Invasion of Privacy

over tees, the buttons on the flannel ones all open, shirttails out over jeans with intentional slashes. Everybody in uniform, just different branches of the service.
    Look a little closer, though, and you could see a stout thirty-year-old woman, maybe a young mother, coming back to school and maybe not with a lot of friends her own age, sitting on a threadbare jacket and nibbling a pea-nut-butter-and-jelly sandwich while she poured over what looked like an English lit text. A trio of African-American students, sitting by themselves and eating ice cream cones, Chicago Bulls and Philadelphia Eagles colors on the two boys, one looking around every once in a while, watching the street in a different kind of neighborhood. A studious Latino, wearing black tie-shoes and a white dress shirt, his back against the stoop of the Administration Building , tapping the keys of a notebook computer he balanced on his knees.
    I climbed the stoop and went in the main entrance, taking the corridor toward the registrar’s office as two of the L.L. Beaners came out, knapsacks on their backs. Inside the door was a rectangular waiting area, probably designed to accommodate long lines of students, a couple of molded-plastic scoop chairs against the wall. I could see two women behind the open counter, one in her late fifties and severe, the other in her early twenties and fresh-scrubbed.
    The older woman shrugged stiffly into a coat, saying in a clipped New England accent, “Be back by one, Zina.” The younger woman sat at a desk bracketed by tall file cabinets, scanning some computer printouts on green-and-cream spreadsheet paper in front of her. “Take your time, Harriet. I’m just meeting Lyle for lunch at the Towne.” Harriet fussed with her coat as she strode past me, never even looking at my face. After she was gone, I went to the counter.
    Zina smiled up from the printouts. “Help you?”
    “Please.” I took out one of my forged authorization letters. “I need a transcript and whatever else you can show me on a former student.”
    Zina nodded and rose, lifting one form from a sheaf of them on her desk. She came up to the counter and turned the paper around for me to see. “We just need you to fill this out and get it signed by the graduate involved.”
    I glanced down at the form. At the top over a couple of detailed paragraphs, it had spaces for FULL NAME, DATE OF BIRTH, and YEAR OF GRADUATION. Since I didn’t know the last two, I positioned my letter the same way she held her sheet. “I already have an authorization.”
    Zina read it. “Hey, Plymouth Mills, that’s, like, south of Boston , right?”
    “Right.”
    “We don’t get many grads going all the way down there.”
    “You don’t?”
    “Uh-unh. Most of our students are state residents when they come here, and they already know Vermont’s the best place to live you could ever find.”
    I smiled with her. “Well, after I get a look at his records, maybe I can persuade Mr. Dees to move back.”
    Zina shook her head. “I’m real sorry, but you have to use our form.”
    “But I’m only going to be here for today.”
    “Sorry.”
    I read the two paragraphs of fine print on her piece of paper. “Look, I know my letter isn’t worded quite the same way, but it’s pretty clearly the same thought. Andrew Dees here is authorizing you to release all his records to me.
    “Uh-huh, but your letter there doesn’t have the disclaimer clause or the hold-harmless clause, and the university counsel says we have to have both to cover ourselves from liability.”
    Zina said the legal phrases correctly, but she pronounced them slowly, as though she didn’t know for sure what they meant. In a bureaucracy of any kind, that usually means the person you’re dealing with isn’t going to yield. I thought about asking to see her superior, then remembered Harriet’s demeanor and had a better idea.
    “Could I have a couple of those forms, then?”
    Zina seemed relieved. “Sure.”

    “Hi, can I help you?”
    “It’s not exactly a résumé, but I was wondering if you could type this up for me?”
    The young guy in the photocopy place across from the Towne Restaurant looked at the registrar’s form and said, “Why don’t you just use the form itself, mister?”
    “I don’t want all that stuff about DATE OF BIRTH at the top.”
    He ran his hand over hair too short to twist around a finger. “Okay, but it’s still going to be five dollars a page.”
    “A steal at