Chapter 19
Caleb
I oversleep.
So Coach's text comes before I can make my grand entrance.
Coach Dixon: My office. Now.
Wendy doesn’t even look at me when I arrive, so I know it's bad before I walk through the door. I've spent my whole life reading the temperature of a room from out in the hall, and this one is cold.
I try hyping myself up and tell myself that I’ve been cold-roomed by better men than Dixon.
I know what to do. You stand still, you say ‘Yes, Sir’, and you take the speech.
But I've never once walked into one of those rooms with anything to lose but myself, so this feels a whole hell of a lot different.
In my head, I repeat back the words Christian made me say last night.
Let her choose.
Don't leave first.
I make it about ninety fucking seconds.
Jasmine's already inside. She’s standing, not sitting, her sleeves down over her knuckles, and that careful blank on her face I haven't seen in weeks. Coach is behind the desk with a folder open in front of him, and I don't need to read it upside down to know it ain’t nothing good.
“Sit,” he says. I don't. But he lets it go.
“I'll keep this short. Jasmine, effective today, you're off Adams's case. Off all of it. I'm handing over the conduct program to the graduate assistant for the rest of the season.”
She doesn't react. She goes still instead. Quiet enough that the room might forget she's still in it.
“Can I ask what changed?” she says in a professionally cool voice.
My girl is tough.
“You got too close to it.” He says it almost kindly, which is worse.
Like he pities her or something. “I’ve been watching you, and I think you've gotten invested in this kid in a way that isn't like you, and it isn't good for you.
I blame myself. You don't do well with this much. With people. With pressure. You never have.” He closes the folder.
“This is not me blaming you; this is me protecting you.
Same as always. You're not built to carry this, and I shouldn't have put it on you.”
“I've handled it fine,” she says, softly. “Every metric. His eligibility, his academics, all of it.”
“This isn't about metrics, Jasmine.” He waves it off the way you shoo a kid out of a room. “It's about you. You fixate. You get overwhelmed. You don't always read a situation right, and that's not a knock; it's just how you're wired. I'm doing you a kindness here.”
What a motherfucker. A kindness? He's taking the one thing she's good at, the one place on earth she gets to matter, and calling it a kindness, and she nods like she's heard it ten thousand times, because she has.
I watch her shrink smaller by the second.
Folding herself down into the shape he's spent twenty-three years telling her she is.
I don’t think I can take it anymore.
Christian's voice is right there. Let her choose. I hear it. I want it on the record that I hear it, in the half second before my mouth opens, and I run flat over it anyway, because sitting still and watching her vanish under that word, fragile, turns out to be the one thing I can't do.
“Why did you need me here to tell her this?” I ask, or more like, accuse.
Coach looks at me like the furniture spoke. “Excuse me?”
“Why. Am. I. Here.”
Jasmine’s eyes widen, then drop to the floor.
“Son, this is a transparent program I run. I owed it to you to know why someone you’ve been reporting to is off now,” he says as if he really believes that shit.
“You didn't pull her because she got too close. You pulled her because you saw something at the game and it scared you, and instead of asking your own daughter a single question, you decided to shrink her down to a size you could manage. Like always.” My voice is too big for the office.
I can hear it, Wendy can probably hear it, and I can't bring it down.
“She is the most capable person in this building, and you've spent her whole life calling her fragile so you'd never have to actually look at her.”
“Adams.” A warning. “You’re crossing a line.”
“You want to know what changed? I did.” The words pour out of me. “I'm in love with your daughter. That's what you saw at the bench. Not her getting attached. Me. Falling for the one person you never once bothered to see, and her being brave enough to let me.”
The office goes dead quiet.
And there it is. I feel it leave my mouth, and I know, the way you know a puck's in before it crosses the line, that I just burned the whole thing down. Carolina. My family. Her.
And for one half second, before I look at her, I don't care, because it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said in a room like this.
“You're finished here.” Coach says it so coolly that it lands harder than any yelling could.
“You’ll have your release papers on Monday.
And I'll call Carolina myself, tonight, and tell them exactly what kind of player they'd be putting on their ice.” He doesn't sound angry.
He sounds certain. Like a man confirming a thing he always suspected.
“I gave you one last chance. You did with it what your kind always does.”
“My kind? What does that even mean? A hot head? Trash? A man not worthy of your daughter? Because I don’t think she would agree with you.”
Then I look at her, and so does Coach.
“Jasmine.” His voice changes. “Is that true?”
And she freezes.
Not a nervous type of freeze, and she’s not stalling.
It’s a real kind of freeze, the whole-body one.
The kind where she goes somewhere I can't follow, and she can't climb back out on her own.
Her eyes lock on a spot over her father's shoulder.
Her mouth opens, and nothing comes out. Her thumb stops halfway down the seam of her sleeve.
I know her answer isn't a no. She loves me. Of course, I know this. The clear part of me knows exactly what I'm looking at, and knows she’s struggling for the words because it's her father and the size of the question. This is a big fucking deal for her.
But underneath the clear part, there’s a place where an old wound lives. The part that has watched the two most important people in a kid’s life (my parents) decide I wasn't worth the trouble– all it hears is Jasmine’s silence. All it sees is a girl standing next to her father, not picking me.
Christian's voice is further away for me now: You let her choose.
She's choosing, dummy.
Just wait.
But I have never once in my life waited around to be left. I get there first. That's the trick to never getting hurt, and it’s been working for me so far. So why change up now?
“It's not true,” I say to Coach. “I made it up on the fly. I just didn’t like how you were talking to her. The truth is, all she did was her job. I was the one who got a stupid crush and overstepped.” The lies start really flowing now.
“But trust me, she shut me down, and she probably didn’t want to tell you because she didn’t want to ruin my chances with you or the program.
That's the whole story. Leave her out of it. All of this was me.”
“Caleb.” It's the first thing she gets all the way out. My name. Cracked down the middle.
But I'm already moving, because one more second and I'll start begging, and I’ve never begged a soul to keep me, and I'm not about to start now, no matter how much I want to.
“Cut me, bench me, call Carolina, do whatever you're going to do,” I tell him at the door. “I knew the deal. One incident. Well, there's your incident.”
He isn't even looking at me. He's looking at Jasmine like she's a stranger who let him down, and she still can't pull her eyes off the wall to land them on him or me or anything in the room. I’m not sure what he believes at this point, but I can’t dwell on that. I’ve made my bed.
The picture of her staring down at her pink and white Air Force One sneakers and Coach, trying to decide what to make of what I just told him, is the picture I carry out of there.
I just did the exact thing my brother begged me not to do twelve hours ago. I chose for her. I left first.
I walk out of the office, out of hockey, and away from the only good relationship I ever talked my way into. Behind me, there's nothing. No footsteps. No one calling my name.
This is not a reality show, dude. I think to myself. No one is giving you a rose.