By the time Joe reached the room, she was breathing a little harder, but her face gave nothing away. She set her bags down. A girl was already there, sitting cross-legged on one of the two beds, sorting through a box of photographs. “You must be Joe,” the girl said. “I’m Nora. Nora Bennett.”
Nora had dark curly hair and a quick smile. She was a journalism major, she explained, though she had only been on campus for two days and had already made friends with half the building. “Nice to meet you,” Joe said. That was all. Nora waited for more. It did not come. She would learn over the following weeks that Joe Callaway did not fill silence just to fill it. When she spoke, she meant it.
Nora tried again anyway because that was simply how she was built. “Where are you from?” “Small town in Ohio,” Joe said. “You’ve probably never heard of it.” “Try me.” Joe told her. Nora, true to prediction, had never heard of it and admitted as much with a laugh that put Joe slightly more at ease than she expected.
They spent the next half hour arranging furniture, deciding who got which side of the room. The ordinary small negotiations of two strangers learning to share a space. Nora talked enough for both of them, filling the room with easy chatter about her hometown, her older brother, the newspaper her mother still read every morning cover to cover before anyone else in the house was allowed near the coffee pot.
Joe listened more than she spoke, the way she usually did, though something about Nora’s easy warmth made the listening feel less like distance and more like rest. Asheford State University was not a famous school. It did not have a football program that made national news. But in a town this small, the football team was still something close to royalty, and every royalty needs a court.
At the center of that court stood a young man named Grant Sterling. Grant was the team’s starting quarterback and had been since his sophomore year. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of easy charm that made teachers forgive him, and parents trust him without asking why. His father, Preston Sterling, owned three car dealerships across the county and sat on the university’s board of trustees.
When people in Asheford said the name Sterling, they said it the way you might say the name of a bank, with a kind of automatic respect. Grant had two friends who moved with him everywhere, the way shadows move with a body in the late afternoon sun. One was Wade Holloway, a linebacker with a temper that ran hot and fast. The other was a quieter young man named Cole Ashby, a wide receiver who rarely spoke first, but always laughed on cue.
Together, the three of them had spent two years building a reputation. Not one they had earned through kindness. One they had earned through fear. Joe did not know any of this yet. On her first Wednesday at Asheford, all she knew was that cheerleading tryouts began at four in the university gymnasium, and she intended to be there early.