Dr. Gale permitted herself a small smile. The kind that carries a story too long to tell right now.
"The kind you develop when you spend a summer as a civil rights observer in Georgia in 1983," she said. "And you learn that the truth almost always exists. It just needs enough paper to stand on."
She gathered her bag and walked to the door. At the threshold, she paused.
"Thursday, Miss Holloway. Bring questions."
Then she was gone.
Reagan sat alone in the empty classroom for a moment.
She took out her notebook. Not the class notebook. A smaller one she kept in the front pocket of her bag.
She wrote down the date and time. She wrote down what had happened in the cafeteria. What Pierce had said. What Shane had and hadn't said.
Then she wrote down what Dr. Gale had told her.
Document everything.
She clicked her pen.
Yeah. She'd been planning to.
* * *
By the end of the first week, Reagan understood the shape of what she was dealing with.
Her roommate, Delia Marsh, was part of it. Not because Delia had told her anything directly, but because Delia talked freely and frequently, and with the cheerful candor of someone who didn't quite realize how much information they were giving out at any given time.
Reagan liked Delia. A lot, actually. She was funny and warm and aggressively honest about her own flaws, in a way that made it easy to trust her.
Delia was from Louisville, pre-nursing, first in her family to go to a four-year college. She had a poster of Dolly Parton on her side of the room and a collection of houseplants on the windowsill that she talked to in the evenings.
"Does that work?" Reagan had asked once, watching Delia murmur something to a small pothos.
"Can't hurt," Delia had said, completely seriously.
Through Delia, and through her own observation, Reagan had put together a fairly complete picture of Shane Whitfield within six days.
Shane was 20 years old, a sophomore. He had been at Caldwell since last year, and in that time he had established a social architecture that was, Reagan had to admit, genuinely impressive in its efficiency.
He never did the obvious things himself.
He didn't spread rumors directly. He asked questions that implied the rumors and let other people fill in the blanks.
He didn't threaten anyone. He just made very clear, through the management of access and inclusion, what the cost of disloyalty was.
He didn't bully publicly. He created situations in which someone else could do it while he watched from a comfortable distance.
It was, in sociological terms, and Reagan was now reading ahead in Dr. Gale's textbook, a textbook example of indirect aggression. Social control through the management of belonging.
Reagan had seen it before. Not on this scale, but the basic shape of it she recognized. There was always someone like this. In her high school. In her gym, briefly, before Ray Dunbar sorted it out in about 48 hours.