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I looked at Owen, wondering if he was taken in by the girl and her theatrics. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the hard, cold look he currently had plastered to his face.
“I want you to think, for just a moment,” he said simply, snapping the words out, “that you worked so hard on a paper, and your fellow classmate stole your work, then turned it in as theirs. How would that make you feel?”
She legitimately sobbed.
“I’d feel cheated,” she cried.
“That’s how I feel, Ms. Grey. I feel cheated.”
Owen sighed and looked over the paper again.
“I’ve read this over several times, and I think you had some decent work here, but then you took…four paragraphs from a man who worked his ass off to succeed. Do you want to succeed, Ms. Grey?”
She nodded vigorously.
Owen tapped his fingers on the desk, watching the girl fall apart in front of him.
“If you want to succeed, you must work, and work hard; not just in school, but in life. I could take this to the Dean and you would fail. Are you ready to fail this class?”
“No, please no! I’ll…I’ll rewrite it! I’ll write five papers!”
He tapped his fingers again.
“Five is unnecessary. But I do want two.”
Her eyes turned up to Owen with hope.
“I want to see a whole new paper. None of this here. You need to remake it from scratch, understood?”
She nodded again, her brain practically rattling in the process.
“I also want you to write me a five page report on ‘The Mist’ and why you like it. What are the important points, and what makes it a masterpiece. Understood?”
“Yes! Yes, Professor Harlo,” she begged.
“Good. I expect them on my desk at the beginning of class on Friday.”
“B-but you gave us two weeks to—”
“Yes, I did. And now I’m giving you an additional six days and…twenty three hours to get it done and have it on my desk.”
She nodded again, tears running down her face again.
“Good, now, if I were you, I’d get on it,” Owen told her, dismissing her with a simple sentence.
“Thank you Professor Harlo,” she said, panic written in her eyes as she stood and hurried back out the door.
After the soft thump of it closing, I turned to Owen and watched him as he stared down at the paper.
“Her tears were sincere,” he said out of nowhere, finally setting the paper down. “She looked legitimately mortified to have been caught.”
“So you’ll forgive her?” I asked him, leaning back in my chair.
“Not necessarily. I’ve given her a very difficult task, and she’ll decide her own fate. If she puts any kind of effort into the two new papers, then I know she’s serious.”
“So you’re not going to tell the Dean?”
“Oh, I’ve already informed him. He just agreed with me that I could handle it, and if Ms. Grey makes no attempt to correct her actions, then our lovely Dean will take over and she will fail out of my class and will face academic discipline.”
