Melissa's euphoric feeling of relief lasted all of about thirty seconds. That was the length of time between the moment she walked into Dean Eleanor Taylor's office and saw her lost purse miraculously sitting there on the desk, and the moment where the dean's secretary closed the door behind her and locked it tightly. She had just enough time to squeal out, "My purse!", but not enough time to get out any questions about where it was found or whether her wallet was still inside before she heard the sinister clicking sound of the key turning in the lock behind her. Melissa turned around, reaching out to turn the handle, but it only rattled uselessly.
Eleanor coughed meaningfully. "If you could please take a seat," she said as Melissa turned back to face her, gesturing pointedly to the chair on the other side of her desk. She didn't look like she was happy to be reuniting Melissa with her lost possessions. Her face was gravely serious, a far cry from the chipper Caucasian woman with the round, smiling cheeks that greeted the students every morning on the TV screen as they entered the halls of Kinnaird Community College for their daily classes. She looked like she was upset with Melissa over something... but apart from forgetting her purse in the student union, the younger woman couldn't think what she might have done.
Eleanor rested her manicured fingernails on the brown leather surface of the handbag. "You're absolutely sure that this is your purse, then?" she asked, her voice every bit as serious as her expression. "You're not confusing it with another one that might look similar, or one that belongs to a friend?" Melissa felt a momentary twinge of apprehension--it almost sounded like Dean Taylor was giving her a chance to retract her statement for some reason. Was someone else saying it was their purse? Were they trying to claim that she stole it and put her stuff in it? It made no sense, but then neither did being called into the Dean's office for something as simple as a lost item.
But even if there was a problem, Melissa couldn't afford to pretend that the purse wasn't hers. It had her student ID in it, her phone, all her cash (hopefully), her temporarily suspended debit card, her driver's license, the tube of flamingo pink lipstick she bought last week that went with the dress she was planning to wear on Friday night's date with Shamika... she decided to press on gamely, figuring that she could always resolve any ownership questions with the truth. "I know it's mine," she said. "There's a little scrape just below the clasp where it smacked into the wall last month when I was running to get to class. I'd recognize it anywhere."
Eleanor's frown deepened. "I see," she said. She opened up the bag and took out a small plastic bottle filled with little pink pills. They had a slightly pearlescent sheen to them under the fluorescent lighting, making them look almost like some kind of hard candy. She set them on the desk in front of Melissa, and they made an accusatory rattle as the bottle struck the hard wooden surface. "You are aware, Miss Keane, that we have a zero tolerance policy for illegal drug use here at Kinnaird? Unless you can come up with some explanation for this, I'm afraid your academic career with us is over."
For a long moment, the sound of her heartbeat rushing through her ears was so loud that Melissa couldn't hear herself think. She felt like she'd been dropped into some sort of bizarre prank show, as if at any moment some Z-list celebrity was going to come out and tell her that she'd been chumped or something. She couldn't begin to even process the actual words that Dean Taylor had just uttered, let alone produce a coherent response. Illegal drugs? Expulsion? Her head spun trying to fit the concepts into her brain.
Finally, with a sickening awareness of just how unconvincing she sounded, Melissa managed to stammer out, "I, I've never seen those before. S-someone must have put them in my purse after I left it in the commissary." It was ludicrous even to her--Melissa had no idea how much illegal drugs cost or even what this particular substance was, but there had to be at least thirty of the pink pills in that bottle. Nobody was going to just walk into a public place, see an abandoned handbag sitting next to an empty chair, and decide to plant something in it just for funsies. Even if they were the kind of sadist who enjoyed making a stranger's life miserable, it would be too expensive to be worth it.
The irritated look on Eleanor's face confirmed Melissa's worst fears. "Is that seriously the best you can manage, young woman?" she asked, her face flushing with consternation as she pinned Melissa into the chair with her cold stare. "You admit that you recognize the purse, you admit that it's yours, but you 'don't remember' leaving a whole bottle of Jubilees in there? I very much think you'll need to do better than that, Miss Keane. If not for me, then for the campus police at least. If you can't name a supplier--"
"I, I don't have a supplier!" A part of Melissa cringed at the thought of interrupting the dean, but at this point she couldn't imagine that she had much to lose by being rude. "I don't know where those pills came from, I--I didn't even know they were called Jujubes until you told me!" She couldn't shake the creeping disorientation that stole over her simply from being suddenly trapped in this absurd, impossible situation; her mind's eye kept adding a Dutch angle to the room, and she gripped the arms of the chair tightly for fear that she'd simply tumble out of her seat.
Eleanor snorted disdainfully. "Jubilees," she corrected. "As if you didn't know. It's becoming a depressingly common problem on campus--girls like you chasing the new high, trying to find something to get you buzzed when weed isn't enough anymore. How many pills do you need to take now to get that click back, Melissa? How much of this bottle do you have to have just to get one night of happiness anymore?" She leaned back in her chair, shaking her head. "I see all the signs, Melissa. The nervous sweat, the flushed cheeks, the trembling. The way you're clawing at the chair. You're jonesing for another fix, aren't you?"
Melissa's mouth opened and closed in wild, incoherent shock. "I... you...." It was no good, she couldn't even find a way to start scaling the vast wall of errors and false conclusions in front of her. Of course she was flushed and sweaty and trembling--she was suddenly facing expulsion and jail time out of absolutely nowhere! Anyone would look nervous under those circumstances. But when Melissa looked into the dean's cold, imperturbable eyes, she knew that she would get nowhere pointing out something so simple and obvious as the truth. "I've never taken those," she whimpered, her voice suddenly small and quiet. "Not even one."
The dean raised an eyebrow. "So you're telling me you've never tried jubilee in your whole life, then," she said, her voice thick with skepticism. "You haven't built up any kind of tolerance to them, you don't even know what the effects would be if you took one. You're just some naive innocent girl who's walked the straight and narrow path, only to fall victim to some nefarious plot by a total stranger to ruin your academic career and send you to jail?"
Melissa looked down at the floor, unable to meet the dean's gaze. She thought about admitting to the Saturday nights she spent as a teenager, getting drunk with the older kids who were able to buy beer and trying not to let the alcohol make her so bold that she tried to kiss Suzy Conover. She wondered if she should confess to the joint Shamika gave her during that first study session they had together that turned into a makeout session by the end of the night. She wanted to be honest--wasn't the truth the best defense? But in the end, common sense won out and she narrowed her honesty down to just the specific answer to Eleanor's question. "No ma'am," she said. "I've never tried jubilee."
The dean reached out and opened the bottle, shaking a single pill out onto the desk. "Prove it," she said, pointing to the little pink capsule. "If you really don't know what these are or what they do, then it really shouldn't take more than just one. If you're a habitual user, well... I'm sure you'll try your best to pretend that one jubilee can still knock you on your ass, but I'm confident that I'll see through any deception. I've judged the intramural one-act play competitions for the last ten years running, I know a performance when I see one." She folded her arms. "Well?"
The Dutch angles were back, steeper than before. "You want me to take drugs... to prove I don't take drugs?" Melissa asked, her brow furrowed in confusion. She couldn't believe that this wasn't some sort of trap, that the dean wasn't planning to wait until she'd swallowed the pill before immediately hustling her off to a lab to pee in a cup and prove that Melissa was every bit the addict Eleanor claimed her to be. But... but why even go to all this effort to entrap her? Why bother with a B student who she probably only saw walking down the halls hand-in-hand with her girlfriend every so often? Even if she was a rampant homophobe or a racist who didn't approve of interracial relationships, there had to be easier ways for the top authority figure at Kinnaird to ruin Melissa's life. This couldn't all just be an elaborate deception.
