Nolan Ashby heard about the upcoming hearing from Dalton himself, delivered with the same casual pride he’d shown off the edited video with weeks earlier. “She’s done,” Dalton said, grinning as they walked out of practice. “My dad already talked to the conduct office. Six days and she’s out. Scholarship and everything.”
Nolan felt something twist hard in his stomach. Sharper this time than it had before. “Because of a video you cut up to make her look bad,” he said before he could stop himself. Dalton’s grin faded slightly. “Careful,” he said. “You’re starting to sound like you’re on her side.” “I’m not on anybody’s side,” Nolan said quickly, backing down. The old fear returning, the familiar pull toward the easy path instead of the right one. “Just saying. Seems like a lot over a napkin and an accident.”
“It’s not about the napkin,” Dalton said. “It’s about people knowing their place. She’s been walking around here for two months acting like she’s better than everybody, like she doesn’t need to laugh at our jokes or care what people think of her. Somebody’s got to remind her she’s just a scholarship kid, same as anybody else.”
Nolan said nothing else. He walked the rest of the way to his dorm in silence, Dalton’s words echoing uncomfortably in his mind. That night, he pulled up the video again, watching it one more time. This time all the way through the full unedited version he still had saved from before Reed had cut it down.
He watched Josie kneel down, pick her father’s napkin off the wet floor, hold it against her chest for one quiet moment before setting it gently back on the table. He watched her say, calm as anything, that she wasn’t looking for trouble, but wasn’t going to run from it either. He thought about Harold falling on the wet pavement and Dalton laughing instead of helping him up.
He thought about his grandmother’s letters again, unopened in his closet, and wondered, not for the first time, what she would think of the person he’d become since starting college, whether she’d recognize him at all. He didn’t sleep much that night.
The next four days passed in a strange, tense quiet. Josie continued attending classes, though the weight of the upcoming hearing sat on her shoulders in every lecture hall, every hallway conversation that fell suspiciously silent when she walked past. She kept coming to the Lantern most evenings, finding some measure of comfort in the familiar booth, in Walter’s steady presence, in Dorothy’s quiet company at the counter, in Harold’s crossword humming a few stools down, his wrist wrapped but healing.
She didn’t know about the phone or the footage it contained. She only knew that something in the diner felt different those days. A certainness in the way Walter and Dorothy exchanged glances when they thought she wasn’t looking, though she couldn’t have said what it meant.