The revision history filled the whole screen behind her. Four months of edits, every one with a name and a timestamp beside it. Mine, at one in the morning. Mine, at three. Mine, on Thanksgiving.
Ashley had eleven edits total. Most of them were changing the font on the title slide. One was adding her own name to the top.
She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. She looked at the screen, then at me, then at the professor.
The girl in the front row put her hand over her mouth.
I did not say anything. I did not have to. I just scrolled slowly so the professor could see the dates. Then I closed the laptop and finished the presentation by myself, the way I wrote it.
Professor Hensley did not say a word until the end. Then he thanked us both, and asked Ashley to stay after class.
I had spent a whole semester believing nobody would ever see what I did, and it had been sitting in a little gray menu the entire time.
That evening I got an email from him. He said he had seen group projects go this way for twenty years, and that he appreciated me handling it without a fight. He said grades on the final would be assigned individually, based on contribution. Then he said something I was not expecting. He asked if I would come to his office hours that week.
I got an A on the project. My scholarship was safe.
At office hours, he asked what I wanted to do after graduation. I told him I did not really know. He told me he was looking for a teaching assistant for the spring, somebody organized, somebody who did the work even when nobody was watching. He said he had just watched me do exactly that for four months.
I took the job. It pays. It also looks good on a graduate school application, which I had never thought about applying for until he brought it up.
Ashley did not say anything to me for weeks. Then, the last day of the semester, she caught me outside the library. She said she was sorry. She said she had been working two jobs and was too embarrassed to admit she could not keep up. She figured if she looked confident, nobody would notice.
I told her she should have just said so. I would have helped her. She knew that. That was the part that bothered her most.
The girl from the front row, Priya, found me the next week. She said she saw me in the library every night and always wanted to say hi. We study together now. We are both applying to the same graduate program.
This spring, in the class I help teach, the very first thing I show every group is where to find the revision history.
Nobody has tried it since.