“I know how it looks,” Coach Marsh said. “I don’t know that it’s true.” “Then let the hearing sort that out,” Delroy said, not unkindly, but firmly. The way a man says something he has said too many times before to still feel good about it. “That’s what it’s there for.”
Coach Marsh left his office unsatisfied, the folder still tucked under her arm, and walked the long way back across the darkening quad, turning the whole conversation over in her mind. She had learned a long time ago that being right and being believed were not always the same thing, especially in a place where certain last names carried more weight than certain truths.
She thought of the way Joe had looked at her in that first meeting. Steady, controlled, entirely without the panic a guilty person usually could not help but show. She thought of the way Joe had caught Paige out of the air weeks earlier, trained reflexes moving faster than fear. Whatever was happening here, Coach Marsh was increasingly certain it had very little to do with a fitness evaluation, and everything to do with a boy who did not like being told no.
She did not yet have proof of that either, but she was patient. She had been patient for eleven years, watching young athletes grow into themselves, and she understood in the particular way coaches understand timing that sometimes the right move was simply to wait for the moment when proof finally arrived.
News of the suspension moved through the squad fast and predictably. It moved through campus faster. By the next morning, half the dining hall was repeating some version of the story. Most of it wrong, most of it worse than the truth. Paige found Joe outside the library that afternoon, her face pale with worry. “They’re saying you cheated,” Paige said, breathless like she had run the whole way. “That’s not true. I know that’s not true.” “It’s not true,” Joe confirmed.
“Then why would they even think that? Why would anyone put something like that in your bag?” Joe did not answer right away. She was watching over Paige’s shoulder. A familiar figure crossing the quad at a distance. Grant Sterling walking beside Wade Holloway. Both of them laughing at something. Neither of them so much as glancing in her direction. That itself told her something. Guilty men rarely look away that easily. Only men who have already convinced themselves they will never be caught can afford not to look.
“I think I know why,” Joe said quietly. “I just don’t have proof yet.” “What do we do?” “We wait,” Joe said, echoing Coach Marsh, though the word tasted different in her own mouth. Heavier. “And we watch.” Paige nodded, though her eyes were still wet, still frightened in a way that had nothing to do with fitness evaluations or locker rooms.
She had grown close to Joe faster than she had grown close to almost anyone else at Asheford. And watching her friend get dragged through campus gossip for something she clearly had not done left a helpless, angry feeling in her chest that she did not know what to do with. She would find out sooner than she wanted to exactly what that helplessness could turn into if left unchecked.