Read The Fifteenth Minute for Free Online Page B

mistreated. By the time this is over, I’m going to make sure everyone knows how poorly they’ve behaved.”
    He waits for me to say something, but I’ve got nothing.
    “At some point you and I are going to have to spend a couple of hours discussing the details of the night in question—last April eleventh. But today we’re not going to do that.”
    “Okay,” I say quickly. I’m not looking forward to telling him the intimate details of my sex life.
    “But today I want to ask you about August twentieth. The day the dean called your home in Huntington.”
    “All right.” That’s another painful story, but at least there’s no nudity involved.
    “Your file indicates that the phone call on August twentieth was the first communication you had from the college. Are you absolutely sure they didn’t reach out before then?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “So the phone rings out of the blue. And who’s on the other end of the line? Tell me exactly what happened.”
    I think of this moment as The Day the Music Died. Just remembering it, my heart does a drum solo, because my father and I have gone over this a million times. If I’d handled everything more carefully on that summer day, everything might be different. “The caller was a secretary for the assistant dean of student services. I didn’t catch the secretary’s name. She said if I had thirty minutes to spare, the dean would like to speak to me. So I said that was fine.”
    “You didn’t ask, ‘What is this about?’”
    “No. I wish I had. But I don’t get calls from the dean’s office…”
    “You were intimidated.”
    “Hell yes.” I remember standing there in our kitchen, feeling worried. But I had an hour before my shift at the seafood restaurant where I wait tables in the summertime, so I just said I’d take the call. “The dean came on the line—”
    “Assistant Dean Maria Lagos.”
    “Right. She said she wanted to ask me some questions about the night of April eleventh.” I should have gotten off that phone and asked for a proper meeting. I should have told my parents there might be some kind of problem. But I didn’t do that. “I told her I didn’t know off the top of my head what night that was. She said it was the night of a party, and also a young woman had asked to stay in my room, and I said, ‘You mean Annie Stevens?’ And she said yes.”
    “Let me stop you right there,” the lawyer said. “Did the dean ask your permission to tape the call?”
    “No. She didn’t mention anything like that. And I don’t think she taped it, because there were times when she stopped asking me questions and said, ‘Just a moment,’ like she was trying to catch up with her notes.”
    “Did she tell you she was taking notes?”
    “I could hear the keyboard clicking.” I remember thinking she was a fast typist.
    “Okay. What happened next?”
    “She asked me about the early part of that night. The party was in the next entryway, where a lot of freshmen were serving drinks to other freshmen, so I was freaking out. There’s a rule against hard alcohol on Frosh Court, but nobody follows it.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “The truth. I went to the party, and Annie was there. The dean asked if I drank alcohol and I said yes I drank some but not very much.”
    “Did she ask you to quantify exactly how much? Did she talk about ounces, or ask you to count up the number of drinks?”
    “No. She asked if I was drunk, and I told her I wasn’t.”
    The lawyer asks me a couple more questions. He’s focused on procedure—what questions I was asked, and how precise they were. I get it—he’s trying to show the college that they didn’t gather enough information to figure out what happened that night.
    But I just don’t see how this is going to help. The college isn’t trying to send me to jail. They’re only trying to decide if I can stay at Harkness. There are thousands of guys who’d like nothing more than to take my spot. The college can