CHAPTER 10
Dylan's Move
The Harrington University Housing and Student Services Committee met on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month in a conference room on the third floor of the Alderton Administrative Building.
It was, in all the ways that institutional committees tend to be, a remarkably unremarkable body — eight faculty members, two student representatives, a facilities liaison, and the chair, who was a precisely dressed administrator named Howard Finch who treated the committee's procedural rules with the reverence of someone who finds liturgy comforting.
Dylan Mercer had spent six hundred and eighty dollars in faculty club dining costs over the past three months entertaining Howard Finch and two other committee members whose names he had taken care to learn. He had done this under the general banner of "student engagement" and the specific intent of making himself the kind of familiar, generous presence that administrative bodies tend not to think critically about.
The petition he filed was fourteen pages. His father's lawyer had written the first draft. Dylan had revised it twice, which was more intellectual work than he typically invested in anything, because this particular project mattered to him in a way that he would not have been able to fully articulate if asked. It was not, he would have insisted, personal. It was a matter of institutional standards.
The petition argued that Ethan Voss's on-campus scholarship arrangement — which included not only full tuition but a subsidized maintenance work-study position that provided housing access — constituted an irregular use of the scholarship fund's bylaws, specifically the provision governing "ancillary support structures" for scholarship recipients.
The argument was technically present in the bylaws if you read them with significant creative generosity. Dylan's father's lawyer was very good at creative generosity.
The committee received the petition on a Thursday. It notified Dean Forde on Friday. Dean Forde brought it to Ethan on Monday morning.
— ◆ —
She found him in the maintenance yard, unsurprisingly, performing the kind of task — in this case, repairing a section of the east building's exterior drainage system — that the facilities department had quietly come to think of as the work they assigned him when they wanted it done correctly the first time.
She walked across the yard with her clipboard and her perpetually unfinished coffee and waited until he had finished the section he was working on before she spoke, because she had learned, over six weeks, that Ethan Voss applied the same quality of attention to drainage systems as he applied to everything else, and interrupting that attention felt wasteful.
"There's been a petition filed with the Housing Committee," she said. She handed him the summary document.
He read it. She watched his face as he read it, which showed nothing in the way that practiced faces show nothing — not the absence of reaction but its management.
"When does the committee meet?" he asked.
"Next Tuesday." She paused. "Ethan. The petition has some technical merit, in the narrowest possible reading of the ancillary support bylaws. I want to be transparent with you about that. Howard Finch is scrupulous about following procedure, which means—"
"Which means if the technical argument holds, the committee will act on it regardless of the intent behind the filing." He folded the document and held it with the same composure he brought to everything. "I understand."
"There are counter-arguments available. The scholarship fund's founding documents include a broad discretionary clause that arguably covers the work-study arrangement. I can have the general counsel draft a response brief."
"Thank you," he said. "I'd like to handle the housing question directly. If the committee rules against the arrangement, I'll find alternative accommodation. I don't want the university spending resources on a legal response."
She looked at him. "You don't want resources spent defending your housing."
"The university has better uses for its general counsel's time."
"Ethan. This is a targeted action. The intent is clearly to—"
"I know what the intent is," he said, with a mildness that was more pointed than sharpness would have been. "The intent doesn't change the practical situation. If my arrangement has a technical flaw, I'd rather address it practically than fight it procedurally." He returned the document to her. "I appreciate you telling me directly. That was kind."
She left the maintenance yard with the distinct and slightly unsettling impression that she had just been handled by someone who was much more competent than the situation she had come to warn him about.
— ◆ —
That evening, Ethan sat at the desk in his room — a narrow, spare space in the scholarship housing wing, which he had arranged with the specific minimalism of someone who has trained themselves not to need much — and made a phone call to a real estate management company registered in Delaware.
The company managed, among other properties, a recently renovated apartment building on Crestwood's Pembury Street, seven minutes from campus. The building had twelve units. One of them — a clean, well-proportioned one-bedroom on the building's third floor — had been held in the management company's internal reserve pool for eleven months, pending a specific occupant.
The conversation lasted four minutes. At its end, a cashier's check for six months' rent and the first month's deposit had been arranged through a Foundation sub-account that appeared, in the payment records, as the kind of anonymous donor transaction that happens at universities often enough to generate no particular curiosity.
Ethan set down the phone. He looked at the room around him — the narrow bed, the ordered desk, the single window that looked out onto the maintenance yard below. He had been comfortable here. Comfort was not, in his philosophy, the point of a thing, but he had appreciated it.
He began to pack. He owned less than one bag's worth of belongings, which made packing efficient. He left the room in the same state he had found it: clean, bare, and indifferent to the question of who had been living in it.
He moved into the Pembury Street apartment two days before the committee meeting, without telling anyone, which meant the committee met, deliberated, and ruled — narrowly, on technical grounds, in Dylan's favor — to find that the existing arrangement fell outside the precise scope of the ancillary support provision.
The ruling was recorded. The committee issued a formal notice requiring the scholarship recipient to vacate campus maintenance housing within thirty days.
The notice was delivered to an address that was already empty.