Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  “There,” he said, beckoning her back to the telescope’s seat. “Now don’t move it.”

  This time, Cady could see the galaxy in smoky swirls of amethyst and rust, and all against the blackest sky. “I can’t believe it can reach so far. When you really think of it, it’s a miracle that our eyes alone can see any stars at all.”

  When you love someone, time isn’t such a big obstacle.

  “It’s a powerful instrument,” Nikos said. “All right, my turn.”

  Cady stepped aside. While Nikos settled with the telescope, she savored a few moments alone with Whit.

  Do you believe in fate? —she thought to him.

  No.

  But what about following in your father’s footsteps? You have such a sense of destiny.

  Legacy is different from fate. I chose to inherit his legacy, and I’m choosing to carry it onward. Fate implies you have no control. I admit, choice can be a burden, it would be a load off to think the future’s already set. But I don’t believe anything is written in the stars. I want to write it myself.

  Cady heard the hope, the possibility in his voice, and it spoke to her heart. And yet.—I want to believe you, but I’m afraid you’re wrong.

  Then how does my story end?

  I don’t know yet. But it does.

  Nikos looked up from the telescope. “What is it? You’ve got a funny look on your face.”

  “Oh.” Cady shook her head. “I was just thinking.”

  “About?”

  “Do you believe in fate?”

  Nikos walked over to her. “Absolutely.”

  All of our stories end, one way or another. The stars are a reflection of the past, what you leave behind.

  “You look like you don’t believe me,” he said, smiling.

  She shrugged. “I guess I didn’t expect you to be so sentimental.”

  “I’m a closet romantic.”

  I want to be a comet.

  Cady blushed. “Maybe I underestimated you.”

  “And I you. You’ve taken me very much by surprise, Cadence, your wit, your maturity, your beauty. Your brother was such an ugly mug”—Nikos laughed—“I’m sorry, I’ve a bad habit of joking when I’m nervous.” He rested his hand on hers as if it steadied him, and she realized he seemed more anxious than she. “The truth is, I had always imagined you from Eric’s perspective, as a little girl, ‘Cady,’ baby sis. And then that day in September, I looked across my piano and the woman I saw took my breath away. To be honest, I felt guilty for how attracted I was to you. I thought, if Eric were here, he would punch me in the face for thinking this way. But then, more recently, I wondered … if in some way, he’s led me to you.”

  I’m not afraid of the darkness. You shouldn’t be either.

  They had drawn closer to one another without realizing it; Cady tilted her chin up and her face was inches from his. Nikos spoke the next words with nearly breath alone.

  “So, in answer to your question, yes, I do believe in fate.”

  You can see more in total darkness than you ever could in light.

  Cady closed her eyes.

  His lips closed over her own, and she felt herself melt into his mouth, the warmth of his body, the clean smell of his neck, the pressure of his fingers on her back. The stars behind her eyes burst like champagne bubbles in a glass. It was wonderful.

  And then she abruptly pulled back.

  Nikos blinked in confusion. “Was that okay?”

  “Yes, no, I just …” she stammered, unable to meet his eye. “I’m too worried we’re going to get caught. Can we go?”

  “Sure, I’ll get our coats.”

  She watched him walk away. Her once-fluttering heart now raced with the real reason she had pulled away:

  Cady hadn’t known which one she’d been kissing.

  38

  Cady awoke the next day with a gasp. The shades in her bedroom were drawn to block the morning sun, but she felt as if a bright light was shining into her brain. Last night at the observatory, Whit had pointed out the coordinate annotations on the plates, and somehow in her sleep, it clicked. She pulled her laptop out of her bag and opened it on her lap in bed. She Googled “coordinates for Cambridge MA.” The answer was electrifying; the coordinates for Cambridge, Massachusetts, were 42.3736° north, 71.1106° west. She found the page of Eric’s notebook where she had decoded the numbers, correcting their notation to reflect her new understanding:

  1. 42.371609° N—71.116840° W

  2. 42.369764° N—71.125497° W

  3. 42.373345° N—71.118889° W

   42.375038° N—71.119531° W

  “Yes!” she cried out loud. She heard Ranjoo groan above her, but Cady was too excited to feel bad for waking her. She had cracked Eric’s code, she finally understood that she was looking at geographic coordinates in the local area. Now she needed to find exactly where they were, and why they mattered to her brother.

  Ranjoo’s feet suddenly dropped into view, her toenails painted mint green. The bed creaked as she climbed down from her upper bunk to the floor.

  “Morning.” Ranjoo scratched at her silky, black ponytail. “Are you up early studying for Psych?”

  “Uh, no, something else.”

  “Oh, you got another test? That sucks.” She stretched her arms over her head and yawned. “I feel pretty good about most of it, but as you saw from those lecture notes I sent you, the statistics part trips me up. How about we get breakfast and then study for Psych together, maybe you can explain it to me?”

  “I wish I could, but I have to finish this.” Cady just wanted to be alone to focus.

  “Oh-kay.” Ranjoo sounded annoyed.

  “Thanks for the notes though,” Cady added, as Ranjoo retrieved her shower caddy and headed for the door. She flashed a thumbs up sign over her head as she walked out of the room.

  Cady sighed. Not ideal roommate relations, but she didn’t have time to obsess. She wanted to reread Eric’s notebook armed with this new knowledge. Much of the notebook’s contents seemed clearly related to some kind of Physics research notes, Cady had previously assumed they were notes for his Bauer project, but they just as likely could have been for Prokop’s restricted research. The fact that Eric had encrypted the locations seemed to strengthen her hypothesis that they were related to the secret nature of Prokop’s work. She also remembered Eric’s refusal to discuss any of their work over email—again, Cady had previously chalked that up to yet another example of his paranoia, but now she wondered if it was lab policy.

  A small note in the margin stood out to her that hadn’t before. A page dated from the fall of last year that had these bullet points jotted in the margin in small print:

  o Don’t be followed!

  o Out of sight

  o Publicly accessible

  o Secure but removable by hand

  o Never recheck once dropped!

  If she was skeptical that these coordinates were merely part of another of Eric’s paranoid fantasies, the bulleted points seemed to argue they were directions given to Eric, as if he was acting on behalf of someone else, likely Prokop, and coordinating with a third party. Cady knew Prokop was hiding something about their relationship, and Cady no longer felt so certain of Lee Jenning’s hypothesis that they were hiding an affair. Her frontrunner guess about the coordinates was that there was some kind of meeting or handoff occurring at these spots. Although that led her to the disappointing conclusion that Cady probably wouldn’t find anything remaining at these locations because they had already been removed by someone else’s hand, but still, she wanted to track them down. At least then she could gather more information by retracing his steps, and maybe some pattern would emerge that could indicate what Eric was leaving, and for whom.

  Cady spent the next hour giving herself a crash course in how to actually use geog
raphical coordinates. Most of the websites she was learning from were for “geocaching,” a hobby for those who enjoy scavenger hunts via coordinate clues. The amount of information on the topic was dizzying, but she’d learned there was an app that could turn your iPhone into a GPS coordinate locator. She plugged the first coordinates into her phone, 42.371940, -71.118128. It was only a quarter mile away, on Mount Auburn Street. Cady got dressed and set out.

  The directions on the app led her to Mount Auburn Street, right where it splits off with Bow Street. She looked down at the app and zoomed in on the map to get more specific. She walked slowly down the sidewalk, watching her blue dot move closer and closer to the red destination dot. When the two were overlaid with one another, she looked up and smiled. She was standing outside Insomnia Cookies. Cady remembered how Eric used to rave about this cookie shop in Harvard Square that was open at all hours of the night. He had said it was his “soulmate” shop, an idea so perfectly suited to him and his night owl habits, he was angry he didn’t think of it himself. She had told him he’d have to take her there when she toured campus, but in the end, she never did tour before applying. He was so sick by her senior year, she hadn’t wanted to see him there.

  If he was simply meeting someone at a cookie shop, geographical coordinates seemed like an overly specific way to make plans. Moreover, the shop was tiny. Cady peered inside and guessed it was about five hundred square feet max, not an ideal space for a clandestine discussion. So maybe there was no discussion; Eric had marked each of the coordinates with dates but no times, so maybe there was no meeting at all. Plus, Eric was awkward around new people, especially so when he was sick, Prokop would be foolish to send him on a sensitive face-to-face. But she might have sent him to make a delivery, or a drop. Cady scanned the storefront for a good hiding spot. The glass window had only a small ledge, too shallow to tuck anything underneath, but closer to the ground there was some sort of metal vent with slats like a venetian blind. She knelt down beside it and ran her fingers behind each of the horizontal slats, grimacing as her hand grew covered in the sooty filth that coated the metal.

  On the third slat from the bottom, she felt something sticky. Hoping it wasn’t chewing gum, she picked at it with her fingernails until she peeled it off and pulled it into the daylight. It was a silvery piece of duct tape, just the sort of thing you would use to affix something—the something, Cady realized with disappointment, would already have been picked up. She was reminded of the check mark beside the first set of coordinates—confirmation, perhaps? She’d have to check all the locations for clues. A scrap of tape was far from proof, but it was enough to keep Cady going.

  39

  Cady nearly spat out her mouthful of warm chocolate chip cookie when she saw the email that came in on her phone. It was from david.hines@fas.harvard.edu, Professor Hines, with the subject line “Important.” A wave of anxiety crashed over her. Cady had been so preoccupied with her worlds of the past, the ghosts’ and her brother’s, that she was completely blowing off her present. She was skipping classes, putting off assignments until the last minute, and she’d resigned herself to tanking tomorrow’s Psych exam. Ironically, she’d thought her poetry seminar was the only class she wasn’t actively screwing up right now. Her finger hovered over the message in her inbox as she flirted with the idea of closing her email without opening it and avoiding the message all together. She took another massive bite of cookie for courage. “Ah, fugg it.” She tapped to open it.

  The message was short:

  Your paper was excellent. I’d like to meet with you to discuss it, sooner rather than later. My office hours today would be ideal, 12–2pm, Barker 135.

  She actually laughed. She wrote him back, thanking him and saying she’d be there at noon sharp. It was quarter after eleven. She put Eric’s notebook back in her bag. Location number two would have to wait just a little longer.

  Cady went straight to the Barker Center and arrived with time to kill before her meeting with Professor Hines, so she bought a coffee and sat in the Barker café’s sunny rotunda. She was grateful for the time, as she was eager to preview the second set of coordinates. With Eric’s notebook open on the table, she keyed the numbers into the app on her phone; a pin dropped on the map a little farther off campus than the first. Cady zoomed in; it was on or near the opposite bank of the Charles River. Her knee bounced under the table as she checked the clock again. She was anxious to get this Hines meeting over with and back to her main mission—figuring out what these locations meant.

  At ten to twelve, she found the door to his office ajar. With her back pressed against the hallway wall, she checked the clock on her phone one last time: 11:54 a.m. Surely he wouldn’t mind her being a little early, she thought. But she waited until 11:56 to knock.

  “Come in,” Hines called out to Cady.

  She entered to find a beautiful office, artfully cluttered. The walls were painted the color of Nantucket reds, and an indigo Oriental rug covered the hardwood floor. The stately mahogany desk that faced her was cluttered with stacks of papers and books and a boxy desktop computer, and behind the desk, a deep-silled window opened onto a view of the courtyard. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with a rainbow of volumes, some faded, cloth-bound tomes and other crisp, shiny, new books, including chunks of identical ones bearing his own name on the spines. The only unappealing thing in the room was Professor Hines, leaning back in his chair with his dirty bare feet up on his desk.

  “Hi,” Cady said.

  “Close the door.” Professor Hines gestured. “Sit. You can move those papers.”

  “Thanks.” Cady carefully lifted a stack of mail and pamphlets from the wooden chair, and, not knowing what else to do with them, sat down with them on her lap. Hines made no offer to take them from her, and instead remained in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head, staring at her.

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Cady’s mouth went dry; it wasn’t the warm welcome she had hoped for. Her tongue worked to unstick her lips from her teeth. “I’m here to discuss my paper.”

  “I want to read you something.” Professor Hines swung his dirty feet from the desk and reached for a book from the shelf, opening to a dog-eared page. “This is Harvard College’s Student Handbook, you were given one at the beginning of the school year, yes?”

  “I think so.”

  Hines leaned forward. “Here on page ninety-seven, in the chapter entitled, ‘Academic Dishonesty,’ it states that ‘Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College.’ ” Hines looked up from the page. “Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t tolerate plagiarism here.”

  “I know.”

  “And I don’t suffer fools.”

  Cady searched his eyes for meaning, but his cold gaze betrayed nothing. She shifted in her seat. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  Hines sat back with a sigh. “I read your paper. It was excellent.”

  “Thank you.” Cady kept her voice soft and obedient.

  “Who wrote it?”

  “My paper?”

  “Yes, you didn’t write it. So who did?”

  Cady shook her head in confusion, her thoughts too jumbled to answer. Not that Hines gave her much time to.

  “The short paper you wrote last summer to get into this class, I reread it. It’s competent, good enough to earn you a spot in my class, which says something. But it is nowhere near the paper you turned in this Tuesday. That paper was entirely different in style, tone, and research. It doesn’t read like any freshman’s paper in my eleven years of teaching. How do you explain that, Ms. Archer?”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “I do. You plagiarized it.”

&nb
sp; Cady gasped. “No—”

  “And while some professors might just give you a zero on the paper, or fail you for the course, I’m not such a softie. I have a mind to take this all the way to the Admissions Board. Plagiarism shows a lack of character. Disrespect. Entitlement.” Hines leaned over the desk and pointed at her. “Because if you don’t deserve to be here, someone else does. Over forty thousand high school seniors apply for sixteen hundred spots in your class. There are easily a thousand students just as good as you who weren’t so lucky. You took someone’s spot, someone more worthy than you.”

  I know, Cady thought. I took Eric’s.

  “I can see the guilt on your face right now. So fess up. Tell me where you copied this from, and I might cut you a break.”

  “I didn’t copy it, I swear.”

  “Look at me.”

  Cady obeyed. His eyes were hard.

  “Last chance.” Professor Hines spoke the next words slowly. “Where did this come from?”

  Cady’s hands were trembling. “Me. I wrote it.”

  “All right. Chance blown. I’m going to submit this to the Ad Board disciplinary committee for an inquiry, they have technology to identify even well disguised plagiarism, they are very thorough. In the meantime, come to class prepared. Try to convince me you were capable of writing this paper on your own. Know that I think you are not.”

  Cady bit her lip and nodded.

  “I’m done here. You’re free to go to the ladies’ room and cry.”

  The Barker Center’s heavy glass doors hissed and groaned like hecklers as Cady pushed through them. She strode through the red brick courtyard past Hines’s office window, feeling at once self-conscious that he may be watching her and hopeful that he was. Her face was red with anger as much as embarrassment, but she wanted him to know he wasn’t worth one tear. Hines simply hated her, he had hated her from the first day, and the feeling was mutual. She had never been spoken to that way by a teacher, much less been accused of something as offensive as plagiarism. She might have been off her game lately, but she wasn’t a cheat.