Right when I arrived at college, I had to sign the contract. The financial aid office stood at the crossroads of the two main paths across campus. I passed through its glass doors, then into a deeper chamber where Eric, the loan administration officer, sat waiting. He had a long white beard and a cup of pens. The document that he slid across his desk bore the bolded title “Master Promissory Note”. Eric said this was the “binding legal document” that would form the basis for my loans. It felt strange to be old enough to sign such a thing. I thought briefly of my parents back home, who had once warned me to beware what I signed, but what did they know of student loans, having never gone to college themselves? I reached to fish a pen from my satchel, but Eric said, “no, use this,” and held forward his cup. All his pens looked identical, all bearing the words Sallie Mae. The pen clicked cheaply and its feeble ink made a shaky blue line of my signature.

Eric pulled a vast binder, fat as a Bible, from a shelf. He slithered my signed contract into a plastic sleeve in the binder, which I saw was filled with the Master Promissory Notes of others. Many such binders lined Eric’s shelves.

I held the pen out to return it.

“Keep it,” he said.

 Then after a pause, he added: “It’s the only thing you’ll get around here that doesn’t have to be paid back.”

He guffawed, which I did not like.

Despite Eric’s ominous laughter, I did not worry but instead went about my carefree student days like those around me, hacky-sacking and Ultimate Frisbee-ing on the quad, reading about hegemony and praxis in the library, cheering the athletic feats of the crew team, ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms at Springfest. I returned to the aid office each fall and spring to sign the next loan, each time receiving a new pen from Eric. Over the years I noticed an odd papery stiffness to Eric’s skin; its lines moved more like folds than wrinkles. I kept all the pens as instructed, and despite their shoddy initial impression, they never ran dry, though I used them freely.

When four years had passed, the financial aid office summoned me by email to what it called an exit interview. For what I thought was the last time, I entered Eric’s office. There, he handed me a folder. Our hands brushed briefly, making a rustling sound. His skin felt drier than it was possible for a human hand to be.

The folder’s cover displayed the college logo and a bucolic photograph of the crew team rowing along the river. All the trees on shore had bright leaves: in the college’s promotional materials, it was forever early October.

I opened the autumnal folder and there I saw it, my fatal number. This was the first time the sum of all my student loans had been revealed to me. My chest tightened. Below the first number lurked another, even more horrifying though its digits were fewer: the amount of my monthly payment.

I snapped the folder shut so my eyes could not see these numbers anymore. The crew team glided down the river, rowing in well-trained unison, and I felt mocked by the choice of their image for this particular folder, as I doubted there was any overlap between the students who rowed crew and those who left college with monstrous numbers in a folder.

I sat staring at the cup of pens and waited for whatever interview was coming. Would the questions concern my feelings about the numbers?

Then Eric explained that my exit interview was over. It didn’t involve any questions or answers, just him giving me the folder.

I crammed the folder into my satchel and stood. “Can I have a pen?” I asked.

“No,” he said: there was nothing more for me to sign away.

I stumbled out of the building into disorientingly bright sunlight and wandered the campus, forming my plan. Everywhere I walked, maintenance workers were placing potted flowers into the ground to form attractive displays for the parents who would soon arrive for graduation. My own parents would not be there, they couldn’t afford the journey.

Early the next morning I filled my satchel with pens and returned to the financial aid office, carrying the baleful folder. Though I had no appointment, the secretary waved me through to Eric. It is so easy to behave diabolically when nobody yet knows of your wickedness.

I told Eric I had doubts about the number I’d received the previous day. I suspected an error in the calculation of interest rates. I wanted to see my Master Promissory Note. He suggested he show me the individual loans instead, as they each had different rates, but I insisted on reading the original contract. He pulled a Bible-wide binder from the shelf and unsheathed my contract from its plastic sleeve. When finally I held that treacherous paper in my hands, I acted fast. I folded, I smushed, I crammed. I fit the whole thing into my mouth and chewed it to a pulp before Eric even moved to stop me.

When he did lurch across his desk, I was ready with pens from my satchel. I stabbed them into his hands. He yowled, I swallowed the mash in my mouth, and I looked at his bloodless torn-paper hands and saw what I could do. I grabbed his shoulders and yanked forward. It worked: he folded lengthwise and I smoothed his spine to a crease. He was a tall man, so I had to push hard to fold him down crosswise. Now he was a rectangle balanced on the chair. From there my folds got less laborious. I folded and creased, again and again.  When I finished, he was small enough to fit in my folder.

So as not to arouse suspicion, I made myself walk slowly away out of the aid office. I broke into a sprint only after I’d crossed the quad. I ran to the river, arriving at its foggy bank beside the crew team’s empty clubhouse. It was early; they were probably still out on the water. I wedged Eric down tighter into the folder’s inner pocket, snug beside my hideous numbers, and pitched the folder at the water. It floated soggily on the surface, refusing to vanish, and I began to fret. Then the sharp snout of the crew team’s scull approached, just alongside the floating evidence of my devilry. Their oars cut lines into the river’s surface, the water gulped the folder down, and Eric the keeper of binders no longer bound me. My debt was gone.