Chapter 9: Concerned Classmate

The director's office had a window over the quad and a bowl of peppermints nobody ate.

She sat me down across from her and laid the printed email on the desk between us.

"From: A Concerned Classmate."

"To whom it may concern at the Ashford Fellowship. I went to school with Lindsay Lowry in Dayton."

"Everybody knew she didn't write her own thesis. She paid a guy to do it."

"I'm attaching proof because it isn't fair to the students who actually earned it."

Under that were three screenshots.

Venmo payments from my account.

Five hundred and fifty dollars. Five hundred and fifty. Five hundred and fifty.

The recipient's name was blacked out with a marker tool.

The notes said, "thesis help pt 1." "thesis help pt 2." "final thesis $$."

I knew those payments.

I'd read them out loud into a microphone in April.

The real notes said "rent."

"Miss Lowry," the director said. "Did you make these payments?"

"Yes."

Her pen stopped.

"But not for that," I said. "These are rent. To my ex-boyfriend. Somebody changed the notes."

"Can you show me?"

I opened Venmo on my phone and scrolled back to last fall.

My hand only shook a little.

"September, five fifty, rent. October, five fifty, rent. November, five fifty, rent."

I turned the phone around.

She leaned over it and read, and then she looked at the screenshots, and back at the phone.

"The dates match," she said.

"The notes don't."

"The name is covered on these."

"The name is Ryan Decker."

She wrote it down.

"I believe you have an explanation," she said carefully.

"But the fellowship rules say any accusation of academic fraud goes to a committee. It isn't up to me. You'd have to show them."

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