“What is this?” I asked.
“Please sit, Miss Bradley,” Morrison said.
I remained standing.
“No. Tell me what this is.”
“An academic standards review.”
“For what?”
The lawyer folded his hands.
“Concerns have been raised about a pattern of behavior incompatible with professional expectations.”
It took me a full second to understand what he meant.
Then the blood rushed in my ears.
They were building a case.
Not about the exam.
About me.
My character.
My whole life.
They had combed my file.
A late paper from sophomore year when my grandmother had been hospitalized.
An unpaid parking ticket later dismissed because the car wasn’t mine.
A classroom conversation where I had asked why our training materials almost never showed darker skin in medical examples.
A professor’s note that I asked “too many adversarial questions.”
I sat down because my knees were no longer trustworthy.
“This is retaliation,” I said.
“Control your tone,” Morrison replied immediately.
The speed of it was almost elegant.
Like she had practiced.
One faculty member said I could be “challenging.”
Another said I sometimes displayed “resentment toward authority.”
The lawyer asked if I had a tendency to see policies as “personally negotiable.”
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