Pretty Little Touchdown

Chapter 3

He doesn’t ask what happened.

That’s the second wrong thing.

Chase crosses the fifteen feet of gravel between us without hurrying, sets his practice bag down in the leaves, and crouches on the other side of my jacket like a man settling in to look at a car engine. Up close, in this light, he smells like chlorine and clean laundry. His hair is still damp at the temples.

He looks at the shape under the fabric. He looks at my hands. He takes his time about both.

“Back end?” he says.

“What?”

“Was it the back end. Spine.”

“I don’t. Yes.”

“Chapel Street.” He nods slowly. “Service road’s blind there. They come off Route 9 doing fifty and don’t slow down until the gate.” He says it evenly, like a man discussing a plumbing problem in a building he owns. Which, in fairness, his family probably does.

I am waiting for the rest of it. The oh my god, Ash. The are you okay. The recoil.

It doesn’t come.

Instead Chase Callahan tips his head and looks at me with those pale blue eyes and asks, in a voice so gentle it could put a child to sleep:

“How did it feel?”

The wind comes off the river.

“It didn’t feel like anything,” I hear myself say.

And I watch his pupils get bigger.

It is a small thing. It is the smallest thing. If you weren’t six inches away and looking directly at him you would never see it, and it is the single most frightening thing I have ever witnessed in my life, including the things I don’t let myself count.

“Okay,” he says softly. “Okay.”

He reaches over and, before I can stop him, folds the last open corner of my jacket closed. Neat. Careful. Tucks it under like you’d tuck in a sheet.

“There’s a spade in the boathouse,” he says. “Behind the door. The ground’s soft by the wall.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

He goes and gets it. He digs the hole himself, in his athletics quarter-zip, in the last of the light, and he doesn’t get dirt on himself once, which I think about later a great deal. When it’s done he puts the spade back exactly where it came from.

Then footsteps on the path.

A groundskeeper, coming around from the boathouse with a rake over his shoulder, calling out, “Everything all right down there?”

And Chase Callahan changes.

I don’t have a better word. I am standing right next to him and I feel it happen, like standing next to a transformer when the power goes through it. His shoulders come down and forward, softer. His chin drops a half inch. The whole architecture of his face reorganizes itself into something open and rueful and boyish, and his voice comes out warm and a little embarrassed, pitched perfectly to carry.

“Hey, Mr. Delgado. Yeah, we’re okay. One of the campus cats got hit on Chapel.” A beat. Exactly the right length. “We buried her. Sorry, I know we probably should’ve called somebody.”

“Ah, hell,” says Mr. Delgado, genuinely sad. “The grey one? With the ear?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah, hell. She was a good girl.” He shakes his head. “That’s decent of you, son. That’s real decent.”

“It was mostly her,” Chase says, and nods at me, and smiles.

Mr. Delgado goes away down the path shaking his head about the grey one with the ear.

The instant he is out of earshot, Chase’s face goes still again.

Not evil. Not cruel. Just off. Like a screen with nothing playing on it.

He picks up his bag, slings it over his shoulder, and looks down at me from six-foot-four, and he is so beautiful in the dusk that it feels like a category error, like finding a chandelier in a slaughterhouse.

“Ash,” he says.

I never told him my name.

“Get some rest,” says Chase Callahan, and walks away up the boathouse path with his hands in his pockets, whistling.

Here is what I decide, over the next four days, with total conviction:

I imagined it.

I was on the ground behind the chapel with blood on my hands and a dead animal in my coat, and my heart rate was through the roof, and it was getting dark, and people misread faces in the dark constantly, that’s a known thing, we covered it in Interpersonal Comm last year. Facial affect mis-attribution under physiological arousal. It’s on a slide somewhere.

He was kind to me. That’s what actually happened. He dug a hole for a cat he didn’t know with his bare hands and he covered for me with the groundskeeper and he told me to get some rest. That’s it. That is the entire factual content of that evening, and I have taken it home and built a horror movie out of it because I am a person who cannot be given a nice thing without checking it for wires.

I know exactly where that comes from. I don’t need it explained to me.

So I put it down. I go to practice. I go to my sad little study booth. I get a 91 on the Quant Methods quiz, which costs me eleven hours and most of a weekend, and I let myself be happy about it for about ninety seconds before the ticker starts calculating what I have not eaten today, which is: an apple, a coffee, half a protein bar at four, and the two bites of grilled chicken that are, at this point, less food than ritual.

I put it down to rest finally.

Monday at four I have my check-in.

It’s in Ellery House, which is the pretty little brick building behind the admissions office that has bay windows and hydrangeas and a brass plaque, and inside which they keep me.

“Ash! Come in, sit, sit. How are we?”

Dean Helena Voss has a corner office, an enormous number of teeth, and a job title that changes every eighteen months. Right now she is Vice Dean for Student Advancement and Institutional Storytelling. I am not making that up. It is on the door.

“Good,” I say, and smile. Up, up, hold.

“Good! Good.” She has my file open. She always has my file open. It is thicker than any file about a twenty-year-old should be. “Three-five-one. That’s holding. That’s good, Ash, that’s real work, I know Quant is a beast.”

“Thank you.”

“And cheer’s going well? Coach Diane says you’re one of her most reliable bases.”

“It’s going well.”

“Wonderful.” She closes the file, which means we’re at the part. There is always a part. “Now. I just want to touch base on the usual, because we’re coming up on midterms and I know how the pressure gets.”

“Okay.”

“No press. No podcasts, no student paper, no social media about your circumstances, nothing about Fairview. If anybody approaches you, you send them to me, you don’t say a word, not even a no comment, because a no comment is a comment.” She says this pleasantly. She has said it to me every six weeks for two years. “And nothing that could bring the file into the light. No incidents, no citations, no parking tickets, nothing that generates a piece of paper with your name on it. Are we clear?”

“We’re clear.”

“You know why.”

“I know why.”

“Tell me, sweetheart.”

I look at her hydrangeas.

“Because the story doesn’t work until I graduate,” I say. “A troubled kid at an elite university is a liability. A troubled kid who graduated from an elite university is a program.”

Dean Voss beams like I have done a trick.

“That’s it. That’s exactly it. And when it lands, Ash, it is going to land big. We’re talking national. We’re talking a girl who came through the worst thing a girl can come through and walked out of Wexford with a degree in her hand. Do you know what that does? Not for us. For the next kid. For the next fifteen kids.” Her eyes go actually wet. That’s the part I can never work out about Helena Voss: I think she means it. I think she means it and it’s a product, and she has never once noticed those are two things. “Two more years and it’s yours to tell. All of it. Loud as you like.”

“Two more years.”

“Two more years.” She stands, which means we’re done. “Oh, and Ash? The sealing is very solid. Records division, family court, all of it. Nobody is finding that. Not a soul.”

She says it to reassure me.

There’s a fact I keep in a box.

I don’t open the box. Opening the box is not a thing I do. But I know what’s in it, the way you know what’s in a room you’ve locked, and this is roughly the shape of it:

There was a house in Fairview with a broken radiator. There was a man in it who married my mother when I was thirteen, whose name I do not say, who spent five years explaining to me in a patient and reasonable voice that I was fat and slow and called me 'Trash-leigh," every chance he got.

And then there was a night when I was seventeen when I found out what he had been doing to my sister, who was eleven.

And then he was dead.

And then there was a courtroom that isn’t like courtrooms on TV, where nobody says guilty, where a judge says adjudicated delinquent instead, and a girl gets sent to a secure facility upstate for nineteen months, and at the end of it a clerk pushes a button and the whole thing goes into a drawer that is supposed to never open again.

I would do it again.

I would do it again, and I would be calm, and my hands would be steady the whole way through and they would only shake after ward, and I have never in million years said my sentence out loud to a living person.