Chapter 9: The Crit

I read the email four times.

Then I got up and turned on every light in my room.

The complaint was attached as a PDF.

It said my restoration plan copied a "landscape concept" by a firm called Ridgeline Builders.

Their concept was attached too.

A glossy brochure for the Ogden Center.

Page six was a "heritage courtyard" behind the glass building.

Brick paths in a cross.

Raised beds along a north wall.

A pear tree trained flat against stone, in perfect tiers.

My garden.

My drawings, redrawn clean, with somebody else's logo in the corner.

I didn't sleep.

At six I went to the greenhouse anyway, because the seedlings didn't care about my scholarship.

Linc was already there in his rubber boots.

It wasn't his day.

"Jess texted me," he said. "What do you need?"

"Every notebook I own."

They were in a milk crate under my bed in the suite.

Twelve green field notebooks, three years of them, every page dated.

Ainslee was asleep, and the sitting room was dark and silent.

I carried the crate out past her door on tiptoe.

The integrity office scheduled a review for Friday.

My advisor called and asked them to make it my mid-semester crit instead.

"Public," he said. "Open studio. If they want to call you a thief, they can do it in front of your classmates."

On Friday at two, the studio was full.

Every landscape senior, half the architecture department, the dean of academic integrity in a folding chair with a legal pad.

A visiting critic from a Boston firm sat beside my advisor.

Four of Ainslee's friends sat in the back row in cream sweaters, phones in their laps.

Ainslee wasn't with them.

I looked at the air over their heads.

Empty.

Whatever happened in this room, her readers would never see it.

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