CAMPUS UNDERCOVER
Love in Plain Sight
Mật Vụ Sau Giảng Đường
CHAPTER TWO
The Vanishing Scholarship Ledger
Harper had exactly one rule for undercover work, established approximately eighteen hours into her career as an unwilling amateur agent: never do it on an empty stomach. She was three bites into a bagel when Daniel slid a manila folder across the table in the same too-quiet corner of the East Reading Room, and the bagel lost.
"Six students," Daniel said, without preamble. "All on the Hudson Heights Merit Scholarship. All with GPAs above 3.8. All of them lost their funding in the last two semesters, with no formal appeal process, no explanation beyond a form letter, and no public record of why."
Elliot, arriving a full ninety seconds late and clearly resentful about it, dropped into the chair across from Harper without looking at her. "And you want us to find out why."
"I want you to find out how," Daniel said. "Scholarship review is supposed to be untouchable — three signatures, a paper trail, an audit every June. If someone's cutting funding without triggering any of that, they've found a hole in the system. I need to know where it is before it gets used on someone I can't get back."
Harper picked her bagel back up out of pure spite toward the universe. "So what, we just casually ask around about clerical fraud?"
"You," Daniel said, "are going to do what you're good at. Talk to people. Ms. Quinn has already been invited, I understand, to a certain closed meeting of the Student Leadership Council tomorrow evening."
Harper choked slightly. "How did you—"
"I read the sign-up sheet posted in the student union at seven a.m. It is not, in fact, a closed meeting. It is a meeting that likes to feel closed. Go. Be charming. Be exactly as loud as you already are." He turned to Elliot before Harper could decide whether that was an insult. "Mr. Hayes, the scholarship office publishes award notices twice a semester. I want you cross-referencing GPA data against those notices going back three years. Somewhere in there is a pattern."
"That's public information," Elliot said.
"It's public information nobody has ever bothered to actually read," Daniel said. "Which is exactly why it's useful."
• • •
The Student Leadership Council met in a conference room that smelled aggressively of good coffee, and Harper understood within four minutes that she had wandered into a very small, very well-dressed ecosystem that ran entirely on gossip disguised as concern.
"—which is *tragic*, honestly, because Priya was so close to finishing her thesis," a girl in a cashmere sweater was saying, to murmurs of agreement.
Harper, who had strategically positioned herself near the snack table with the specific goal of being adjacent to conversation, made her most sympathetic face. "Wait, sorry — is this the thing with the scholarship reviews? I heard something happened to a bunch of people this year."
The cashmere girl turned, delighted to have a fresh audience. "You haven't heard? It's *always* the same students. High-achieving, first-gen, usually on need-based aid, and then boom — letter in their mailbox, funding revoked, no hearing." She lowered her voice like she was sharing something delicious. "My theory? Somebody up top decided the merit budget got too generous and started quietly trimming names nobody would fight for."
"That's — actually kind of horrifying," Harper said, and meant it, the sympathetic act sliding uncomfortably close to something real.
"Right? And nobody in administration will even confirm the number of students affected. It's like the scholarship office runs on secrets and bad lighting."
Harper filed that away, smiled, ate a second small sandwich she did not want, and left twenty minutes later having learned three names, one department rumor, and absolutely nothing that would hold up as evidence — which, she reflected on the walk back, was probably the most realistic spy work she was ever going to do.
• • •
Elliot's evening was, on paper, considerably less social and considerably more damning.
He'd pulled every scholarship award notice the university had published for three years, cross-referenced them against the GPA thresholds listed in the student handbook, and found, buried in a spreadsheet he was absolutely not supposed to have compiled this thoroughly for a homework-adjacent side project, six names whose recorded grade-point averages had changed *after* their award notices were published — not before, not during review, but weeks later, quietly, in a database nobody checked twice.
"They're not cutting funding for low performance," he told Harper the next morning, sliding his laptop across a library table like a man laying down a winning hand of cards he wished he hadn't been dealt. "They're editing the performance after the fact to justify a cut they'd already decided to make."
Harper stared at the screen, at six rows of numbers quietly rewritten by someone with database access and no fear of consequences. "That's — okay, that's actually diabolical. Whoever's doing this isn't hiding students losing scholarships. They're hiding the *reason.*"
"Which means the reason is the part that would actually get someone fired," Elliot said.
For one unguarded second, Harper looked at him like he'd said something genuinely impressive instead of insufferably smug, and Elliot, visibly thrown by being looked at that way, immediately closed the laptop.
"Anyway," he said. "That's step one."
"What's step two?"
"Step two," Daniel said, appearing behind them with the specific stealth of a man who had clearly been eavesdropping for at least a minute, "is getting into the financial aid office after hours, which neither of you is doing alone, and which both of you are doing in a way that does not look like breaking into the financial aid office."
• • •
The plan, such as it was, required Harper and Elliot to pose as a couple having a spectacularly public argument in the hallway outside the financial aid suite at exactly 5:45 p.m. — loud enough, Daniel explained, to pull the last administrative assistant on duty out of her office to see what the commotion was, giving Elliot ninety seconds alone with an unlocked terminal.
"I don't understand why it has to be a *couple* fighting," Elliot said, adjusting his jacket like it had personally wronged him. "Two people fighting doesn't require a relationship."
"Two strangers arguing gets ignored," Daniel said. "Two people who clearly know each other gets attention. Attention is the point."
Harper cracked her knuckles like she was about to enter a boxing ring. "Don't worry. I do dramatics. I was in one and a half school plays."
"That is not reassuring," Elliot said.
It should have been a simple, contained, ninety-second performance. It was not.
Harper, once given permission to be loud, discovered she had an alarming reserve of loud she had never previously been allowed to access, and by the time the administrative assistant — a tired-looking woman named Carla, according to her name tag — poked her head into the hallway, Harper had already accused Elliot of, among other things, forgetting their six-month anniversary, texting his ex, and "never once, not *one time*, complimenting her scarf."
"I don't know you well enough to know if I like your scarf," Elliot said, which was true and also extremely off-script.
"That is *exactly* the problem, Elliot!"
Carla, alarmed and vaguely delighted the way most bystanders are by other people's relationship drama, stepped fully into the hall to intervene, which was the entire point, except that Harper had gotten so committed to the bit that she followed Carla partway down the corridor still listing grievances, which meant Elliot had roughly forty extra seconds of unsupervised terminal access he had not planned for and used, with grim efficiency, to copy an entire access log onto a flash drive before anyone thought to check.
By Monday, Harper Quinn had a campus-wide reputation as the girl who'd screamed about a scarf in the financial aid hallway, and Elliot Hayes had a reputation, entirely undeserved and deeply unwelcome, as a boyfriend who couldn't accessorize.
"People keep asking if we're back together," Harper reported at their next library meeting, deeply unbothered by this development in a way that suggested she found it slightly funny.
"There is no *together* to be back in," Elliot said, with the flat, aggrieved dignity of a man whose fictional relationship history was now more socially significant than his real one.
Daniel, reviewing the access log Elliot had pulled, did not look up. "You'll both survive it."
• • •
The access log led them somewhere worse than a spreadsheet.
Buried in the financial aid terminal's file directory was a reference to a ledger — an actual physical notebook, apparently, kept off any digital system, cross-referencing scholarship names against a set of four-digit codes and dollar amounts that didn't match any scholarship on record. Someone old-fashioned enough, or careful enough, to keep the real bookkeeping on paper.
It took Harper two days of aggressively friendly small talk with a work-study student in the financial aid office to learn where the physical files were stored, and one very tense Thursday evening for her and Elliot to actually get the ledger out of a supply closet that was, infuriatingly, unlocked the entire time, which felt like an insult to the amount of anxiety Harper had built up beforehand.
The notebook itself was unglamorous — spiral-bound, coffee-ringed, filled with cramped handwriting that alternated between a fountain pen and, oddly, three different colors of gel ink, as if whoever kept it had switched writers over the years without ever switching notebooks. Names. Amounts. Codes that meant nothing to Harper and, judging by his silence, not much more to Elliot.
"This is it," Elliot said quietly, flipping through pages under the thin light of his phone. "This is the actual ledger. Everything else has been an approximation of this."
"Then let's get it to Daniel," Harper said, already reaching for her bag.
She should have known better than to say that out loud in a building with this many people who apparently already knew her name.
• • •
Harper kept the notebook in her dorm room for exactly one night, tucked inside a hollowed-out textbook because she had, at some point in the last two weeks, apparently become a person who hollowed out textbooks, which was a sentence she never expected to think about herself.
It was gone by morning.
Not stolen dramatically — no broken lock, no disturbed room, nothing to suggest forced entry. Just gone, the textbook back on her shelf exactly where she'd left it, hollowed and empty, like whoever had taken it wanted her to know precisely how easily they'd gotten in.
"That's not possible," Harper said, for the fourth time, standing in the middle of her dorm room while Elliot checked the window latch with the grim focus of someone who badly wanted there to be a broken latch to find. "I locked the door. I always lock the door. I have very reasonable, very average paranoia about locked doors."
"The lock isn't forced," Elliot said. "Whoever did this had a key, or knew how to get one."
"Which means it's someone with access to student housing," Harper said, sitting down hard on her bed. "Which means it's someone who works *here.* On campus. Close."
Her phone buzzed on the desk. She almost didn't want to look at it.
She looked at it.
The message came from a number with no name attached, no contact history, nothing — just eleven words sitting on her screen with the specific chill of something written by someone who knew exactly which threats would land.
*If you want to keep your scholarship, forget this ever happened.*
Elliot read it over her shoulder, and for once, he didn't have anything dry or clever to say. He just went very still, the particular stillness of someone recalculating how much danger they'd actually signed up for.
"They know it's you," he said quietly. "Not us. You, specifically."
"Great," Harper said, in a voice that was trying very hard to sound braver than it felt. "Love that for me."
• • •
Two miles across the city, in an office with better lighting than anywhere Hudson Heights allowed its students, Eleanor Voss sat behind a wide glass desk, reviewing paperwork with the particular calm of a woman who had never once in her professional life raised her voice to get what she wanted.
A manila folder sat at the corner of her desk, slightly out of place among the neat stacks of financial reports. Inside it, clipped together, were two photographs: a student ID photo of a girl with unmistakable pink hair, and a candid shot of a tall, guarded-looking boy walking alone across the quad, taken from an angle that made it clear neither of them had known they were being photographed.
Eleanor did not open the folder. She simply looked at it for a moment, the way a person looks at a loose thread on an otherwise perfect sweater, and made a small note in the margin of her own paperwork — nothing dramatic, just three words, underlined once.
*Watch them closer.*
Then she closed the folder, set it precisely square with the edge of her desk, and went back to her afternoon exactly as if nothing about it had changed at all.