Chapter 15
Jasmine
My father calls me into his office at seven, which is never good. He probably wants to give me an assignment I most likely won’t want.
“Sit.” He points to the chair opposite his desk. I sit.
“The Carolina thing is real.” He slides a folder across the desk. I act surprised. “They want Adams. Camp this summer, contract after, the whole package, contingent on him finishing the season without an incident.” Two taps on the folder. “Which is where you come in.”
“I already run his conduct review.”
“Now you run all of him.” He leans back.
“Academic checks, anger management attendance, every practice, every game, every interaction in this building that could turn into a problem. Now, let me be clear, we’ve always run an ethical program here.
If some shit happens, you report it like you always have, BUT if he raises his voice at a vending machine, I’m hoping you will see and address it before it lands on my desk and I have to deal with it. ”
“What is with you and this kid?”
“Every player I send to the pros means more prestige and money for our program, Jasmine. And Caleb is one of the most valuable players to walk through that door in ten years, but he's also a lit match. I'm trusting you to carry him to June without letting him catch fire.”
“That's a lot of supervision for one player.”
“It's not supervision. It's protection.” Then he says the thing that empties the room of air. “You're the only one on staff I'd put on him. You want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Everybody else wants something from him. The assistants want him to like them. The trainers want to be his guy. The freshmen want to stand close enough to him to feel important.” He nods at me like he's pinning on a medal.
“Not you. You don't get charmed. You don't get attached.
He's a case to you and nothing else, and that's exactly what the kid needs.
Somebody who can see him clearly and feel nothing doing it.
It's the thing you've always been best at. Keeping your distance.”
I have a face I built over twenty-three years for times like this, and I have never leaned on it as hard as I do now. I have to, since my father admires me for not loving the person I love more than I've loved anything in my life.
“And if I can’t?” I ask, just to test the waters. “Keep the distance, I mean.”
He doesn't even look up. “You've kept it your whole life, kid. You keep it from me.” He says it warmly, like he’s giving me an actual compliment. He has no idea it's the loneliest sentence anyone has ever said to me. “Which is why you're perfect for this.”
“Understood.”
“Good.” He adds more. “This matters, Jazz.” My father rarely uses his nickname for me.
Now I know it’s serious. “If Carolina takes Caleb, it only makes things better for the other boys. Real scouts start showing up. Recruits start returning my calls. Then the VCU program finally gets the respect we deserve.” He takes a beat.
“I've spent twenty years clawing at a career like the one this kid could hand me on a silver platter, so don't let him torch it. We all need this to work.”
“No pressure,” I say sarcastically.
“All of the pressure. That's the assignment.” He finally looks at me.
“You were invisible in this building for three years. That’s what you wanted, and I allowed it.
But for the next eight weeks, I need you to step out of that box.
You're the most important person in VCU ice.
Don't waste the opportunity to prove it.”
And the part I'm ashamed of, the part I will never say out loud to anyone, is that some thin, half-starved corner of me sits up at being told I’m important and that I matter to him.
Even now.
There's a note waiting at my cubicle when I get back to it. One page, time-stamped 6:14 that morning, from one of the assistants who runs the early skating group. It’s the kind of routine flag that crosses my desk twice a week and goes into the log without a thought.
It’s from a late session yesterday. Adams and a kid named Petrov went into the boards.
There were words. Petrov said some random thing about Adams' family, but the assistant didn't catch what. Adams had two fistfuls of Petrov's jersey and his glove cocked back before anyone got between them. No punch landed. He apologized to the room, skated it off, and sat out the last drill on his own. The assistant wrote it up because that's the rule. Minor. Resolved on the ice. It’s so minor that I guess that’s why Caleb didn’t tell me about it.
I read it three times.
A week ago, this was nothing. A shove, no contact, an apology. I'd log it in with two lines and forget it by lunch, because recording everything these jugheads do is the entire point of me. I am the person who writes things down. Accurately. Always. That is not a job I do; it’s the job.
But this isn't a week ago.
It's eight weeks before a commitment to Carolina, and there's a man in Charlotte who told my father, twice, that they want a drama-free investment. One conduct note is one line in a log that my father reads every Friday. One line invites a second look. A second look invites a phone call. And I’m the one holding the pen.
I sit with the page for a long time.
This is exactly why my father assigned me to Caleb, except the request has come a little too late.
This is a trap that my father built without knowing he built it.
He trusts the log because he trusts me, and he trusts me because, as of this morning, he believes I'm the one person on earth who would never bend it.
He's right about the first part.
I find Caleb at the east stairwell at lunch.
“There's a report on Petrov,” I say, sitting two steps above him. “From yesterday. The boards.”
He stops chewing. “That was nothing. He said something about my fucking my mother. I grabbed his jersey, I let go, I sat the drill. I didn't touch him.”
“I know. It's in the report. None of that's the problem.” I hand him the part that is. “It's a conduct note that has to go in the log. My father reads the log on Fridays.”
“I don’t see what the problem is. Coach wants me to get the Carolina job just as much as I do.”
“I realize that, but because of your…history, Carolina is asking to see the logs.”
I watch him do the mental arithmetic I already did.
“So don't log it,” he says, easy, like he's wiping a crumb off a counter. “You said it's nothing. You're the one who writes it down. So don't.”
“Right,” I say. “I just don't write it down.”
“Yeah.”
“Caleb.” I keep my voice even, because the thing in my chest is not. “Do you understand what you're asking me to do?”
“Skip a note about a shove that didn't land.” He takes another casual bite of his food.
“Falsify a compliance record.” It comes out colder than I mean it.
“I have done this job for three years, and I have never once shaded a thing in either direction.
Not to protect a player, not to bury a problem, not to make my father's program look cleaner than it is.
That's not a rule I follow. It's the only reason I'm allowed in this building.
He keeps me because I'm the one who doesn't bend.”
“He keeps you because you’re his fucking daughter.”
“You’re upset.”
“I’m upset that you think you’re only worthy of your father’s love if you run his program for him.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Maybe I said it wrong.”
He sets the sandwich down.
“You haven’t done a single thing wrong, baby,” he says, dropping his eyes to the ground.
I look at the stairs instead of him. I hate to see him in this kind of pain. “If I do this and it ever comes out, I don't just lose you. I lose you, and the job, and my father, and the only thing he's ever respected about me, in the same hour. And you lose Carolina.”
“Then don't,” he says.
I look at him.
“Don't do it.” He means it, I can see that he means it.
“Log the note. It's true, it happened. I should have never casually mentioned burying it. That’s not who you are, and it’s not who I want to be either.
I'll handle the note myself. I'll go to your dad, I'll own it, I'll do the anger group twice a week, and smile about it. I've lived through worse than a write-up. If Carolina doesn’t want me because of something so minor, I don’t belong there.”
And that, of course, is the moment I decide to do it anyway.
Because he doesn’t want me to. That's the whole difference.
He handed it back. He'd rather walk into my father's office and jeopardize his future than watch me become the girl who bends. And I’m so tired, so far past tired, of being the person who never bends, who can be trusted with any damn thing because there has never once been anyone she'd break a rule for.
There's someone now.
“Eat your sandwich,” I tell him. “I'll deal with the report.”
“Jasmine.”
“I said I'll deal with it.” I stand and put on the office voice, the one he hates. “It's a compliance matter that wasn’t a big deal. It's my job. Let me do my job.”
He catches my wrist on my way up the stairs. Not hard. Just enough to stop me.
“Whatever you decide,” he says, “decide it for you. Not me. I'll be fine either way. I need us to still be us on the other side of it.”
“We will be,” I assure him, but, truthfully, I’m not even sure myself.
That afternoon, I open the conduct log.
I sit with the cursor for four minutes. I time it, because timing things is what I do when my nervous system is on overload.
Then I write it up. Not the way the assistant wrote it. I write:
Brief verbal exchange during late session, no physical contact, resolved on ice, no action required. Every word of it technically true, and the whole of it a lie by everything it leaves out, which is a thing I didn’t know I was capable of until I watched my own hands do it.
I read it back once. It's clean. It's the kind of note my father skims and forgets. It will keep Caleb eligible, it will keep my father proud of the daughter who never bends, and it’s the first dishonest thing I’ve ever put my name to in this building.
Good for me.
That’s growth.
I save it. Then I sit at my desk and wait to feel sick about what I've done. I wait a long time. What surfaces instead is something I have even less practice with. I feel like a person who finally has someone worth lying for, and surprisingly, that shit feels good.
I have spent my entire life being the person who writes down exactly what happened. I just became the person who decides what didn't.