The Admissions Officer and the Faculty Advisor
The sequel to The Truant Officer, a couple of other people who broke the rules to help Spencer during his teenage years.
Parts of this story have been inspired by the story "A Mother Knows Revenge Is Best Served Cold" written by TimelessTears.
Robert Sheams hated his job sometimes, in fact it could be said he hated his job just over 93.2% of the time. He was a clerk in the admissions office at Yale and it was his job to send out the first round refusals for those that didn't meet Yale's extremely high minimum requirements on their SATS and to check the references on the undergrad applications that met their minimum SAT score requirements to reach the second round. In a couple of weeks, he would have to send out the rest of the rejection letters and then came the part of his job he liked. The letters to the lucky 6.8% of applicants to be accepted.
He conscientiously did the rejection letters first, it was bad enough that his work was destroying teenager's dreams, it would be even worse if he put it off long enough for them to get their hopes up. There had been more letters than usual today so by the time he started on the reference checks he was already in a bad mood.
His mood was made even worse when the first student he checked had reached a guidance counsellor that did not recall the student in question and though she was able to bring up his records they didn't include anything but his grades.
He picked up the next one and rang the guidance counsellor, without any optimism that he'd be able to clearly recommend or exclude the student.
"Oh yes Spencer Reid, our little genius" the guidance counsellor said.
"I've received his grade transcript, though it is a little odd," Robert began.
"He tested out of most of his classes, he was being badly bullied and it was decided that he was better off taking as many classes as he could as an early entrant at UNLV. I didn't agree, the socialization aspect of high school is as important as the academic but he pointed out he wasn't exactly with his peers anyway. You do realise he is twelve years old?"
Robert all but groaned. They received numerous applications from child prodigies but few had the maturity to cope with the university environment.
"You'd do better ringing his Faculty advisor at UNLV. He spends more time there this semester" The school guidance counsellor said uninterestedly.
Robert sighed and made the second call.
"Yes, I've been expecting these sort of calls. I'll be sorry to lose Spencer but since he went to high school with next year's freshman I can understand why he doesn't want to teach them. He has enough trouble establishing authority with the students being so much younger, funnily enough he does better with the senior classes," Professor Terence Allbright said cheerfully. "But Spencer told me that he's already received an acceptance from Caltech, and he intended to attend there.
"Are we talking about the same person, I'm calling about the twelve year old Spencer Reid that attends some early admission courses as part of his senior year at Los Vegas High School?" Robert asked.
The faculty advisor chuckled, yes the twelve year old genius son of Professor Diana Reid. He completed and defended his PhD in fifteenth century English Literature last semester and has been working almost full time since January."
Robert was struck dumb and as the silence extended, Professor Allbright started to explain. "Spencer's been attending classes with his mother whenever he could since he was a toddler. He used to get bored when she had office hours and sneak into other lectures with his paper and coloured pencils but he was no trouble so none of us tried to stop him. Honestly, we felt sorry for the little tyke. He should have been out playing in the park not coming to work with his Mom because she was too paranoid to leave him in day care. We used to chuckle at his pretending to take notes but the joke ended up being on us. I gave him the end of year exam to draw on because he was out of paper and I had an extra, then didn't realise that he'd handed it in with the others until after I'd marked it. In spite of the fact the whole thing was written in purple pencil and his handwriting was truly atrocious, he had the top score for the class," Terence laughed at the memory of that day, and Robert chuckled too.
"I told the story in the break room and the others tried it too. We started giving him the opportunity to do the assignments as well and by the time he turned nine he had enough credits to graduate. His mother was deteriorating and he was often taking over her lectures and grading papers for her to cover up. Dr Diana Reid really wasn't well enough to keep teaching but the boy's father had walked out on them and wasn't paying alimony or child support and she needed the money and the health insurance from her job, so as long as the classes were taught we hushed it up and made him an official post grad student and TA. Dr Diana qualified for her pension and lifelong insurance in April last year and Spencer applied to defend his PhD a few days later."
"Well that definitely answers my main concern, whether the child has the maturity to cope on a college campus. But if his mother is ill, who would come to University with him?"
"Nobody! He told me he was planning to live on campus" Terence said.
"And doesn't that concern you?" Robert asked.
"Any other child it would but I'm actually more worried about how Diana will cope without him. Spencer's actually started arranging for an Aunt to come to take over looking after his mother, managing her medication, cooking, cleaning and shopping while he's away. The only concern I have is that he will be bullied again. One of the reasons the school approved him testing out of so many classes is that they know full well that he was in danger on their campus. If he had a parent that was well enough to push the issue they could have sued the school for child endangerment and several seniors would've gone to jail. We've black banned the worst of the bullies in the hope that Spencer would remain here but he said there was one incident when the football team stripped him naked, physically assaulted him and left him tied to the goal post for six hours. He said that nearly half the senior class watched, and did nothing to help him, even after the bullies had left. I can't blame him from not wanting to teach students that had seen him so vulnerable," Terence explained. "We are just not able to black ban all the students of the largest high school in the area, though I would've been willing to ban them from Dr Spencer Reid's classes if he stayed here."
"Did he give you a list of who did it? I think if we're to accept Spencer then we should exclude his tormentors to give him a chance at a fresh start," Robert asked.
Professor Terence Allbright smirked. "Yes, and a list of those who watched. Spencer has an eidetic memory, the list is a long one but I'm confident there is nobody on that list who doesn't deserve to be," the faculty advisor said, eager to hinder the teenagers that had tortured a child who was already dealing with burdens that should've been unendurable in a boy his age.
"Please fax it to this number and I'll see it reaches the appropriate people," Robert said giving him the number.
Robert had recently done a course on extracting and evaluating information from referee calls, and he'd made some friends with jobs like his at several other universities and colleges. Receiving the lists he added an explanation of what the students were guilty of doing, pointing out that similar behaviour as a college freshman would be considered paedophilia and ruin the reputation of any college they were admitted to and emailed it to those friends.
Over the next few weeks, Terence Allbright had several similar conversations with the admissions officers at MIT, Cornell and Rice University and the counsellor assigned to oversee Spencer at Caltech, cheerfully acquiescing to their requests to send each of them the list of bullies and those who stood by and watched a child tortured. All of those he spoke to had similar feelings about the incident that Robert and Terence did and all of them were angry and astonished that the high school had covered up the incident to protect their reputation rather than making the students involved face justice for their actions. All of them also took steps to ban the students in question from attending their universities, with their boss's full position of course, universities reputations were very important to future enrolments. They and their bosses also took time to spread the word to friends in similar positions.
Not surprisingly, the counsellor at Caltech asked far more questions than the others, focussing more on the effect these bullying incidents had had on the boy who in spite of his academic performance and IQ had physically and chronologically just turned twelve.
"I cannot tell you how he behaves while at school having to face the bullies and bullying on a daily basis. I can tell you that the bullying didn't stop with this incident, Spencer continued to acquire scrapes and bruises until the last day he spent at that school."
"Here in charge of most of his classes he is calm and mature, he has no difficulty standing up in front of a couple of hundred young adults and lecturing, he does not let threats influence his grading of a students work and he trusts the campus security to deal with any threats against him. That being said when meeting new fellow staff members, he comes across as surprisingly shy and awkward, almost submissive though he is not normally submissive at all.
I have to tell you that it is incredibly important that he isn't bullied at Caltech. He would not react well to being bullied in what he thinks of as his safe place.
The guidance counsellor took that information and carefully selected classes for Spencer that met his interests and requests but also placed him in classes with professors that did not resent teaching students more intelligent than themselves, did not bully their students and did not allow bullying among members of their class. He also tried to choose professors that announced at the start of the semester that they either didn't grade on the bell curve or would be excluding the extreme geniuses from the bell curve so that the rest of the class' grades wouldn't be adversely affected by Spencer's.
Next, he called the housing officers and explained that he had an underage student planning to live in the dorms. He explained that the twelve year old had been responsible for caring for his mother and that he already had one degree and needed to be housed with the seniors who had single rooms. He also mentioned his fear that the child had been badly bullied in the past and if he could be put on a floor with the most supportive RA away from the jocks of the school. The housing officers looked at the room allocations and moved Spencer from where he'd originally been into somewhere he thought the child would be mothered and protected. Near another student returning for her third degree after being a child prodigy herself.
Robert's friends were as horrified as he was by the torture of an eleven year old these students had got away with and easily made the decision to add the students involved in the torture to their own "Not to be considered for Admission" lists as well as forwarding it to other friends in similar positions, including several big companies known for hiring high school graduates. Unsurprisingly, those secondary recipients did the same and a week later Terence Allbright smiled as he received notification from a friend in his own admissions office that they had now received the list from four different sources, and had passed it on as widely as they could. Including to every major employer in Las Vegas.
The Los Vegas High School football and cheerleading teams, never realised why all their college applications were rejected and they found it so difficult to even get an interview for most of the jobs they applied for anywhere.
Spencer also never realised the influence his former faculty boss had on his life at Caltech. He settled into his new classes, enjoyed the challenges of his new professors and almost immediately felt at home in his new dorm, blossoming in the nurturing atmosphere and learning how to be if not a child at least an adolescent without responsibilities beyond those he chose himself. At Caltech he found the haven that he'd always hoped and dreamed it would be, a safe place for him to be himself and to explore exactly who Spencer Reid actually was other than the child of a paranoid schizophrenic mother and a genius brain.
The man that emerged at the end of Spencer's eight years at Caltech wasn't what Terence Alllbright or Robert Sheams had pictured when they tried to make sure Spencer's experiences there were as positive as he could make them, one from 1,000 miles away and the other a total stranger, but someone who had exceeded all the expectations anyone could have had of him. And Terence and Robert were both proud of the small part they'd done to help the young boy overwhelmed by heavy burdens and responsibilities to become the man strong enough to deal with the worst of mankind in order to make the world a better place.
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A/N: Thank you to MayaHikari, Village-Mystic, Locket1, Womenreligiousfan, ahowell1993, eutopia23, Cutiepie120048, MrPlatypus12345, DaemonWolfe, MOKA CASTILLO, May a Chance, CriminalMindsGeek, Ryu-Tsui-Sen, Booksbear, sheltie26, SkullAuror107, Missabakuno, matechan, Cosmos89, Reader Ethiriel, Jezebel9991, jully123, Echonite, fontsofwisdom, paskinmath, GladToBeAbnormal, CharlotteDaBookworm, alexdcl, fishtrek, giderasia, FanFicAddicT2012, KayciNinja07, Morbid Crow, kira690, ShadowSkill29, Ieahleen and The Fallen Angel 13, who reviewed, favourited, and followed "The Truant Officer".