Over lunch, he recounted Dennis’s visit to his room the night before. As he told the story he saw her face darken with anger, until he regretted having brought it up at all.
“Will!” she exploded when he finished. “He’s your friend! I can’t believe you treated him like that!”
Will shrugged. “What was I supposed to do, Felicia? Throw away my own career for his? Cheat for him? How would that help?”
“You could have helped him out in some way,” she insisted.
“I offered. He didn’t want it. It was everything or nothing, as far as he was concerned.”
“Still.
“Are you going to tutor him?” Will asked.
“He hasn’t asked me to.”
“But he might. What if he does? And you could always volunteer, you know. Are you willing to spend hours every day helping him catch up?”
“Maybe it won’t really take that long,” she said. “Maybe he’s exaggerating the situation.”
“Maybe,” Will admitted. “But I don’t think so. It seems like he knows what his own position is, and it’s pretty precarious.”
“Even so,” Felicia said, anger still simmering in her voice and body language, “you ought to do what you can to help him out. Friendships are important, Will. Relationships are important. You can’t just turn a friend away like that.”
“Felicia,” Will said, feeling suddenly helpless. “I told you, I offered to do what I could. It just wasn’t as much as Dennis wanted.”
She nodded. “And then, instead of negotiating something in between, you just let him walk out the door. Have you seen him today?”
“No,” Will replied.
“Don’t you think you should find him? Make sure he’s okay?”
“If you had seen him last night, Felicia ... he turned into an iceberg, like our entire friendship rested on that one question, and when I said no, then it was just over. I don’t feel like it’s my place to track him down. If he wants to find me and apologize, he knows where I live.”
Felicia had folded her arms across her chest and looked toward where the brook cut through a sward of grassy lawn, instead of at Will. “You disappoint me, Will,” she said. “Truly.” She rose, then, and walked away from the table, leaving Will with the remains of their lunch. “I guess I’ll talk to you later,” she called back as she left.
Will genuinely didn’t know what he was supposed to say to that. Hadn’t he made the best offer he could to Dennis? Didn’t he need to keep his priorities straight in order to graduate with the best grades he could? He cleaned up the lunch mess, checked the time, and headed toward his next class.
Professor Knudsen was, Will believed, one of the best lecturers he’d had during his time at the Academy. She paced the front of the room as she talked, a slight, blonde figure in tailored civilian clothes, speaking with a heavy Scandinavian accent, stopping from time to time to accentuate a point with a jabbing finger or a fist punching the palm of her other hand. She knew her material, which was the history of the Federation’s first contacts with alien races, inside and out, and never needed notes when she lectured. Normally Will took pleasure in watching her. Her utter command of the subject matter was inspiring and she made it seem important and valuable.
But today he couldn’t even focus on what she was saying. He kept running through his conversation with Dennis in his head, and the argument with Felicia that it had precipitated. She hadn’t come right out and called him a jerk, but her tone of voice and the way she’d carried herself had done that job for her. He couldn’t think of anything he might have done differently, that was the problem. He couldn’t accede to Dennis’s demands; they were unreasonable. They would put his own standing in jeopardy, maybe even threaten his whole career. It just didn’t make sense to take a chance like that for anybody.
And then Felicia’s response had seemed out of proportion as well. It wasn’t as if his relationship with Dennis would necessarily affect her. She knew Dennis too, they were friendly. But if Will’s friendship with Dennis had come to an abrupt end, why did that have to change her own association with Dennis? It didn’t—she was just blowing things up for no reason. Maybe she was upset not because her connection with Dennis was impaired but because her own impression of Will had been challenged. Not that her impression had always been a favorable one.
He shook his head and tried to concentrate on what Professor Knudsen was talking about.
He was aware of his lack of focus, and hoped that this particular lecture would be one he could afford to miss most of. But that pointed to a larger problem: Even without agreeing to Dennis’s ridiculous demands, his own academic work was being affected. Dennis, and now Felicia, were threatening his career simply by being part of his life and having expectations that he couldn’t necessarily live up to. If this sort of thing—disagreements with friends and lovers—could draw his mind away from one of his favorite lecturers, then it was dangerous. He couldn’t afford to let his concentration lapse. His priority had to be getting the highest grades he possibly could and doing his best work in these remaining few weeks. As hard as it was now, when finals hit it would be harder still. He needed to be mentally and psychologically available for himself at that point, ready to take on whatever academic challenges were thrown at him.
His decision made, he tried to tune in Professor Knudsen.
He found Felicia after his last class of the day, in her room. Estresor Fil was in there with her, studying, but when she saw the look on Will’s face—Will wondered just how bad he must look—she quickly gathered her things and excused herself. Felicia regarded Will with a blank expression. Pointedly, she did not get up to hug or kiss him. Will sat down in the chair that Estresor Fil had just vacated.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Will began.
“I’m glad to hear that.” Felicia’s voice was as flat as her face, as if she had pushed all emotion to the side.
“Yeah, well, it’s not always easy for me,” he said. She didn’t smile at the joke, and he decided not to try that again. “But what I keep coming up against, Felicia, is this. The school year is almost over. I had a rough first year, and some snags in my second too. If I want to get the best possible posting after the Academy, I have to really shine this year. That’s why I couldn’t devote the time to helping Dennis—because I need to devote it to helping myself. I have to push myself as hard as I possibly can.”
“Career isn’t everything, Will,” she said. “Friendships are every bit as important.”
“Friendships may be important,” he admitted. “But not ‘every bit as.’ Nothing is, not to me. The way I see it, there’s no reason to go into Starfleet unless I’m willing to give it my all. It needs a hundred percent of me.”
“That seems pretty narrow-minded,” Felicia responded. “What’s wrong with giving it seventy? Eighty? You need some of you left over for you.”
“I don’t agree. I mean, sure, that’s good enough for some people. But not for me. I’ve been trying to do this for as long as I can remember. Getting into Starfleet, moving up the ranks, becoming a senior officer—those have been my goals since I was a kid. Now they’re within range—I can almost close my hands around those gold pips. I can’t afford to lose my momentum. I can’t let anything get in the way of that goal. Not now.”
“And by ‘anything,’ you mean ... ?”
“You know,” he said, still unwilling to say out loud what had really brought him to Felicia’s room. “Dennis and his crazy schemes. Helping him cheat. That’s a sure way to get kicked out, to guarantee that I’ll never have a Starfleet career at all.”
“But tutoring isn’t against the rules.”