Chapter 8
Twenty-Four Hours
~IRIS~
The administrator’s office smells of stale Keurig coffee, paper that has lived three lives in three filing cabinets, and the faint, defeated lavender of an air freshener someone gave up plugging in two weeks ago.
Her name plate says PATRICIA HENDERSON — HOUSING & RESIDENT LIFE, in the kind of brass-effect plastic that fools nobody.
She is a Beta in her mid-fifties with a salt-blonde bob, reading glasses perched at the very tip of her nose, and the precise weary posture of a woman who has spent thirty years explaining bad news to people who outrank her.
There is a half-eaten granola bar on her desk. Three highlighters lined up like little plastic soldiers. A photo of a golden retriever I am quietly choosing to like her for.
“Miss O’Shea.” She does not look up from her monitor. “Take a seat.”
I take the seat. My duffel slumps against my shin like a co-conspirator.
She types, the sound of clicking away, while she makes the small mm of a woman who has been hoping the spreadsheet would say something different this time and has just confirmed, for the fourth viewing, that it has not.
“So, we have a wrinkle.”
Wrinkle?
We love wrinkles.
“Due to,” Patricia goes on, finally tipping her glasses down at me, “unforeseen enrollment this semester, the Omega housing block is at full capacity. There is no bed available for you in the standard Omega residence.”
I sit with that for a beat.
“Unforeseen.”
“Unforeseen.”
“I was personally invited to attend this college, Mrs. Henderson, six weeks ago. By the head coach of the men’s hockey program. With a scholarship that requires me to be housed somewhere with a roof.”
“I understand.” Patricia is unmoved. Patricia has heard worse. “I did not say there was no housing. I said there was no Omega housing. There is a difference, and I am about to walk you through it.”
She tucks the glasses back up her nose and rotates her monitor a degree, which is not so much sharing the screen as making it slightly easier for her to read at me.
“Your options. Option one. You take a placement in the figure skating residence. Scent-neutral facility, mandatory check-in at twenty-two-hundred hours, no overnight guests, no closed doors during quiet hours, dorm mother on staff. Most of our female athletes find it perfectly comfortable.”
“Dorm mother?”
“Dorm Mother.”
“I am twenty-four years old.” Does she really need a reminder that just because we’re Omegas doesn’t mean we’re children? We’re adults…no different to Alphas.
“So are most of the figure skaters. They like her. She makes biscuits.”
I sit with she makes biscuits for a long, dignified moment.
“Option two.”
“Option two.”
Patricia’s mouth thins by half a hair.
“Option two is the hockey team housing.”
Now we are getting somewhere.
I lean forward an inch.
“The hockey program operates on a split-sector arrangement,” Patricia recites, in the tone of a woman reading the safety briefing for the four-thousandth time.
“Two team houses, one assigned to each sector of the roster. The system has been in place at North Star for the past nineteen years. Athletes live with their sector. It encourages cohesion.”
“Two houses,” I repeat. “Two halves of the team.”
“Correct.”
“Which means, theoretically, I could be assigned to one of them.”
Patricia removes the reading glasses entirely. Sets them on the desk. Folds her hands.
The body language of a woman about to give me the polite version of something impolite.
“Sector one,” she begins. “Captained, I am told, by an Alpha named Brennan. Senior leadership includes Mr. Voss. I gather from the program director that you have already had the pleasure of meeting both gentlemen this morning. In the doorway of this very building.”
“We have established a rapport,” I say.
“Mm.” Patricia’s mouth twitches. It is the closest thing to solidarity I am going to get out of her today, and I take it.
“Sector one’s house was, as of an hour ago, formally polled on the question of accepting an Omega placement.
The vote came back unanimously against. The team has cited—” she lifts a finger and reads off her screen in the small clipped voice of a woman who would rather not be the one saying it “— quote, the risk of disruption to training environment and roster focus.”
“Disruption,” I echo.
“Disruption.”
“Of course.” My jaw is going. I make it stop.
“It would simply not be fair to ask an entire Alpha team to share a kitchen with an Omega who might at some point in the calendar year experience a fully predictable biological event. The strain on their roster focus could be catastrophic. Possibly fatal.”
“Miss O’Shea.”
“I am being collaborative, Mrs. Henderson.”
Patricia sighs the long sigh of a woman who has earned it.
“I am not the architect of these policies. I am the secretary tasked with explaining them, and frankly, on a personal note, the Heat Clinic on campus exists for very good reason. Have you been by yet?”
“I have not. I have been alive on this campus,” I check my watch, “for approximately nine and a half hours.”
“Go today.” She is no longer reading the script.
She has gone faintly maternal, the way a dorm mother who makes biscuits might.
“Get your name on the list. The Heat Clinic is excellent. The Omega doctor on staff can re-titrate your blockers for the saturation here at North Star. The stronger formulary works, but it comes with side effects you will want to be briefed on, and there is currently a waitlist that grows by the day. So sooner is better than later. That is one piece of advice I will give you for free.”
I nod, slow, filing it the way I file everything.
“Duly noted.”
“Good.” She returns the glasses to her nose. “Now. Back to housing.”
“You said sector one refused.”
“Correct.”
“Which rather suggests the figure skating dorm is the only door left open.”
She types something. Clicks something. Reorders her three highlighters by some invisible logic.
“Sector two,” she says, almost as an afterthought, “has not been polled.”
I go very still.
“Excuse me?”
“Sector two. The other house. Captained by a Mr. Kavanagh. Senior leadership includes Mr. Bellerose and Mr. Santori.” Her eyes flick up over the glasses at the last name, and I will be wondering for the rest of my natural life whether she clocked something in my face when she said it. “They have not been asked.”
“Why not?”
“Because sector one’s refusal was assumed to be representative of the program at large. The director did not see the need to put a second team through the formality.”
Assumed.
Did not see the need.
Something hot and small and indignant lifts behind my sternum.
I push it down for later, where I keep all the things I will examine when there are fewer Beta administrators in the room.
“You have,” Patricia goes on, sliding a paper across the desk with two boxes I am meant to tick, “twenty-four hours to make a decision. Beyond that window, the scholarship office considers the placement forfeit and the offer revoked. Standard policy.”
She says it like a woman reading the weather. Tomorrow: light snow. The sun rises at six forty-two. Iris O’Shea may not have a college after lunch.
“Twenty-four hours,” I repeat.
“Twenty-four hours.”
“And if I want sector two polled, I have to —”
“Request it. In writing. To this office.” She taps the paper. “You would also have to find a means of communicating that request to the captain in question yourself, since formal channels would take longer than the deadline allows. We are bureaucrats, Miss O’Shea, not magicians.”
I look down at the paper.
Box one. Figure skating residence.
Box two. Hockey Team Housing — Sector to be confirmed.
The second box has, in red pen, a tiny handwritten note in the margin: requires sector approval.
I rise. I take the paper. I tuck it into the front pocket of my duffel with the same care I would tuck a goalie’s playbook.
“Thank you, Mrs. Henderson.”
“Go to the Heat Clinic today.” Without looking up. “Take your time on the housing. Twenty-four hours is more than people usually get.”
Yes.
It is a real spoiling of riches, Patricia.
The afternoon outside the admin building is colder than the morning was, but not by much.
The sun has done what Minnesota suns apparently do, which is hang very low and very pale and provide approximately zero of the actual warming benefits the rest of the country associates with daylight.
Students cut across the quad in fat puffer jackets, hot drinks fogging in their hands.
The air smells of woodsmoke from somewhere, the diesel breath of a campus shuttle idling at the curb, and the faint, sharp animal of fresh-cut grass that has frozen and thawed one too many times this week.
I find a bench under a thinning maple. Drop my duffel. Sit.
And, for the first time since I cleared customs at the airport, I let myself stop.
The quad is busy. That is the part that arrests me. Boys in North Star letterman jackets, sleeves shoved to elbows despite the cold because they are twenty and immortal, drifting past in clusters of three and five.
A group of girls in the green scarves I now know belong to the figure skating program, laughing at something on a phone screen.
Two guys clapping each other on the shoulder outside the coffee kiosk.
A tall Alpha in a brown beanie palming the small of a willowy Omega’s back as they cross the path. Everyone here is in motion.
Everyone here is in groups. Everyone here is, by all visible evidence, having a perfectly fine day in the company of people who are glad they exist.
And I am the only thing on this bench.
It is a stranger feeling than I am ready for.