Chapter Eight

EIGHT

A few weeks later, I stand in the office kitchen, surveying the options. Chocolate-covered pretzels. Chocolate-covered strawberries. Chocolate-covered almonds.

Figure out the first shot of the video, and the rest will fall into place.

I chew my lip. Weren't there muffins here an hour ago? The platter is still there, but it's clean except for a few telltale crumbs. It's almost Christmas, which means daily deliveries of gifts to Coach Thomas from friends and supporters. Gold, frankincense, and Harry & David pears.

What about starting with the empty court…Meh, uninspired.

Maybe a pretzel? But it's only nine fifteen in the morning, and I've already eaten three.

What if…No, too similar to last week's video. How about…Not practical. It'll never be done in time.

I mosey over to the bathroom and examine my eyebrows in the mirror. Is the one on the left thicker than the one on the right? I've never noticed before.

Maybe I'm going about it all wrong. Maybe I should end with a shot of the empty court.

Hm. Better.

I meander back toward my office, stopping in the hallway to chat with Betsy from Compliance about her son's wisdom tooth surgery. Eric appears as soon as Betsy walks away. "Hey, Annie, is that video for the recruits ready yet? I want to send it out tonight."

It is, thankfully. Unlike the next hype video, which is still working itself out in my head. "All done," I say. "I'll send it to you when I'm back at my desk."

He raises his eyebrows. "And when will that be? Ten?" His tone is playful, but he's not wrong. It's all part of my process. Also, I have a process now. This job requires actual creativity. I let things percolate in my brain in the morning, sometimes wandering the building while I think. I get them done later, usually at night. I do my best work then, when the office is quiet and few people are around.

"Very funny."

"It's usually closer to ten thirty." Ben's disembodied voice comes from his office. My non-identical eyebrows contract. Eric is my friend, and he's allowed to joke about my work habits. But Ben is not invited to this bantering session.

How does he know my routine, anyway? I tuck my hair behind my ears. "Got my schedule memorized, Callahan?" To Eric: "Let's get away from the heckler."

"You're talking right outside my door," Ben protests.

Okay, fair. I shoot him daggers anyway, but he's already focused on his computer again, the tip of his tongue poking through at the corner of his mouth. Eric follows me into my office.

"I'm coming over tonight to keep Cass company while she packs," I say, leaning over my computer to drag the file into an email and send it to Eric.

Cassie's big case settled, so she's going to New Orleans for ten days to see her family. Eric will join her for forty-eight hours, flying down on Christmas Eve. I'll be at my parents' house in New Jersey, submerged in Dad's old leather couch with the cupholders, watching games with Kat and reading Mom the instructions for her AncestryDNA kit. Holidays still don't feel right without Dad, and they probably never will. We need to accept that instead of trying to fight it.

Eric points at me with both hands. "That reminds me, Cassie's already thinking ahead to when she gets back. The Beach House starts in January. You should come watch at our house."

"You guys are obsessed, huh?" I take a big sip from my new water bottle. It has lines marking how much I'm supposed to drink each hour. I used to be good about staying hydrated, but lately I keep forgetting.

"Have you ever seen it?"

I wrinkle my nose. "I've seen the commercials."

He makes a pssh sound and picks up a mass of fleece from the back of the chair facing my desk. He holds it up and turns it in different directions, trying to figure out which end is up. I have a lot of fleece in my office, but this item is reserved for the coldest days. The thermostat war is still ongoing.

"Is the actual show drastically different than the commercials?" I ask.

He ignores the question. That's a no. "We do a fantasy league with some friends. You pick different contestants each episode and get points when they kiss or go skinny-dipping or fight. It gets competitive. Is this a dress?"

"It's a wearable blanket."

"Looks like a dress."

"I bought it at the grocery store. Nothing sold at Giant legally qualifies as clothing."

Before he can say the words "meat dress," my phone buzzes.

Quincy: can you come to my room

Quincy: 911

I squint, rereading the messages. Uh-oh. I hope he's not upset about the assholes online who've been calling him "soft" since he tweaked his ankle during our last game. In high school he injured the same ligaments—badly. Losing him would be disastrous, so he's sitting out tomorrow as a precaution and will have plenty of time to recover over the nine-day holiday break.

I kick Eric out of my office and hustle over to Quincy's dorm. It's easy enough to find. His RA must be a Cricut fanatic, since each door in the hallway is marked with an elaborate sign listing its residents' names atop a cartoon stack of books. Someone scrawled a lazy sketch of a penis on the I in Quincy with a Sharpie.

"That was fast," he says when he opens the door, dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie. A mountain of similar sweatpants and hoodies sits on the floor behind him. His roommate, another freshman basketball player, is nowhere to be found.

"What's wrong?"

His face is grim. "Follow me. We need to go to the basement."

"I'm not totally opposed to helping you dispose of a body," I say, "but it depends on the circumstances of the murder."

We take the elevator because of his ankle, emerging into a musty corridor and then entering a fluorescent-lit room. There's no body, and, in fact, nothing worthy of a 911 text at all. Just a basket full of sweaty clothes and an unopened bottle of Tide.

"Oh, hell no," I say. "You did not summon me here to do your laundry."

A guilty chuckle escapes his mouth. "It's not like that! I summoned you here so you can teach me how to do laundry."

I sniff the clothes from a safe distance. The smell is…ripe. "How have you survived all semester without learning how to wash your clothes?"

"I have an NIL deal with Tommy John, so I get a lot of free underwear." He looks away, sheepish. "And, uh, Andreatti's girlfriend and her roommates usually do it for us. But they went home for Christmas already."

"Wow. Laundry service and you literally get paid to put on your underpants in the morning? I'd say the life of a college athlete is all glamour, but I saw the Sharpie dick on the door of the cinder block closet you live in."

"I think they let stuff grow in the showers to keep us humble." He opens the detergent and pours it into the washing machine. And keeps pouring.

"Stop!" I cry. "That's more than enough."

"I don't use the whole thing?" His expression is guileless. Jesus, I think he's serious.

After an introductory lesson in measuring by the capful and choosing a water temperature, I hop onto an empty dryer while Quincy sorts his clothes according to my instructions.

"An NIL deal for undies," I muse. The NCAA rules changed a few years ago, so now players can profit off their name, image, and likeness without losing eligibility. It's only right, given how much money the schools, sponsors, and advertisers make off them. "Are you leaning toward declaring for the draft?"

He shrugs, pulling the whites out of the pile. "I've been talking to a few agents. They think it's a good idea. If I go pro after this year, I'll maximize my earning potential."

"What does Coach Thomas think?" I don't know the right path for Quincy, but he's so young. It would be a tough decision for anyone. I'm sure he's considering every factor like a weight on the scale: the way college ball is honing his game, the risk to his body, the value of a degree as a backup plan. And money, like gravity, pulling each side up or down.

"Of course he thinks I should stay," Quincy scoffs. "It's better for the team if I do."

"Put everyone else's opinions aside. What do you want to do?" I ask.

He stares pensively at the T-shirt in his hands. "I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's not up to me."

That night, when the hallway is dark except for rectangles of light thrown onto the carpet from Ben's office and mine, a young woman walks past my door.

I pull off my headphones and toss them onto the desk in a dramatic gesture visible to no one. Come on. It's the third time this week. The girl is a student. Her ID dangles around her neck, and she has a part-time job in the academic support office, tutoring athletes.

When she visits Ben in his office it's always at night, and they always close the door. Their voices are muffled, and sometimes they laugh. She stays for thirty minutes or so.

I don't know what's happening. Nobody's moaning or anything, but it seems inappropriate. This girl is young and a student, and Ben is senior to her, if only in an indirect way. She tutors basketball players. In theory he has the power to say something to somebody that might affect her future employment prospects. I never would've picked him out as someone who would exploit a nineteen-year-old, but the ones people don't expect are often the most dangerous. Except maybe the ones people call dangerous repeatedly for years to no effect.

Enough is enough. I have a legitimate need to speak to Ben tonight, anyway. I get up and approach his office, hovering for a moment with my ear turned toward the door. They're talking, but I can't discern anything specific.

I brace myself and open the door without knocking. I'm not sure what I expected to see. Skin, maybe. Or Ben giving the girl a back rub while commanding her in a whisper: "Write Andreatti's history essay."

Andreatti is on the cusp of academic ineligibility. He really does need to nail his history essay.

Instead, Ben is sitting in his desk chair and the girl is across from him. There is an unbreachable barrier of computing devices between them, her laptop and his desktop and somebody's tablet and a literal calculator, plus the desk itself. She's got an open notebook in her lap. Nobody is giving anyone a back rub. Relief floods my body.

Ben and the girl turn to me in unison. His hands still on his keyboard, he tilts his head, face blank. The girl smiles, not knowing this isn't normal.

"What are you doing?" he asks.

"Sorry, I didn't realize you were with someone," I say breezily. "I need to talk to you."

"I'm busy." His palm falls open toward the girl.

I take it as an invitation. "Hi, I'm Annie." I reach out my hand.

"I'm Kendall. I love your videos!" Her handshake is like a newborn baby's, her voice bashful as she delivers the compliment. Up close she has round adolescent cheeks full of potential and a constellation of pimples on her chin.

Gosh, I used to be that young. When I was her age, I thought thirty-year-olds were people who had just finished the decade where they made all their important life decisions and were now embarking on a lifetime of living with the consequences.

I'm still not sure that perception was wrong.

"Thanks. Is this a personal meeting?" I ask.

"Uh," Kendall says, turning back to Ben. I want him to be the one to answer, but he's glowering at me silently, his eyes like the stubborn coals at the end of a campfire.

"Because I need to talk to you. About work."

He doesn't say anything. Under the fluorescent lights of his office, I'm starting to feel obvious. My face is hot. I ate a wrap for dinner and forgot to check my teeth in the mirror after, so I slide my tongue across my top teeth. Maybe I should withdraw into the dark hallway like a ghost.

Kendall is not the type of person to allow a silence to linger. "He's helping me with a project for one of my classes. It's about free lunch for low-income students."

"What?" This makes no sense. Ben doesn't know anything about free lunch for low-income students. "Students who play basketball?"

Finally Ben speaks, his voice resigned. "Her topic is related to my master's thesis."

"I can email you. I don't want to keep you from your work," Kendall says to him. Her laptop clicks as she shuts it.

While she gathers her things, I say, "Next time you can keep the door open. I'm the only other one here, don't worry about disturbing me."

I wait until I can no longer hear Kendall's keys jangling down the hallway before I speak again. "You went to grad school?"

He rubs his face and puts the calculator in a drawer. "I did a master's in applied statistics here. I was a grad assistant for a year before I started this job." His stubble is verging on scruffy for once, and he has purple-gray hollows under his eyes.

"Ah." It makes sense. After I left, Coach Maynard stuck around for one more year. If a spot for a grad assistant coach was available, Ben was the obvious choice.

Ben must really love numbers, or Ardwyn, or both. A grad assistant position is a temporary gig, but it could've put him on track to a more permanent coaching job somewhere by now. As director of analytics, he's not a coach, and that's not just semantics. There are a lot of things he can't do in his current position, according to the NCAA: give instruction or feedback to the players, help with recruiting. Things he'd be good at, that I'd have thought he wanted to do.

Right now, though, it looks like what he wants is to throw me out of his office. "Why did you do that? My door was shut for a reason. You can't barge in."

"It's nice that you're helping her, but this is work-related."

"And did you know I wasn't doing work when you busted in here without knocking, or did you not care?"

"But you weren't doing work."

He gives his monitor a dark longing look, like he'd rather jump into it and tuck himself into cell A1 of a spreadsheet, any spreadsheet, even one full of circular references and formula errors, if the alternative is sitting here talking to me. "What do you want?"

"We need to do the interview. For your profile." Not my primary motivation for barging in, but it is true. "It was supposed to go up a week ago, I keep having to come up with new excuses, and we can't put it off any longer. Let's film it tonight."

"I'm busy." It's the third time he's given me this excuse. "I need to finish some lineup analysis."

Bullshit. He doesn't need to do that tonight. Tomorrow's lineup is set, and then we have the long break.

"Yeah, well, I have work to do too. This interview. It's part of my job, and this series was Coach Thomas's idea in the first place, so it's part of your job too."

"Annie. Not tonight."

Case closed, apparently. His voice sounds particularly firm when he says it. I wish I could teleport to the green room at my apartment and lie on the turf, talking to Mona Lisa Vito while the ceiling fan spins. Mona Lisa, I'd say. Can you believe he said that? In that voice. Mona Lisa would shake her head. She'd get it right away. The voice of the patriarchy, she'd say. Maybe not in those exact words, but the sentiment would come through.

I haven't been able to get him to cooperate by being polite, and I haven't been able to get him to cooperate by being assertive. Probably I could get my way by crying, or not even a full cry, just blinking wet eyes and a shaky voice, but I'm tired and righteous and I can't afford the tears. I'm an hour behind on my water bottle.

I retreat, like I did the last two times I tried to get his interview done. Back to my cryogenic chamber, where the chill hits me harder than usual after all the stress-induced sweating I did in Ben's office.

Before I round the corner of the desk, I spin back to grab my wearable blanket. And to add injury to insult, my elbow smashes into the filing cabinet.

"Fuck," I hiss, but it comes out as unintelligible air. I screw up my face and my fists as the pain radiates everywhere. Now my eyes are actually watering. Something inside me snaps, and I hear Dad's voice in my head: Don't be afraid to take up space in the paint.

It's something he used to say all the time when I started out at Ardwyn as a tentative, intimidated freshman, unsure how to make myself valuable to the team. He takes up space in the paint is normally a charitable way of talking about a player the size of a sequoia who doesn't do much other than get in the other team's way. But it's not a complete knock. Standing there, ensuring that others need to factor in your presence, is important.

Don't make yourself small, that's what Dad meant.

I don't know if anything I'm doing at Ardwyn this year is making a difference. But at least I can make sure Ben understands that I'm here, and I'm not going away, at least not yet.

"Look, I know you think your job is way more important than my job." I wheel around, ranting before I'm even back in his doorway. "You won't let me forget it, that you don't have time for me, that my work is insignificant and I don't deserve to be here, that you matter more than I do. This didn't have to be a fucking competition. You don't have to sabotage me. You're being a jerk. I don't know how you became this person, but you need to get your head out of your ass, because I'm sick of it."

He looks stunned. "I'm—"

"No." I hold up a finger. "Whatever you're about to say, I don't want to hear it. Just no. Meet me on the court at seven. We're doing the interview then." I turn on my heel without waiting for an answer.

Back at my desk, my computer pings with a new message. An icon with Ben's face and name appears. A first for us.

Ben: Sorry. I'll see you at 7.