almost relieved, because it was obvious why Professor Harcourt would want to talk to him about this kind of mix up, and it would be easy to explain. He didn’t think too deeply about how his name had gotten on the top; he figured some classmate had just had a slip, or something had gone wrong with the printing, because obviously it had to be someone else’s paper that had gotten mixed up with his.
When he’d gone to see Professor Harcourt in her little corner office with all the orchids and cut flowers, she’d just looked incredibly tired. She wasn’t an old woman, maybe in her mid-forties, but something about her expression, or the contrast with all the bright plant-life, she’d looked ancient and exhausted, and Mark had lost some of his confidence that this would be easy to clear up.
“Mark,” she’d said, with none of the energy he’d become accustomed to in her lectures. “Thanks for coming to see me. We need to talk about your paper.”
“Hello, Professor,” Mark had said, taking the seat she motioned towards. “Yes. I wanted to talk to you about it, too, because I think there was some kind of mix-up. The paper you handed back to me isn’t the paper I wrote. I think someone must have put my name on theirs by mistake, but I did turn in my own paper, so it should also have been in the folder.”
“Mark,” she’d started in the same exhausted voice, looking at one of the potted orchids on her windowsill instead of at him. “I understand that there’s a lot of pressure to succeed, more even than when I was in college, but the school’s policies on plagiarism are set in stone.”
“Plagiarism? But I didn’t write it. I mean, I know that’s what plagiarism is; I mean, this isn’t the paper I turned in.” He pushed it towards her across the desk, trying to distance himself from it. “I turned in a different paper, one that I wrote. That—” He pointed at it. “—is not the paper I turned in.”
She still wouldn’t look at him. She seemed so… disappointed, and Mark was realizing quickly, with a growing sense of panic, that she didn’t believe him at all, that this wasn’t going to be an easy thing to clear up, and then… “But why is it plagiarism? I mean, it’s not my paper at all, but why is it plagiarism and not just… a mistake?”
“We run all the papers we receive through a scanning program.”
“It’s from online?” He didn’t know how she couldn’t tell that he was completely confused about this, completely in the dark. He didn’t know how she could believe he was sitting here making it all up, how anyone could possibly make this stuff up. But she looked like she’d seen it before. She looked like he’d crushed her last faith in humanity.
“The decision will go to the Honor Board,” she said. “If you have anything to say, it will have to be to them.”
And so had begun Mark’s month-long series of meetings with the Honor Board, who believed him even less than Professor Harcourt.
Today, like every meeting he’s had with the Board, they'd told him in no uncertain terms that it’s over; there’s nothing he can do. But it’s not right. Someone screwed him over; he just has no clue who or why. And now more than his job security and reputation rests on figuring it out, because if he can’t clear his name, graduate, and get the job back, he has no way to pay off the creepy new debt collectors, and he’s somewhat attached to his kidneys.
Comments (0)
See all