When Malkiel awoke from her nap, the second Apparition already hovered at the foot of her bed.
“Are you the Ghost of Princeton Present?”
“Yeah. That’s me.” The Spirit’s sweatpants hung loosely, and its grey hoodie looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a fortnight.
“Spirit,” said the dean, “you don’t look so good.”
“Yeah, well, I just pulled another all-nighter. Those asshole premeds are all fighting for a handful of A’s, so the rest of us have to kill ourselves just to stay on the curve. Let’s walk.”
The Trustees’ Reading Room in Firestone was packed with students working with desperate intensity. Quietly clacking keyboards and shuffling papers hardly broke the silence, interrupted occasionally by a student’s weakly wheezing cough.
At a table in the corner, his face wan in the feeble gleam of his laptop’s light, sat Tiny Tim Cratchit, the littlest junior in the Religion department. A box of Kleenex lay atop stacked piles of books, and a short crutch rested against the table.
“I say! That’s the Cratchit boy,” said Malkiel. “I met his parents at orientation- they say he wants to be a professor someday. Is he not well?”
“Tim has mono,” said the Spirit. “And he slipped on the walk here from Forbes last week. The doctors at McCosh say he shouldn’t have been carrying so many heavy books.”
Tiny Tim tried to muffle another set of coughs with his sleeve as they rattled his fragile frame. Classmates glowered at Tiny Tim for disturbing the silence.
“God bless you,” whispered the girl across from Tiny Tim before also sneezing sharply.
Tiny Tim smiled weakly. “God bless us, every one!”
“If you get me sick I will kill you,” said the girl.
“Spirit,” said Malkiel, with an interest she had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will get into grad school.”
“If the shadows of the Future remain unchanged, no.”
“If not grad school, what lies in store?”
“I see dusty boxes,” replied the Ghost, “in a basement corner, and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica unopened in years, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, Tiny Tim will die–”
“No!”
“- after a long and undistinguished career in middle management earning $50,000 a year.”
“NO!” cried Malkiel. “Has he no refuge or recourse?”
“Are there no I-banks?” said the Spirit, turning on her with her own words. “Are there no consulting firms?”
“Oh, no, kind Spirit! Say he will be spared!”
“Woman!” said the Spirit, “if woman you are in heart, and not stone, forbear your wicked policy! Or you will see a hundred more like Timmy here barred from grad school because of lousy GPAs, a hundred more high aspirations abandoned, and a hundred-hundred more souls sold out to careers in financial services.”
The clock struck midnight, and Firestone’s closing bell jolted students from their studies. The Spirit led Malkiel outside and began to fade into the night. “Be honest, Ms. Malkiel: grade deflation sucks,” he said. “If you would change the shadows of the Future, you must be honest with yourself! Grade deflation sucks! Be honest! It sucks!”