Pretty Little Touchdown

Chapter 2

There is a specific kind of stupid you only find out you are in a lecture hall.

Not the normal kind. The normal kind you can hide. The normal kind you can smile through, nod through, laugh at the right beat and nobody ever checks. I have been hiding the normal kind since I was fourteen.

The other kind gets projected onto a screen at the front of a room in twelve-foot letters while a man in a quarter-zip explains it like he’s telling you the weather.

“So the null hypothesis here,” Professor Oyelaran says, “is what?”

Nobody answers. He waits. He is a patient man, which is somehow worse.

“Anyone. It’s on the slide.”

It is on the slide. I am looking directly at the slide. I have been looking at this slide for ninety seconds and the words have arranged themselves into a shape I recognize as English and refuse to mean anything.

COMM 240: Quantitative Methods in Communication Research. Required for the major. Required for the degree. Three credits, one midterm, one final, one semester-long research project, and a syllabus that says, in bold, on page one, that this course “assumes comfort with basic statistics.”

I have no comfort with basic statistics. I have no comfort with any statistics. I have a Fairview High math education, which is to say I had one very tired woman teaching four sections of Algebra II in a room with a broken radiator, and I have the distinct and permanent sense of having been handed a book in a language everyone else learned as a baby.

Here is the joke, and it is a good one, so I want you to appreciate it.

I can do math.

I can do math constantly. I can look at a plate of food from six feet away and give you a number. I can convert grams into a decision. I can hold four running totals in my head at once while smiling, while stretching, while nodding at something Melina is saying about her mother’s decorator. The ticker does not stop. The ticker is brilliant. The ticker could get a PhD.

Put a confidence interval in front of me and my brain goes as smooth and blank as a wall.

Professor Oyelaran gives up on us and answers his own question. I write down what he says. I do not understand a word of it, but I write it down, because that is my entire academic strategy: transcribe now, decode later, in the fourth-floor study booth of the Callahan Wing at eleven o’clock at night with three tabs of a free tutorial website open and my forehead in my hand.

The Rowen Scholarship (not named after me, obviously, I just got lucky that the dead man who endowed it happened to be a Rowen and the alumni office thought it was charming) requires a 3.4. Not a 3.0, which is what most of them require. A 3.4. I have a 3.51. I have a 3.51 the way a person on a ledge has a handhold.

If it drops, I lose the money. If I lose the money, I lose the tuition, the meal plan, the housing, the uniform with my last name stitched in the collar, all of it, in one motion, like a tablecloth pulled out from under everything. There is no second plan. My mother works at a dental office in Fairview and my sister is fifteen and there is no version of this where somebody writes a check.

So I sit in this room four hours a week, and then I sit in that tiny study booth in the corner, and I claw a 3.51 out of the dirt every single semester with my fingernails, while girls around me who have never opened a textbook in their lives pull the same grades and go to brunch.

“Anybody know what he’s talking about?”

The voice comes from directly beside me. Low, amused, entirely unbothered by the fact that we are in the middle of a lecture.

I don’t have to look. Everyone in this room has known who is sitting in seat 14C since the first day, because on the first day he arrived eleven minutes late carrying an iced coffee and a small dog.

Beckett Ashford has taken the seat next to mine for three weeks. Not because of me. Because it’s the aisle, and the aisle means he can leave whenever he wants, and Beckett Ashford has never once in his life sat anywhere he couldn’t leave.

“He’s talking about hypothesis testing,” I whisper.

“Is he? Because he’s been saying words for forty minutes and I’ve been getting steadily dumber. Genuinely. I think he’s taking it out of me.”

“You could take notes.”

“I could.” He does not take notes. He is drawing something in the margin of a notebook that has, as far as I can tell, nothing else in it. “Do you understand any of this?”

“Yes,” I lie.

He looks over at me. Beckett has this way of looking at you where you can feel him checking your work.

“No, you don’t,” he says. “You’re doing the thing where your jaw goes tight.”

I stare at the slide.

“That’s a rude thing to say.”

“It was an observation.”

“It was a rude observation.”

“Most of them are.” He goes back to his drawing. “Relax, Rowen. Half this room doesn’t understand it and the other half is lying about it. You’re just the only one honest enough to look upset.”

I do not know what to do with that, so I do nothing with it.

Here is what everyone at Wexford knows about Beckett Ashford. His grandfather founded Ashford Capital. His father runs it. His name is on the plaque above the fireplace in Havermeyer, on the east wing of the athletic complex, and on a residence hall he has, to my knowledge, never entered. He was asked not to return to two boarding schools, though the specifics change depending on who is telling it. He is richer than Chase, richer than Melina, richer than anyone, which is a sentence that means very little to me practically and a great deal to me socially, since it is the only fact about him anybody bothers to repeat.

Here is what I have noticed about Beckett Ashford, personally, over three weeks in seat 14D.

But when Nadia Ruiz, who works two jobs and sometimes falls asleep in the third row, missed a week in September because her mother was sick, Beckett photographed his notebook, which contained nothing, realized this, walked across the hall to a stranger, borrowed hers, photographed those, and sent them to Nadia with no message attached. I know this because Nadia told me in the bathroom, baffled, holding her phone like it might go off.

Trouble. But not cruel. Those are different animals and I grew up in a house that taught me to tell them apart very fast.

Professor Oyelaran releases us at 3:52.

I pack my bag slowly on purpose so I don’t have to walk out in the middle of the crowd, and while I’m doing it my brain, unsupervised, does what it has been trying to do for six days.

A soft grey sweater. A hand on my elbow.

I feel it hit my face before I can stop it, the heat coming up my throat and over my cheeks like someone opened an oven, and I duck my head into my bag and pretend to look for a pen.

It’s so stupid. It is so stupid. He held my elbow for four seconds in a dining hall and I have thought about it approximately nine hundred times.

But it’s the way he did it. That’s the thing nobody warns you about with Chase Callahan. It isn’t the face, though god, the face. Up close his face was an act of violence. It’s that he let go slowly. He let go slowly, like he was checking that I could stand, and he made up a whole lie about walking into me so I wouldn’t have to be embarrassed, and he did all of it in about six seconds for a girl he has never seen before and will never see again.

Nobody does that. Nobody who doesn’t have to.

And then, because my brain cannot leave anything alone, it goes where it always goes.

He does not study.

Everyone knows he doesn’t study. Chase Callahan is in the honors track, and he is in season, and he has a 3.8, and Melina told me last spring that he sat down forty minutes before a Constitutional Law midterm, skimmed, and walked out with an A. She said it the way you’d describe weather. Priya nodded like this was normal.

He didn’t need any of it anyway. There’s a wing of the library with his name on it. There’s a portrait of his grandfather in the alumni club. There’s a first-round draft projection and a shipping fortune and a family that has not had to want anything since the eighteen hundreds. If he failed every class at this university tomorrow, his life would not change by one degree.

He got it all. The face, the money, the arm, the brain, and on top of all of that, so much of it that it spills out onto strangers, the kindness.

And I am in a tiny study booth until midnight fighting for a 3.51 to keep a scholarship that keeps a bed that keeps me here, and I don’t even know what I’m fighting toward. That’s the part I never say out loud. Not to Melina, not to my mother, not to anyone. Everybody at Wexford has an answer for what are you doing after. Consulting. Law school. Dad’s firm. Brand strategy, whatever that is. Priya says “media” with total confidence and no content.

I picked Communications because it was the major with the fewest math requirements, and even that turned out to be a lie, and when someone asks me what I want to do I say “something in media” and smile the smile, and inside there is nothing there. No shape. No picture. Just a blank room and the sound of the ticker.

Twenty-two thousand people applied to Wexford last year. I got in. I have replayed that email so many times it’s worn out.

I still can’t figure out what God was doing that day. Whether it was a gift or a joke.

I take the long way back to my dorm because the long way goes past the boathouse and the boathouse path is empty at four in the afternoon and empty is the only thing I actually want, most days.

It’s October and the light is already going amber and thin. The Hudson is doing the flat pewter thing it does. Somewhere behind me a groundskeeper is running a leaf blower.

That’s why I almost don’t hear it.

A sound in the hedge along the old chapel wall. Not a bird sound. Wrong pitch, wrong rhythm, too much air in it.

I stop.

It comes again, and my whole body knows what it is before my mind catches up, because it is the sound something makes when it is trying to be quiet and can’t.

The cat is under the hedge, pushed back against the stone.

It’s a campus cat. There are four or five of them, half-feral, fed by the dining hall staff, tolerated by the groundskeepers. This one is the grey tabby with the notched ear that hangs around the loading dock behind Havermeyer. I have seen it a hundred times. I have never once touched it.

Something has happened to its back end. I don’t know what. A car on Chapel Street, probably, because the service road comes around blind there and everybody takes it too fast. Its front paws are working. It is trying, with total commitment, to drag itself further under the hedge, and it is not moving, and it has clearly been trying for some time.

I get down on my knees in the leaves.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey. Okay. Okay.”

I put my hand out flat and it doesn’t bite me. That’s how I know how bad it is.

I take out my phone. I look up the campus vet clinic and it closed at three. I look up the emergency animal hospital and it is in Poughkeepsie, twenty-six minutes by car, and I do not have a car, and Melina has a car and is at a formal fitting, and campus security’s non-emergency line rings four times and puts me into a hold queue with a recording about parking permits.

I sit on my heels in the leaves and listen to the sound it’s making.

And I do the math. The real kind. The kind I’m apparently good at.

Twenty-six minutes to Poughkeepsie assuming I find a driver in the next ten. Thirty-six minutes minimum of this. Thirty-six minutes of an animal with a spine that doesn’t work anymore dragging itself against a wall in the cold, so that a stranger in scrubs can do, at the end of it, the only thing there is to do.

There is no version of this where the cat is fine. There is only a version where it takes an hour and a version where it doesn’t.

I know things about this that most twenty-year-old girls don’t know. I know them because of a house in Fairview with a broken radiator and a man in it, and because of one particular thing that happened in that house that I have never told anyone, and I am not going to think about that right now. I am going to think about it never.

But my hands know what they know.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the cat. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

I take my jacket off, because it’s cold, and because I don’t want it to see, and because it is the only soft thing I have.

I’m quick about it. That’s the only mercy available, so that’s the one I give.

Afterward I sit there for a while.

My hands are shaking, which is interesting, because they weren’t before. That’s the way it always goes. During, they’re steady as a table. After, they come apart.

The leaf blower has stopped. The light has gone from amber to grey. I am sitting on the ground behind the old chapel with my jacket wrapped around a dead campus cat and my whole body running cold, and I am not crying, because I don’t, but there is something enormous sitting on my chest and I can’t get out from under it.

Poor thing, I think. You poor thing. Somebody should have been feeding you inside.

That’s when I hear the footstep.

It’s a small sound. Gravel, one shift of weight, behind me and to the left, maybe fifteen feet back along the path.

And here is the thing I understand instantly, in my body, before I even turn around: whoever it is has been there a while.

Because there was no approach. No walking up. Just one shift of weight, the kind you make when you have been standing still long enough that your leg has started to complain.

I turn around.

Chase Callahan is standing on the boathouse path with his hands in his pockets.

He has a practice bag over one shoulder and his hair is wet from the showers and he is wearing the athletics quarter-zip, and the last of the light is coming off the river and hitting the side of his face, and he is, even now, even here, so beautiful that some i***t animal part of my brain notices it before anything else.

He doesn’t look shocked.

That’s the first wrong thing. He should look shocked. I am on the ground. There is blood on my hands. There is a dead animal in my jacket. A normal person seeing this from fifteen feet away would say oh my god or what happened or are you okay, and they would say it loud, and they would say it fast.

Chase says nothing.

His head tilts slightly to one side, the way people do at a museum when they’re deciding whether they like a painting.

And then, slowly, his face changes.

Not into horror. Not into disgust.

Into delight.

It comes up through him like heat through a wire. The eyebrows go first, lifting just a fraction. Then the corner of the mouth. And then that smile arrives, the poster smile, the alumni magazine smile, the warm easy aw-shucks smile that half this campus would sell a kidney for, and it lands on his face like something being placed there by hand, and behind it his eyes are doing something else entirely.

His eyes are wide open. Interested. Lit up like a boy at a window.