Bloodroot by Bill Loehfelm Page B

secretary. The dean needed to see me. Now.
    Whitestone kept me waiting outside his office for half an hour while he did nothing, I was sure, but stare out the window. As dean of a struggling department at an underfinanced city college of little to no reputation, Whitestone treated his teachers in keeping with his milieu. Like field hands, basically. He conducted himself as if he were dean of Harvard Law. At his own expense, he’d outfitted his office with an enormous teak desk and matching bookshelves. He had a penchant for European vacations, often taken sans wife and stepchildren. Research trips, he called them, though no one could figure out what got researched beyond pricey hotels. He hadn’t taught in years and what little he published concerned a little-known corner of Staten Island: the history and possible futures of the abandoned Bloodroot Children’s Hospital. He’d even started some kind of activist group called the Friends of Bloodroot. Some crap about turning the old hospital into a medical museum.
    He’d been on me and everyone else in the department to join. Or at least write checks to support the group. Most everyone else in the history department had done one, the other, or both. Besides me, the only remaining holdout was Kelsey Reyes, the closest thing I had to a friend in the department. The big guns in admin were not happy about Friends of Bloodroot, I’d heard. The old hospital sat in Willowbrook Park, not far from our own beloved Richmond College and admin wanted that land for new off-campus dorms.
    When his secretary finally sent me in to see him, Whitestone was waiting for me behind his desk, his hands folded in his lap.
    In his oversized black leather office chair, Dean Alvin Whitestone looked like an elf trying on Santa’s chair for size. Barely over five feet tall, he had spindly legs that dropped from almost obscenely wide hips, into which collapsed a round, bulging chest. All of that crowned by a bald, ovoid head. He reminded me, more than anything else, of a walking thumb. A walking thumb in Coke-bottle glasses.
    “Close the door,” Whitestone said. “Take a seat.”
    I did as I was told.
    “Eight.” He dipped his chin at a pile of papers on his desk. “That’s how many student complaints I’ve gotten about you this semester.”
    “I thought you said it was six,” I said.
    “It was, last week. This week, it’s up to eight.”
    “So I got two more?” I asked.
    Whitestone slid his glasses to the tip of his nose. “Are you sure history is your calling? Your math skills are astounding. You assured me, you promised me there wouldn’t be any more, yet here before me are indeed more complaints.”
    “Am I safe in assuming it’s more of the same?”
    “Despite the popular clichés,” Whitestone said, smiling, “you are safe in that assumption. You are nothing if not consistent in your shortcomings.”
    “I’m catching up on my grading,” I said. “I’m almost there. Those’ll be the last two.”
    “These students,” Whitestone said. “They deserve to have their work returned to them in a timely manner. And to have proper attention paid to that work when their instructor evaluates it. Maybe if you spent your office hours focusing on your work and not consorting with Ms. Reyes, you’d make better progress.”
    I threw my hands in the air. “But the students’ work sucks .” I swallowed hard. Twice. “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”
    “Perhaps their teacher is failing to provide a proper example.”
    I set my hands on my knees, took a deep breath. Whitestone was a dick, but that didn’t make what he said any less true. “Perhaps.” But he was wrong about Kelsey and I wanted him to know it, for her sake if not mine. “Ms. Reyes and I are coworkers. We talk teaching, compare notes.” Whitestone grunted. I soldiered on. “We have very similar schedules, so we see each other a lot. Here at work, I mean. We don’t socialize.”
    My boss stared at me. I