5. Put Me In, Coach!
PUT ME IN, COACH!
LAKE
Not only did I get arrested and have to endure the wrath of Heather Capitano, but I missed my date with Sutton entirely. He’s going to think I stood him up.
Even though I’m a junior in college who should have her own apartment by now, I still live with my mom because I’m the built-in babysitter for my brother.
My mother juggles quite the heavy workload at the office, and she’s not always available to pick Max up from school or drive him to hockey practice.
I’m thankful for the time I get to spend with the little scoundrel, but my home life restricts me from enjoying many of the freedoms that come with college.
I don’t always get to go out on the weekend and get drunk.
I don’t get to share a crappy one-bedroom apartment with Ellaria and almost burn the house down when we try to cook our first grown-up meal that’s not prepackaged.
I don’t get to hook up with frat guys when I’m feeling especially lonely at night and my vibrator has stopped working.
You know, all the important milestones in a college girl’s life.
Executing my revenge plan was risky for a multitude of reasons, and I was just lucky that my brother went to sleep early and my mother is an undiagnosed workaholic. If she found out what I did at Buford’s house, she’d probably give me another one of her lengthy lectures.
I’ve been waiting for the right time to finally move out. My job—I work for the school newspaper, glamorous, I know—pays all right, and I’ve been saving funds from the other soul-sucking jobs I had before I settled on journalism.
Sephora employee. Starbucks barista. Waitress at this restaurant called The Grotto where I was the unofficial code brown inspector and had to repeatedly clean the bathrooms after Taco Tuesdays.
All of them were equally humiliating, and for some reason, dealt with more bodily fluids than were mentioned in the application.
Luckily for me, I have a great immune system thanks to my inherent desire to play in mud and eat bugs as a kid.
Mustang Mania—a student-run blog that’s not official by any means—is our biggest competitor.
Nobody reads online news articles anymore—not when they have hot and juicy gossip twenty-four-seven in addictive, handheld devices.
Gossip can be submitted anonymously, which means a lot of it is uncredible.
The paper covers more appropriate school topics. Not if Jenna Davidson hooked up with Erin Monelli’s boyfriend while said best friend took an impromptu vacation to Cabo with Jenna’s hot, newly divorced dad.
Journalism is fun, sure, but I’d prefer to be out there in the active war zone, rioting, inducting like-minded strangers into a coalescence of the fucked and forgotten (by Maple Grove’s pencil-pushing echelon of town officials.)
I thought that, above all the chaos, I was getting somewhere with Sutton.
Maybe I would have if I didn’t royally piss my mom off.
Now he thinks I was a no-show on purpose.
I could message him on Instagram, but I’m the last person he probably wants to hear from.
He doesn’t deserve to be caught in my hot mess of an exceptionally unexciting life.
Maybe this is karma for redecorating Buford’s house, or for all the other impulsive decisions I’ve made that have fucked me in my puckered starfish.
There’s always a mutiny in the grayscale sky just before it rains—a wetness to the air that precedes a Minnesota staple.
Slow-moving clouds form an ominous veil, hard-pressed to drench the town in darkness before noon, blotting out any other pinpoints of light for miles and miles.
The weather loves to seethe for a wide-eyed audience, lowering a livable sixty-eight into post-Ice Age numbers that are still surprisingly encumbering.
I coil deeper in my MU hoodie, a fallible stopgap that’s going to be rendered useless in less than ten minutes.
The sparse cropping of trees everywhere shed their leaves at winter’s command, littering the desolate ground in husks of pumpkin and persimmon.
Necrosis infects what little grass is left, drying stalks out before chipping away at their unsightly defenses and leaving gaping holes of loam and resistant offshoots.
As I make my slow and depressing trek across campus to my next class—Chemistry—I feel a tunnel of wind unmoor my awareness and chill the back of my neck with an ice-cold hand, and I quite literally scream at the manifestation of my editor in chief right beside me.
“Lake, just the person I was looking for,” Tamara—the senior editor of the newspaper—says with a full-fledged beam on her face, looking far too peppy for a ripe seven in the morning.
I humor her, but I would rather be anywhere else. “Hi, Tammy.”
I continue walking east of the quad, inviting her to join me.
Journalism is Tamara’s lifeblood, and she runs this operation like it’s the goddamn navy.
She’s diligent, resourceful, strong-willed.
She’ll do anything for the perfect story, even if that means sacrificing the well-being of her employees for an anticlimactic headline.
She’s stricter than any other boss I had in the past. If anyone poses a threat to her perfect paper, she’ll go full scorched earth.
“You know how hockey season is heating up, right?”
Hockey. We meet again.
I nod woodenly, trying to curb my disgust. My tongue burns with words unsaid, and I pray that she doesn’t have some internal lie detector that’s waiting to blare all my contempt in high-pitched frequencies and showy floodlights.
“Uh, yeah,” I reply bluntly, feeling my legs start to speed up in an attempt to spare me from this conversation.
Tamara skids to a halt, cuts me off, then shoves her face into my personal bubble.
“Well, it’s been unanimously decided that you’ll be the one covering their ongoing season.
I want you to write a series of articles all about the inner workings of the team.
For the next few months, you’ll be eating, sleeping, and breathing hockey. ”
This has to be a joke, right? No way. Absolutely not. Doesn’t Tamara know that my ex is on the Minnesota Mustangs? Why, pray tell, does she think I’d be the most qualified to play puck bunny and spend my very precious free time cataloging what they ate for breakfast?
For the love of all things holy, put me back in jail.
“Oh, I’m good,” I say indifferently, sidestepping her, determined to ignore the way anticipation brews in my belly at the prospect of joining Sutton in very close proximity. For an extended period of time.
Tamara chuckles to herself, her tone dipped in a saccharine sweetness that’s as insincere as the smile on her face. “Oh, I wasn’t asking.”
Tamara Bainbridge likes her ducks in order, and if she doesn’t get her way, she will single-handedly turn this campus on its head and unleash the hounds of hell. She tolerates me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m in the fifty-eight percentile of casualties when her evil reign begins.
I tug her off the main walking path to keep the eavesdroppers at a minimum. “Tammy, my ex is on the hockey team. You know, the one who cheated on me in front of twelve million people?”
Just thinking about that low-quality porno fans the flames of indignation inside my chest—flames that were perfectly content being undisturbed.
Sure, at first, I mistook the shock for hurt, but the embarrassment that followed had already smudged my meticulously cultivated reputation and dubbed me as the sad, pathetic girl who was just another one of Buford’s victims. I could shoulder the judgment, but the pity drove me insane.
She takes a beat to fossick through her memory file. “That’s why you’re the perfect candidate for this. You have firsthand experience with the team. I remember watching the video. It was bad. She was practically doing a split on his—”
“Thanks for the vivid reminder.” My breakfast is retracing its steps up my goddamn esophagus.
I hate that I’m still attached to his name.
I haven’t made a public statement about the whole ordeal.
Right now, people think I’m this sad loser who’s accepted a Buford-less arrangement.
What they don’t know is that I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about who he sticks his tiny, floppy, diseased frankfurter into.
That thing is a biohazard and a threat to women everywhere.
“Also, I approached you with this piece because some people saw you talking with Sutton Whittaker. According to them, you guys were looking pret-ty cozy.”
“Word-of-mouth gossip? Please, I thought we were better than that.”
A frown cuts across Tamara’s peachy lips, our unspoken work relationship balancing on a very steep edge, where it only takes one final coup de grace to shatter the brittle earth beneath my feet and plunge me into everlasting darkness.
Crags breaking off into a restless ocean, bulldozed by the crashing of waves that only seek to erase the resilient little parts of me that won’t die easily.
“If you don’t want the job, I can have someone else cover the season. But this could be your chance to move up in the newspaper. Would hate for you to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity just because your loser of an ex is warming the bench.”
Ugh, I do want to solidify my place in the newspaper. I want to have more jurisdiction—more authority. I mean, this is what I want for my future career. It’s imperative I curate an impressive resume if I want a job in the industry.
Pros: I get promoted, I get to apologize to Sutton, and I get to (hopefully) try and pick up where things left off.
Cons: I hate hockey, I hate hockey players, and I hate Buford Montgomery.
Honestly, it’s pretty even right now. Would Sutton even want to hear me out? I can’t exactly tell him that I landed in jail the night of our date. He’s going to think I’m unstable! He would be right, of course, but for some reason, his opinion of me is the only one that matters.
God, he really did a number on me. I blame my luteal phase and Mercury and the tarot reading I had done by the practicing Wiccan in my calculus class. In my defense, she seemed legit and it was free.
Nobody’s gone through as much trouble for me as Sutton has.
He sacrificed his relationship—albeit a rocky one—with his teammate just to cover my ass.
He lent me a pair of his clothes and walked me to my car.
I felt something in that moment—after a period of numb stagnancy—and I owe it to myself to feel it again.
A warm feeling niggling into the tissue of my scorned heart, purifying the blackened malady that Buford left in his wake.
As scared as I am to own up to my mistakes, Sutton deserves an apology, and I truly don’t know of a better way to give him one than to forcibly plant myself in his life. That way, he’ll have nowhere to run.
Buford is a fuckface, but I can take him. Daddy’s money can buy everything except a backbone. Plus, I know it’ll drive him insane watching me flirt openly with his teammate. Maybe then he’ll think twice about humiliating me in front of the entire world.
The first slivers of hope shine through a metaphorical silver lining, and my will to live undergoes a resuscitation that I didn’t think was humanly possible.
Tamara came to me with this mammoth of a project for a reason.
Call it fate or destiny or life giving me a fucking break, but I have to make the best out of a terrible situation.
“I’ll do it,” I decide, gleaning as much certainty as I can while the semipermanent anger inside of me metamorphosizes into something with a duller edge. Softened. A blade that’s still sharp but slices in methodical strokes rather than uncontrollable lashes.
Tamara sheds her nonchalance, bouncing on the balls of her feet and squealing.
“Perfect! I knew I could count on you, Lake. You’ll start next week.
Attend every practice, attend every hockey game, interview the players, and write a series of articles about why the Minnesota Mustangs are the beating heart of MU. ”
“How am I supposed to get into practices? They’re closed.”
“Already talked with Coach Lawson. You’re good to go. Just—don’t make any rash decisions.”
Me? Rash decisions? Oh, please.
I scoff, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit offended by the implication. “What are you talking about?”
Tamara fluffs up the bottom of her big, 1980s-style ringlets, wafting me a trace of her floral-scented perfume. “You know, keep your priorities straight.”
“Priorities?” I echo dumbly.
With a groan like I’m the one speaking in cryptic riddles, her feline eyes narrow into unamused slits. “I know you and Sutton are on a friendly basis. Use your relationship with him to get closer to the team.”
“That seems kind of deceitful, don’t you think?”
“It comes with the territory.”
Fuck. Of course I want to get closer to Sutton, but not because I have some ulterior motive. I want to ride his big nose like a bridesmaid five drinks deep on a mechanical bull without feeling any guilt whatsoever.
Seeing as I can’t exactly refuse, I simply nod, hating the way shame crouches low in my already nauseated belly.
“You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll make sure I get the inside scoop.”
As I watch Tamara walk away to probably go terrorize some underclassman, I pull out my phone, open Instagram, and navigate to Sutton’s direct messages.
ME
Hey. I never got your number. Hoping we could talk soon.