The Voice They Didn't Deserve

Chapter 7 Fix It

Jonas Whitfield had never once needed to try at anything, which was exactly why the last two weeks had put him in a mood nobody at practice wanted to be near.

"Whitfield. You're dropping your shoulder again." Coach Reyes blew the whistle a second too late, after Jonas had already missed the catch by a full stride. "Where's your head at today?"

"Nowhere. I'm fine."

"You've been nowhere for two weeks straight." Coach didn't say it unkindly, which somehow made it worse. "Run it again."

Jonas ran it again. He dropped it again.

In the locker room after, nobody said much to him, which was its own kind of message. Two weeks ago guys would've ribbed him for a bad practice, made it a joke, moved on. Now they just changed quietly around him, like his mood had weather to it and nobody wanted to get caught outside. Only Marcus lingered, leaning against the lockers with his arms crossed, waiting him out.

"You gonna tell me what's actually going on," Marcus said, "or am I supposed to keep guessing."

"Nothing's going on."

"Right. Nothing's going on, which is why you've dropped more passes this week than the rest of the season combined." Marcus shrugged into his jacket. "Whatever it is, it's got you somewhere else. I've known you since third grade, Jonas. I can tell when your head's not in the room."

Jonas didn't answer that, and Marcus, to his credit, let it go for the moment, though he didn't look convinced. He never did, not really. That was the trouble with a friend who'd known you long enough to spot every version of your own excuses.

He knew exactly where his head was, and it wasn't on the field. It was on an auditorium stage two weeks ago, and a girl he'd meant to embarrass standing there instead making the entire school forget his name existed. It was on a masked voice on a television show that sounded, impossibly, exactly like hers. It was on his father's voice on the phone last night, flat and clipped the way it always got right before it turned into something worse. Heard you dropped three passes at practice this week. That's not the son I'm paying for.

Jonas hadn't had an answer for that. He didn't have one now either.

After practice, he found Marcus in the parking lot, already scrolling through his phone with the particular focus of someone who'd been assigned homework he actually wanted to do.

"Anything?" Jonas asked.

"Maybe." Marcus turned the screen around. "Fan account posted this three days ago. Photo outside some warehouse, supposedly where Hidden Voices films. Everyone's saying it's nothing, plate's unreadable, whatever."

"You don't think it's nothing."

"I think it's something. I just don't know what yet." Marcus zoomed in on the grainy image, useless as it was. "You're really doing this, huh. Full detective mode over a TV show."

"It's not about the show."

"Sure it isn't." Marcus didn't push it further, which Jonas appreciated more than he'd ever admit out loud. "So what's the plan. Stake out a warehouse three towns over based on a bad photo and a hunch?"

"The plan is I find out who she is before anyone else does."

"And then what?"

Jonas didn't have an answer for that either, not one he was ready to say out loud. The honest answer was that he didn't fully know what he wanted from the finding out itself, only that some part of him needed to be the one who solved it, needed one single thing this month that he'd actually earned instead of been handed or had taken away.

He drove home with the radio off, replaying the auditorium in his head the way he had most nights since it happened. He'd meant it as nothing, a joke, the kind of thing that would've blown over by Monday the way everything always did. He hadn't accounted for the way she'd actually sounded, hadn't accounted for the particular look on Ezra's face when he'd picked up that guitar, hadn't accounted for how thoroughly and completely the joke had turned around and landed on him instead.

His father's car was already in the driveway when he pulled in, which meant the house would be quiet in the specific, careful way it got whenever Richard Whitfield was home early. Jonas sat in his own car a full minute before going inside, gathering himself the way he'd learned to do since he was twelve, checking his own face in the rearview mirror for anything that might read as weak.

His father was in the kitchen, tie already loosened, a glass of something amber in one hand. He didn't look up when Jonas came in.

"Coach called me today."

"I know. I was there."

"You dropped three passes." Richard finally looked at him, and Jonas made himself hold the gaze, the way he'd also learned to do at twelve. "Three, Jonas. You've never dropped three passes in a single practice in your life."

"I had a bad day."

"You've had a bad two weeks. I've noticed. Your mother's noticed." Richard set the glass down with more force than the moment required. "This wouldn't happen to have anything to do with that stunt you pulled at the school talent show. The one that made you look like an i***t instead of the other way around."

Jonas said nothing. There wasn't a version of the truth that wouldn't make this worse.

From the doorway, he caught a glimpse of his mother passing through the hall, pausing just long enough to hear the tone of the conversation before continuing on without a word, the way she always did. She wouldn't intervene. She never had. Jonas had stopped expecting her to somewhere around age fourteen, and the not-expecting had become its own quiet ache he'd learned to carry without examining too closely.

"I built this family's name on being the person people respect, not the person people laugh at. You understand that a scholarship offer doesn't care how many touchdowns you throw if half the school's already decided you're a joke." Richard picked the glass back up, done with the conversation as suddenly as he'd started it. "Fix it. Whatever it takes. I don't care how."

Jonas went up to his room without dinner, not because he wasn't hungry but because sitting across from his father for another twenty minutes felt like more than he had in him tonight. He pulled out his phone and looked again at the blurry photo Marcus had sent, at the black mask, the half-visible plate, the girl whose voice had undone two weeks of his life without her even knowing his name existed outside of a cruel joke.

Fix it, his father had said. Whatever it takes.

Jonas didn't know yet what fixing it would even look like. He only knew that finding out who she really was had stopped being about the prank days ago, and had turned into something closer to the only thing in his life right now that felt like it might actually be his to solve.

He typed a message to Marcus before he let himself think too hard about it.

Get me everything you can find on that warehouse. I don't care how long it takes.

The reply came back almost instantly.

Now we're talking. What's in it for me?

Jonas almost smiled for the first time all day. Whatever you want. Just find her.

He set the phone face-down on his desk and sat there a long moment in the dark, listening to the muffled sound of his parents' voices somewhere downstairs, too low to make out words, familiar in a way that had stopped being comforting years ago. Whatever it takes, his father had said. For the first time in a long time, Jonas wasn't entirely sure he was doing this for his father's sake anymore.