Free Obedience by Will Lavender Page B

There were no students in Seminary at this time-it was too early before the 4:00 p.m. classes and now fifteen minutes after the last set of classes had ended.
    I’ll leave a note under his office door, she thought. Even though Williams had not given them a syllabus with any of his contact information, she was pretty sure his office would be in the philosophy wing, which was right upstairs, on the top floor of Seminary.
    She climbed the three flights of stairs. She passed other students in the class, including Brian House, who was hopping down the stairs three at a time. “You hear?” he asked breathlessly. She told him that she had, but he was already sliding down the rail, letting out a whoop as he disappeared down the well.
    The top floor of Seminary was another world. Professors’ offices lined the halls, and students sat passively outside in uncomfortable chairs, waiting to be called in. The hum of a Xerox machine punctuated everything. Mary followed the first wall, reading the nameplates on each door. She went all the way down the hall and around the corner, toward the west side of the building, which led down a second set of stairs and into the Orman Library. Near the end of the hall she found an open door, and as she leaned inside to read the name, a voice said, “Can I help you?”
    Mary started. She backed out of the room as if she had been doing something wrong. Something illegal.
    “Are you looking for Dr. Williams?” the voice asked. She peeked in and saw the boy. He was standing by the bookshelves on the far side, a stack of index cards in his hand.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “He’s out for the day. Something about his kid.” The boy looked back at the shelves, wrote something on one of the cards. Then he looked at Mary and said, “I’m sorry. I’m Troy Hardings. I’ll be Dr. Williams’s assistant this term.” He came toward her and offered his hand, and she shook it. He was tall, reedy, his movements awkward. His hair had been shaved into a buzz, and his scalp was unhealthy and pink. “You need to leave him a note or something?” He nodded toward the paper she had torn and was holding now, limply. “You can just give it to me and I’ll make sure he gets it.”
    “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She stepped out into the hall and put the paper to the wall and wrote, Dr. Williams, but the surface was bubbled and she could not write smoothly. She went down the hall a bit and sat down on a chair outside a professor’s office. She used
City of Glass
as her desktop to write her note. As she was writing, she saw Troy leave the office and walk the opposite way, down the hall, and enter a room just before the exit.
    Mary suddenly had a funny idea. She stood and returned to Dr. Williams’s office. Troy had turned on just one light, a desk lamp that emitted a pale glow on the shelves. She wanted to look at his books, but she knew she didn’t have much time before Troy came back. She put her note-it was a bit unfinished, certainly not all she wanted to say, only the part about Summer McCoy, but none of the other stuff, not the Pig and Polly hypothesis that she’d been thinking about-on his desk, her eyes scanning its surface. What was she looking for? She didn’t know. But she couldn’t leave. Now that she was here, in his presence, she had to find
something,
didn’t she? She’d been brave enough to come this far. There was his mail, for instance. There were a few coffee mugs on the shelves. There was a poster of Einstein on the wall with the heading HE COULDN’T TIE HIS OWN SHOES. But there was nothing of substance that she could see without searching the desk drawers. Quickly she scanned the books-logic texts, philosophy treatises with their spines veined, a whole row of John Locke. But nothing else. She felt ashamed for coming, for-
    On the desk, nearly hidden under a stack of envelopes, was a sentence. It was in the cold, distant font of a typewriter. It looked as if it had been written a long time