The Last Thing He Told Me

“Excuse me?” he says.

“I’m just saying, what are we going to ask them? If they have a student on file who now goes by Owen Michaels but used to go by something else?” she says. “This person who has apparently evaporated into thin air?”

“Yes, well, you’re not wrong. They probably wouldn’t be able to help with that…” he says. “This really isn’t my forte though.”

He hands Bailey her cell phone.

“I wish you both luck,” he says.

Then he puts his bag over his shoulder and starts walking toward the exit.

Bailey stares down at her phone, back in her hands. She looks scared—scared and desperate—Professor Cookman moving away from her, Owen moving nowhere closer. We thought we were getting closer. We found Owen’s professor. We got here. But now Owen just feels farther away. Which may explain why I call out to Professor Cookman, why I refuse to just let him leave.

“My husband was the worst student you ever had,” I say.

Professor Cookman stops walking. He stops walking and turns around, facing us again.

“What did you just say?” he says.

“He loves to tell this story about how he struggled in your class and, after killing himself studying for the midterm, you told him that you were going to keep his exam in a frame in your office as a lesson to future students. Not as a how-to on applying yourself, but more like, at least I’m not as bad as that guy is.”

He stays quiet. I keep talking, filling the silence.

“Maybe that is something you do with a student every year, especially since you had him so early on, and really by then who could have been a worst anything? But it worked with him. He believed you. And instead of it frustrating him, it made him want to work harder. To prove himself to you.”

He still doesn’t say anything.

Bailey reaches for my arm, like that is something she does, trying to pull me back, to let him go.

“He doesn’t know,” she says. “We should go.”

She is eerily calm, which is somehow worse than when I thought she was going to lose it.

But Professor Cookman isn’t moving, even though he is off the hook.

“I did frame it,” he says.

“What?” Bailey says.

“His exam. I did frame it.”

He starts walking toward us.

“It was my second year teaching and I wasn’t much older than the kids were. I was trying to prove my authority. My wife eventually made me take the exam down and throw it out. She said it was too mean for a crappy midterm to be any student’s legacy. I didn’t see it that way, at first. She is smarter than I am. I kept that thing framed for a long time. It scared the crap out of my other students, which was really the point.”

“No one wanted to be that bad?” I say.

“Even when I told them how good he became afterward,” he says.

He reaches his hand out for Bailey’s phone, Bailey handing it over, both of us watching as he tries to put something together.

“What did he do?” he says. “Your father?”

He directs his question to Bailey. I think she is going to offer an abbreviated version of what is happening at The Shop and with Avett Thompson—and say that we don’t know the rest of the story yet. We don’t know how he fits into the fraud there, or why it led to him leaving us here alone, trying to put the pieces together. These impossible pieces. But, instead, she shakes her head and tells him the worst part of what Owen has done.

“He lied to me,” she says.

He nods, like that is enough for him. Professor Cookman. First name Tobias. Nickname Cook. Award-winning mathematician. Our new friend.