Finals (19 page)

A Mexican mocha in one hand and a cordless phone in the other, I made the call to Rogers.

“
Hello
?”

“
Hi, can I speak with Gordon Rogers?” I asked.

“
This is
Gordon
.”

“
Hi
,
Gordon, I’m with the University of St. Elizabeth paper,
The Gazette
. I was wondering if I might have a moment of your time.”

Like those creepy
Scream
movies, I heard breathing on the other line but Rogers remained quiet. The prolonged silence forced me to
speak.
“Mr. Rogers, are you there?”

“
What do you wanna know?”

I figured tiptoeing around the issue would be a waste of time and I’d eventually have
to
explain the
reason
behind the call.

“
I want to talk to you about Professor Quinn,” I began. “I know the topic may be sensitive, but I promise I will disclose the information only as you see fit. I suppose I’m really trying to discern who the real Cheryl Quinn is, and I believe you may know that better than anyone.”

“
Do you know where the IHOP is on
Greeley
?” Rogers asked, after another lengthy pause.

“
Yes.”

“
Meet me there at midnight if you want any information,” and with that, he hung up.

†

What
a way to spend a Saturday night, going to IHOP to meet Quinn’s former boy toy when I could be out having a grand old time at a house party. I could be drinking beer, dancing with hot freshmen, and having stimulating discussions. Oh, who was I kidding? I was never one for outrageous parties. On occasion, I would go to
one to
give off the impression that I didn’t have a social stigma, but
it
was never my scene. I was more of a let’s cuddle on the couch while we watch Hugh Grant’s latest com-rom kind of guy, but the lack of a girlfriend and my abrupt desire to start killing off my classmates put a serious damper on those plans.

Despite the fact that I would have to drag my butt out of bed earlier than usual and put on my Sunday best for the Easter service, staying out later than usual to meet Rogers was worth it. If Quinn had filed a restraining order against him, I bet she likely had a good reason for doing so. Maybe Quinn and Rogers had had an unknown baby from their secret love affair and decided to give the baby up for adoption. Maybe Quinn had hired Rogers to kill one of her ex
-husbands,
but when he chickened out she got him expelled. Oh, the crazy possibilities were endless.

The Greeley IHOP was only a couple of minutes from the university, which made this midnight adventure a tad more convenient. Personally, I didn’t understand the whole idea of having pancakes for dinner. I was more of a traditionalist when it came to dining. I was not about to fill up on pancakes at midnight, nor was I going to
consume
steak and potatoes in the early morning, and I certainly will never be able to comprehend how anyone could eat cold pizza for breakfast. Merely the thought of putting cold cheese in my mouth first thing in the morning makes me want to blow chunks.

The IHOP was pretty desolate when I arrived a couple minutes after twelve. A few derelicts were enjoying their bacon and eggs, and a small number of Portland hipsters were sharing a rather massive stack of pancakes. A young man sipping on what I believed to be coffee was alone in a corner booth, and unless Rogers had yet to arrive, I guessed this was my guy.

“
Gordon Rogers?” I asked, approaching the
lone man
.

“
That’s me. You must be the guy from
The
Gazette
,” he replied.

“
Wayne York,” I said, extending my hand
.
“Nice to meet you.”

Refusing to stand, Rogers shook my hand then gestured for me to sit down. Looking at Rogers, my presumption that he and Quinn had bumped uglies a time or two didn’t seem too farfetched. If it wasn’t for his cleft chin and a visible mole on the tip of his nose, I would have thought I was talking to a scruffy Jake Gyllenhaal. His bloodshot eyes gave off the impression he was up past his usual bedtime or he was a user. Judging from the cup of coffee and his slouched shoulders
,
I was betting it was the former.

“
I already ordered, but the waitress should be back soon if you want anything,” Rogers said.

“
Thanks, I’m good,” I said
.
“I’m not too big on breakfast for dinner.”

“
Weird, most people are,” he said, matter-of-factly. I didn’t take offense to the remark because he clearly didn’t mean anything by it, but evidently I was in the minority when it came to ordering breakfast foods at irrational hours in the day.

“
You a vegan or something?”

“
Do I look like I’m malnourished?” I asked.

“
Yeah, kinda,” Rogers said straight-faced.

“
Thanks for the concern,” I said dryly. “Just because I don’t like eating pancakes at midnight doesn’t mean I’m a vegan.”

“
This is Portland, the city full of granolas and hippies. I was curious, that’s all,” Rogers
answered
.

The waitress arrived carrying his pancakes, allowing for a break in our less than stirring initial conversation. She asked if I needed anything, but I told her I was fine with water.

“
So what can you tell me about Quinn?” I asked, watching as Rogers removed his silverware from the napkin cocoon.

“
Since I’m about to eat my pancakes here, why don’t you tell me your motivation behind writing this article?” Rogers said, now drenching his pancakes in maple syrup.

“
I’m merely trying to find out a little more about Professor Quinn,” I said.

“
I figured that
.
I wanna know what you know about Quinn and how you came up with my name.”

Given my recent span of dastardly behavior, I thought about coming up with a fabricated story about why I was “writing this piece” but I didn’t see the harm in telling him the truth. I doubted he and Quinn were on speaking terms considering that Quinn had filed a restraining order against this short-stack lover, and really, what was the worst thing that could happen?

No one would slap the cuffs on me and send me to the big house for snooping on a seemingly sexist professor. Sister Robinson might reprimand me for researching a potential story without her knowledge if she happened to find out, but the old nun loved me and the ability to forgive was
essentially
written in her DNA. Truth be told, there was no reason why I shouldn’t tell Rogers about my
discovery
of the grade books, which is why I laid it all out for
the
St. Elizabeth alum.

As Rogers began devouring his three blueberry pancakes, I told him about my discovery of Quinn’s grade books and the purple folder, somehow managing to forget how I came about conveniently locating such documents.

Once I concluded telling Rogers about the unfair grade distribution,
he
took a break from jamming maple-enhanced dough down his gullet. “Sounds like you’ve done some fine investigating. I was hoping you hadn’t found my name in her day planner and
figured
that I’d be willing to help plan her tenure anniversary party or something.”
He chuckled in
a
self-satisfied way and added
. “But I’m glad that’s not the case.”

“
Assuming I’ve been
deemed
worthy, how about you tell me about your relationship with Quinn and why she filed a restraining order against you,” I said, praying I would finally get some answers.

“
She basically ruined my life,” Rogers said, looking at me for the first time now that his plate was licked clean.

As the words slipped out of his mouth, I found them difficult to believe since the statement was said without an ounce of conviction. The guy had a bit of sass, but for the most part he had a rather ho-hum demeanor. Either Rogers was incredibly tired or Quinn hadn’t actually ruined his life. Whichever the case, I was beginning to think that this trip had been a waste of time
and his preference towards keeping information bottled up was beginning to get on my nerves.

My scruffy friend took a sip of his coffee as I sat patiently waiting for more
of
an explanation. It was difficult to say whether Rogers didn’t want to openly discuss his relationship with Quinn, was falling into a coma, or was simply relishing the fact that he now
had
an audience. I was on the verge of relaying to Rogers that I had yet to master the art of telepathy but as if on cue, he finally began spilling the information I was so desperately trying to obtain.

“
I was an engineering major with a mechanical focus. I was accepted into Stanford’s graduate mechanical engineering program my senior year, which is one of the better engineering programs in the country. As you
can
guess
, as
an engineer, I’ve never been one for writing or the arts, so I held off on taking English 101 and my upper division social science electives until my final semester. I ended up signing up for Quinn’s Sociology 315 class, Politics and Society.”

“
I heard that class was tough enough to begin with, but with Quinn…I can only imagine,” I said. Thankfully, my collegiate planning was well thought out, meaning I could spend more time focusing on my “extracurricular activities” this semester.

“
She ended up filing a restraining order against me by the end of that year, so that basically sums up how that class turned out,” Rogers said.

“
I suppose throughout the course of the semester you began to come to terms with Quinn’s grade styling?”

“
I began to come to terms that she was intent on ripping me a new asshole,” said Rogers, showing a tiny burst of passion for the first time. “I knew the class was going to be difficult so when I started to get poor grades on my first assignments, I thought I needed to put in the extra effort to make sure I was grasping the important concepts. You see, I’ve never been one to get bad grades so I was more than a little shocked that my grades continued to suffer after I went to see her and spent hour upon hour making sure my papers were flawless.”

“
So what happened?” I asked, hoping he was getting down to what brought about the restraining order.

“
One day I was in her office having another pointless discussion about one of my projects when another professor asks to speak with her for a few minutes. As I’m sitting there waiting for Quinn to return, I notice her grade book is out on her desk. Since I was a senior and didn’t have any friends in that class, I was curious to see if other people were flunking as well, or if it was just me.

“
When I take a gander at her grade book, I notice that I’m not doing so terrible and am in fact the only guy in the class with a C+. Anyways, I start flipping
through
the grade book and I begin to see a pattern. The girls are getting A’s and B’s and the guys are struggling to get C’s and D’s.”

“
Then I’m guessing Quinn walks in and isn’t too thrilled about finding you flipping through her grade book?”

“
She harshly asks me to explain myself, but I went off. I started dropping F bombs telling her to explain this stuff to me,” Rogers said. “Long story short, I was escorted out of the Buckley Center and then a university hearing regarding the incident was scheduled posthaste.”

I found the odds of Rogers cussing out Quinn as
probable
as a fat kid being chosen first for a pickup basketball game
. Yet
the
fact that
a hearing
was held
did make the story more believable. I could go into
The
Gazette
records to find out if
Rogers’s
incident had warranted a faculty hearing or if he was feeding me a heaping pile of baloney.

In many situations, the St. Elizabeth Student Government, SESG, was in charge of handling cases such as roommate disagreements, student drinking, gambling issues, and other trivial problems. Most of the students brought before SESG are head-cases that need a third party to intervene because they’re either too stupid or unreasonable to resolve their own issues. In serious cases such as Rogers’s, St. Elizabeth faculty members conducted these hearings rather than student officials.