The dew on campus was moist with retribution. Jacques Peters kneeled on on the grass and felt the wetness of the grass between his fingers. “It’s over, I’ve won” Jacques whispered to himself. Jacques eyes were firmly fixed on the bottom of the Bartle Library tower by the English department corridor. From fifty feet away, by the location Jacques once said goodbye to Dorothea, Jacques watched the English department office from his pair of military style binoculars. From that distance, Jacques gazed at fleeing professors and faculty running from the building, getting into their cars, and speeding off campus as fast as possible.

By the time Jacques spotted some junior facility and visiting staff, adjuncts, and teaching assistants about to leave campus, the sirens could be heard in the distance. That was when Peters began his proud strut towards the department office and library tower. Police sirens were blaring. Federal agents, in coordination with local police, county, and state all began to pour into campus. It was dusk, but it could have been 12 noon. The scene was a flickering storm of emergency lights and personnel. This was a storm of judgement. As more and more police came on the scene, Jacques just pointed towards the department office, where all the vehicles began to assemble at a massive staging point, for the liberation of the office of Rhetoric. The end of SIX MONTHS OF Contesting Admission.

Peters tore off his jacket sleeves, leaving on just his vest. On his vest, insignia marked his status in the operation at hand. Jacques Peters was leading the charge, if it wasn’t apparent enough in the full quasi military outfit he had assembled, affixed with lightening bolts and “PhD” sewn into the very lining of the vest he wore for this day: final victory. In the department was a very different situation. Inside the library tower, Dr. B and Dr. Harris were standing over a large conference table littered with a full scale map of the English department. On the map lay small plastic figurines representative of staff still loyal to the department, and those loyal to J. Peters. The map was overwhelmingly clear as day when it came to the escalating critical situation on campus.

“It’s over, we’re finished” Dr. B said while sobbing in his office in the back of the department hidden away from the rest of the staff. There, in his back office, he could only look down at the map in a state of suspended disbelief. “Fucking, Jacques Peters!” Dr. Harris screamed in style congruent with Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. That was when Dr. Harris moved her bookcase to the left a few inches to reveal a secret safe behind it. She entered the numbers “12-13-07” the date of Peters rejection letter to the Graduate School in English. The safe popped open. Inside, was just one unfinished manuscript titled with the words: “Meta-Power”. She took out the manuscript from the safe, and began making her way down the long department office corridor to the paper shredder in the bowels of the office, right next to Dr. B’s office, where Jacques was humiliated when Contesting Admission first began.

Now the sirens were louder than ever, and you could see federal agents outside the doors of the barricaded department office. “BANG!” The door jostled a bit as police rammed the door once. “BANG!” twice. “BANG!” The doors flew open. The federal Marshalls lead the charge through the office. “Everybody, hands up!” Full time faculty and a few associate professors still loyal to Dr. B and Dr. Harris put their hands up. Others, research and distinguished staff, now, forever tarnished in the annals of academe, took their lives silently and cowardly, each biting down on a capsule of poison provided to them by Dr. Harris and B for this very occasion.

“Noooo!” Everyone could hear Dr. Harris scream as agents cuffed her, dragging her out of the department office in handcuffs, similar to Jacques Peters a few months prior. “What’s this?” Marshalls asked Dr. Harris moments before she tried to dispose of the plans and documents in her manuscript Meta-Power, the very agent of language designed to destroy J. Peters forever in academia. Peters could only smile, and breath deeply, as he saw the papers for himself for the first time, putting to rest a semester of paranoia and fear around what was finally discovered to be a massive conspiracy against him at New London University. The mystery, now fully revealed, was nothing more than an unpublished set of papers that would be read before the Council on Rhetoric Liberation months later by Dr. Harris and Dr. B themselves in front of the court, for CRIMES AGAINST THE ACADEMY, where Contesting Admission was finally reconciled and J. Peters would be remembered for as a hero in academe.