Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Reese
Ipick the boathouse, since it’s the only building on this campus where I know where everything is.
Beckett drives me. He doesn’t talk for the first ten minutes. When he finally does it’s to say, “You want me in the room?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He pulls into the gravel lot. “I’ll be on the dock. If you want me, put your hand on the back of your neck and I’ll come in and knock something over.”
“Beckett.”
“I’m being serious. I’ve got a whole thing planned. It involves a bucket.”
He’s still smiling when I get out, and he’s still smiling when I look back from the door, and I know exactly how much of that is real.
Jenna Kowalski is already inside, standing under the racked eights with her hands in her coat pockets, looking up at the hulls. She’s shorter than she seems when she’s ambushing you.
“I’ve never been in one of these when nobody’s shouting,” she says.
“That’s most of the day.”
“Hm.” She turns around. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“You gave me a choice for the first time. I took it.”
She has the decency not to pretend she doesn’t know what I mean. She sets a recorder on the bench between us, a real one, not a phone, and she puts my sheet of questions beside it, folded to the crease I made.
“Ground rules, since you set them and I want them on tape,” she says. “On the record. Your location. Questions in advance. Nothing about the other members of the crew. Am I missing anything?”
“You can’t record the boat bay after we’re done. There’s equipment in here that costs more than the building.”
“Fine.” She sits. “Then let’s do the easy part first, and I’ll warn you before I go off the sheet.”
“Then why send it to me at all?”
“So you’d know I wasn’t planning to ambush you twice.” She taps the sheet with two fingers. “Everything on there I’ll ask exactly as written. What comes after depends on how you answer. I can’t script that.”
We do twenty minutes of the easy part. How I ended up coxing.
Why a hundred and twenty-five pounds of person gets to give orders to eight men who could bench me.
What a coxswain actually does, which nobody outside the sport has ever understood, and which she asks about with more interest than I expect.
Then she turns the sheet face down on the bench and doesn’t look at it again.
“Off the sheet,” she says. “Late last week I received an envelope. Inside it was your state designation registration listing you as Undifferentiated, and a two-page unsigned summary explaining exactly what that document does to your eligibility.”
“Who sent it?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Then we’re not going to have a productive afternoon.”
“I said I wouldn’t tell you who sent it.
” Kowalski folds her hands. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t tell you anything about him.
It came by courier. The return address is a law office in Atlanta that doesn’t represent whoever paid them.
The registration isn’t a records-office printout, either. It’s a filing copy. Somebody kept it.”
I sit with that.
“You said him.”
“I did.” She lets me have that one on purpose.
“How long have you had it?”
“Three days.” She looks at the recorder instead of me. “I’ve written four openings and thrown all of them out. That isn’t normal for me. I’ve been doing this eleven years and I’ve never once had a story handed to me this clean. Clean is how you know somebody built it.”
“So don’t run it.”
“I’m going to run something. If I sit on it he takes it to a wire service and they’ll write it in a morning without calling you at all.
” She leans forward. “That’s why I’m in this boat bay on a Sunday.
I would rather write the true version. So let’s find out how much of this is true.
Your registration says Undifferentiated. Is it accurate?”
“No.”
She lets the silence run, and she doesn’t help me out of it.
“I’m an Omega,” I say.
“When did you know?”
“Fifteen.”
“And when was the registration filed?”
Beckett’s thirty feet away on the dock, and all it would take is my hand on the back of my neck. I keep it in my lap.
“I was sixteen,” I say. “I didn’t file it. My father did.”
Kowalski goes very still.
“Say his name for the recording.”
“James Callahan. He’s an attorney in Atlanta.
He filed an amended designation for me the spring I turned sixteen, and he did it since a Beta daughter was easier for my mother to explain at the club than an Omega one.
I found out about it two years later. By then I was on suppressants, competing, and being told by both of them that this was a kindness. ”
“You understand what you’re doing right now.”
“Yes.”
“Then put it in words I can print.”
“I’m telling a reporter that my father falsified a state designation record for a minor.” I make myself hold her eyes. “He’s licensed. That’s not a family embarrassment, it’s a bar complaint. It could end him.”
“And you’re doing it on the record.”
“With my name on it.”
She sits back and looks at me for the length of about three breaths.
“Why?”
“Because you’d have printed the version where I did it.
That’s the story in your envelope. An Omega lied her way onto a men’s team.
That version has followed me since Westlake, and it has cost me a school, a captaincy, and every friend I had there.
I’ve spent four years letting other people write my designation for me, since correcting it meant giving up my father.
” I put my hands flat on the bench. “I’m done paying for a lie I didn’t tell. If the truth wrecks him, he built it.”
The recorder light blinks red between us.
“That’s the piece,” Kowalski says quietly. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“It’s better than what he sent me. It’s more human, it’s checkable, and it puts a name on the part everyone was going to assume was yours.
” She rubs her forehead. “The envelope told me you cheated. You’ve just told me somebody traded his daughter’s records for a quiet table at a club, and I can pull the filing date off the state registry in the morning. ”
“Then pull it.”
“I will.” She reaches for the recorder, then stops. “Two more, and then I’m going to ask you about the crew, and you’re going to say no, and I want you to say no properly since my editor will ask why I didn’t push.”
“Ask.”
“Are you racing at nationals?”
“I intend to.”
“Is the university trying to stop you?”
“The athletics department has asked me to verify my designation through the health center this week. I’m going to do it.” I keep my face still. “There’s a difference between an institution being careful and an institution being pressured. I’ll let you work out which one you’re looking at.”
“That’s a lawyer’s answer.”
“I was raised by one.”
She almost laughs. Then she puts her elbows on her knees.
“The crew,” she says. “You’re bonded to some number of them. I counted three in your boat bay last week and I’d bet the number’s gone up. Comment?”
“No.”
“Reese.”
“No.” I don’t raise my voice. “You said you needed it for your editor, so here it is. Every man on that roster is an adult and none of them signed up to be a paragraph in a story about me. Their designations, their relationships, and their private lives aren’t mine to hand you, and they aren’t yours to take.
If you print speculation about any of them I’ll say publicly that you did it without a source, and I’ll be telling the truth. ”
Kowalski holds my eyes.
“That’s the best answer I’ve gotten out of an athlete in a decade,” she says.
“Does that mean you’ll leave them out?”
“It means my editor gets a clean quote about why I didn’t get more.” She clicks the recorder off. “It runs Wednesday morning. Digital first, print the next day. I’ll send you the passages that quote you directly. I won’t send you the whole thing and I won’t take notes on what you think of it.”
“That’s more than I expected.”
“Don’t tell anyone.” She stands and buttons her coat, then stops with her hand on the bench.
“One more thing and then I’m out of your boathouse.
Nobody has ever sent me a document and then not called me.
No conditions, no follow-up, not one phone number.
Whoever couriered that envelope hasn’t tried to steer a single word of it. ”
“He doesn’t have to. He knows what it does.”
“Maybe.” She picks up the recorder. “Or he already got what he wanted.”
She looks at me for a second longer, then goes.
I sit in the boat bay by myself after the door shuts. The four is still on the rack with a strip of tape on the bow where Zane patched it in April. Somebody’s left a cox box on the bench with the cable coiled wrong.
My phone buzzes against my leg.
Quinton: Section four is still blank. I can write it if you’re busy. No pressure either way.
I look at it until the screen goes dark, and I don’t answer.
Beckett is on the dock with his elbows on the rail, watching a single go out in the last of the light. He doesn’t turn around when I come out.
“Well?” he says.
“It runs Wednesday.”
“And?”
“And I gave her my father.”
Beckett comes off the rail. He doesn’t say anything at all, so I keep going.
“I told her he filed the registration. On the record, with his name and his profession, and she’s pulling the state filing date in the morning.
It’ll be in front of the bar association inside a month.
His firm has a licensing review every year.
My mother will find out from the internet, since I’m not going to be the one who calls her. ”
Beckett doesn’t say anything for a second.
“Do you want me to tell you that was the right call?”
“No.”
“Good, since I don’t know if it was.” He puts his hand out, and when I take it he pulls me in against his chest and holds on. “I know you didn’t have a better one. That’s the most I’ve got for you.”
The single comes back down the course, and whoever’s in it is a novice, by the puddles.
“He came to Riverside for me,” I say into his jacket. “Two months ago. Walked into the officials’ tent and took the whole thing apart in under five minutes and got me on the water.”
“I remember.”
“He did that to protect the story. Not me.” I get a breath in. “I knew it while it was happening and I’ve never told anybody, and it doesn’t feel any better now that I have.”
Beckett doesn’t answer that. He just keeps his hand between my shoulder blades and lets me stand there in the cold until the novice gets the single racked.
“Come on.” He opens the truck door. “Tyler’s texted twice asking if you’re all right, and Gray’s been standing in the kitchen since we left, making coffee nobody wants.”
“He doesn’t drink coffee.”
“I know. Which is why it’s so weird.” Beckett shuts my door. I stare out the window as the lake disappears into the trees.