"You can't just—"
"I can, and given what's on that video, I'd strongly encourage you to have a lawyer look at your contract before you finish that sentence," Harmon said. "Malcolm. I am so sorry this happened to you, in my building, in a classroom that was supposed to be one of the best things this school offers. We are going to fix your letter — I already have Caldwell's admissions office on hold, and I intend to explain exactly what happened to their scholarship coordinator myself. Tobias — thank you. I mean that with my whole chest. That took courage most adults in this building wouldn't have had."
The call to Caldwell Institute of Technology took eleven minutes and involved, at Harmon's insistence, Malcolm sitting right beside her so he could hear every word. The admissions coordinator on the other end, a woman named Priscilla Odom who had clearly fielded her share of strange calls but had never fielded quite this one, went very quiet partway through Harmon's explanation and then said, with a controlled fury of her own, that they'd be sending a replacement letter by overnight courier, at the school's expense, and that someone from the dean's office would like to speak with Malcolm personally sometime that week.
"Why would the dean want to talk to me?" Malcolm asked, once the call ended, the first genuinely uncertain thing he'd said all day.
"Because," Harmon said, "you're about to become the most talked-about incoming freshman that school has had in a long time, and not because of anything you did wrong."
She was, it turned out, being conservative.
Tobias hadn't posted the video publicly — he'd sent it directly to Harmon, and for the first two days, that was where it stayed, contained, official, moving through the slow, careful machinery of a district personnel investigation. But Jefferson High School had six hundred students and approximately four hundred group chats, and within forty-eight hours, at least one student who'd been in Room 214 that day had described the incident in enough detail, in enough places, that the story had a life of its own even without footage attached to it.