Signed to Hate You

Chapter6: The fallout

AVERY

Dom doesn't step into the closet. He doesn't have to. He holds the phone at chest height, where the light from the corridor catches the screen, and taps once.

My own voice comes out of it, small and flat through the speaker. Because I won't be the one to fall first. I want that on the record.

Then nothing. Four full seconds of nothing, a cup rolling, a swinging bulb, and a boy not answering. Then Julian, very quietly: Ave.

Dom lets it sit. He lets the silence play to the end, and I realize that's what he's been waiting for. The answer that never came.

"There's a part before that, where he reads your rules back like a scoreboard." His thumb hovers over the screen. "Thirty seconds, Quinn. Nobody needs the whole movie to know how it ends.”

My pulse is in my throat. I could take two steps and grab the phone. He'd hold it over his head, and he's six feet and I'm not, and a boy with a recording and a girl lunging at him is a better video than anything Riley has posted this week.

So I don't move. I keep my hands where he can see them.

"What do you want?"

Dom's eyes slide past me. "Not from you, Quinn."

Julian hasn't spoken. He's standing very straight beside the shelf of cups, one hand closed on his wristband so hard the knuckles have gone pale.

"Scrimmage on Saturday," Dom says. "You tell Hale you're distracted, you step aside as captain, and I run it. Tonight, or this goes to Coach Vargas."

A pause, polite. "I hear she has a sheet with your girl's initials on it. Anything further, and all."

I don't know how he knows about the sheet. I never said a word about it to anyone.

"Give me until tonight," Julian says.

It's the first thing he's said since Ave, and it sounds like it cost him.

Dom's smile finally reaches his eyes. He taps the screen, and I watch a small word appear under his thumb. Saved.

"Sure," he says. "Take your time.”

***

Dom doesn't wait until tonight.

I find out at ten past eleven, when my phone buzzes in the middle of a stretch and the screen says Coach Vargas: Gym. Now. Nothing else. No please. She has never once texted me without one.

Take your time, he told Julian. Dom smiled when he said it.

The retreat gym is empty and smells of floor polish. Vargas stands at center court with her clipboard flat against her hip and her phone in her other hand, screen up.

Even from the doorway I can hear it. My own voice, tiny and tinny. I won't be the one to fall first.

She stops it before the silence.

"Thirty-one seconds," she says. "It reached my inbox ten minutes ago. I've heard it twice."

She checks my posture before she says anything else. Chin, shoulders, feet. It's how she steadies a girl before the real conversation, and for the first time it feels like a hand on my collar.

"Tell me what I'm listening to."

A rule. A clause. The word contract isn't in there, and she knows it. I could say it's a private conversation. That someone recorded it without telling me. All of that is true, and none of it is an answer.

"A private conversation," I say. "Which someone recorded."

"That's not a defense, Avery. That's a description."

"It's what I have."

Vargas looks at me for a long moment. Then she lowers her voice, the way she does when she's about to be kind.

"I can make this small. Tell me it's staged. Tell me it's a bit for the retreat. I put that in the file, you keep your position, and we walk to Saturday."

Say it's fake and you keep the spot. A clean exit, handed over on a clipboard.

And she'd have it in writing. In Vargas's handwriting, in a file, in a drawer that Maya's name is already printed in.

"No," I say.

"No it isn't staged? Or no, you won't tell me?"

"No comment."

My voice doesn't shake. I don't know where it comes from. Probably from a locker-room hallway two days ago and a red dot that never lowered.

She nods, once, slowly. "Then it's a further incident. I'm sorry."

The side door opens.

Maya comes in already in her warm-ups, hair tied, a water bottle in one hand, with the loose, easy walk of a girl who has been waiting on the other side of a door. Nobody called her. I'd have heard it. She's already here.

"Coach," she says softly.

Vargas turns to the clipboard and takes the pen from behind her ear. She crosses out my name at the top of the flyer line. One neat stroke. Writes M. Torres above it in the same small square hand.

Maya doesn't look at the sheet. She looks at me.

"I'll be careful with it," she says.

***

I find Julian's schedule on the Crestwood door in a stranger's handwriting. 11:40, Coach Hale, Lodge B. It's 11:38.

I don't decide to go. My feet go ahead of me across the gravel with Maya's I'll be careful with it still sitting in my ears.

Lodge B is a squat wooden building, one window dark, one lit. A low voice comes through the screen door that was never meant to carry.

I stop on the step. The door is open two inches.

"Say it again," Hale says. His voice has no volume at all. It's the voice he uses when a drill has failed and he already knows why.

"I'm stepping aside as captain." Julian. Level, careful, the voice that reads out scores. "For Saturday's scrimmage. Dom runs it."

A chair creaks. "You've never missed a minute of a game you wanted. Give me the reason."

"I've been distracted." A pause that goes on a second too long. "You said it yourself."

"I said it to see what you'd say." Paper shifts on a desk. "Shaw hasn't sent me anything. So what's he holding?"

Julian doesn't answer.

I stand perfectly still on the step with my hand flat against the doorframe. Splinters bite under my palm, and I let them.

"If I don't do this, it goes further," Julian says, finally. Lower. "To you. To Riley. I'd rather it stop here."

"And her?"

My stomach drops. Not at the word. At how he says nothing.

"She doesn't know," Julian says.

She doesn't know. Four syllables, and the whole morning turns over. Vargas and the pen. Maya's easy walk.

The cost of Dom's phone landing on me, and the boy who just told a coach he'd pay for it, in a room I wasn't invited into.

I can't tell if I've been helped or handled. They look exactly alike from out here.

Hale sets something down hard. "Fine. Scrimmage is Dom's. Don't confuse that with forgiveness."

Chair legs scrape. Footsteps cross the floor, heavy, toward the door.

I step back off the stairs. Then again, onto the gravel, quietly, the way you leave a stunt you weren't called for.

The screen door swings open behind me, and I'm already gone.

***

Riley's post goes up at twelve-fifteen, while I'm sitting on the back step of the girls' lodge not reading it.

I read it anyway. A photo of Maya in warm-ups, mid-stretch, hair tied back, smiling at somebody off-frame. squad update : Maya Torres is your new flyer for Saturday!, sometimes the girl who stays kind steps up. Two thousand likes before I've finished the caption.

The girl who stays kind. It has my

face-sized hole in it.

"Avery."

Julian stops a few feet from the step. Out of breath, like he walked fast and then made himself slow.

No jacket, hair damp from somewhere, wristband in his fist instead of on his wrist. He looks like someone who has just been in a room where it cost him something.

He doesn't say what.

I could tell him. I heard you. I stood on Hale's step and I heard every word. Four seconds pass and I let them go by.

"Dom," he says. "I handled it."

Handled. There's the word. It goes into my chest like a cold coin.

"Okay," I say.

He reaches into his back pocket and takes out a folded sheet, creased soft at the edges. Our page.

He holds it out the way you offer someone a stunt card. "Keep this. You should be the one holding it, not me."

I take it. It's warm from his pocket.

He turns to go. I look down, because it's something to do with my eyes, and my thumb smooths the fold open out of nothing but habit.

Two weeks. Public appearances. The typed lines, the two signatures. And at the very bottom, in the footer, so small I missed it the first time on the hood of a car, a line of gray type.

Drafted: Sept. 11.

I read the date. I read the retreat date, two days ago, from the poster on the lodge wall across the lawn.

Almost a month.

"Julian."

He stops. Turns slowly. I stand, and the page shakes in my hand, a small steady shake I can't stop.

"You said last night." I hold it up so the footer faces him. "This says September."

He doesn't look at me. He looks at the gray line at the bottom of the page, and I watch the color leave his face one shade at a time.

His thumb goes to his wristband. The clasp slips. It hits the gravel with a small flat click, and he doesn't bend to pick it up.

"Which night, Julian?" My voice comes out quiet, which is worse than loud. "The one you told me about, or the one on this page?"

Nothing. The wind moves the flags on the lodge roof. Behind me, Riley's post glows on the step, Maya's smile at the top of it.

His lips part.