Chapter 42 – Waylon
chapter
forty-two
Waylon
Trace sat at my kitchen table, eating cereal dry out of the box.
“You’re going about this wrong,” he said around a mouthful.
I didn’t look up from my phone. I’d spent the last ten minutes buried in Marcus’s feed, scrolling a wall of photos that hadn’t existed a month ago.
He’d never posted her before. For two years, he’d barely acknowledged her.
Now she was in every frame: his arm hooked around her at some formal, his hand spread wide over her hip at a party, the two of them crammed into a booth somewhere dark.
And in every single one, Josie had her body angled away from him, leaning toward the edge of the frame like she was trying to get as far from him as she could.
Off-screen, it was the same. He was everywhere she was. He walked her to classes she’d never asked him to walk her to. He turned up at the track. He sat outside the media office in that stupid car of his. Lately, she’d worn a look I knew too well.
It made me want to put my fist through something.
I’d grown up watching how my dad treated Mom, how possessive he was. I knew how a man talked himself into believing he was the protector, right up until he turned into the thing she needed protecting from.
“Going about what wrong?” I asked.
Trace set the box down. He didn’t get serious often. For a guy with a trust fund and a guaranteed first-round slot, there wasn’t much reason to.
“You keep thinking about how to get in front of him,” he said.
“Like it’s gonna be you and him on the ice, mano a mano, and you out-tough him.
You already tried that. It cost you three games and your draft stock.
Cost him two and a shrug. His last name’s a credit card with no limit, Way.
You hit him where the refs can see, and you’re the one who bleeds for it.
You want to actually touch him? You go where his daddy’s money’s been doing the cleanup for years. ”
He didn’t have to spell it out, because I’d already lived it.
Same fight, same penalty box, and somehow I’d come out of it with scouts wanting to talk about my temper instead of my hands.
Marcus’s draft odds had always come from his father’s phone, not his stick, so a couple of missed games barely mattered to him.
“So what,” I said. “I just let him —”
“No.” He leaned in. “You think bigger. He was a dick to you, Way. You think you’re the only one?
Guys like Marcus don’t do it once. They do it constantly, to everybody, and they get away with it because everybody thinks they’re the only one.
You put enough of those only ones in a row, and suddenly it’s not a he said.
It’s a pattern. You make a pattern, you make an anonymous tip to the league commissioner’s office, and now Daddy’s checkbook is bailing water. ”
I thought about that.
“Think about the worst thing he ever did to you,” he said, quieter now. “And then just know somebody had it worse. There’s always a worse. With guys like him, there’s always a worse.”
Trace was talking about Marcus, but I’d known about worse a long time before either of us was old enough to drive.
I’d spent my childhood standing between my mother and my father, in a house where nobody had a famous last name or a lawyer to make any of it go away.
The worst thing Marcus ever did to me wasn’t even the first thing that came to mind.
I had Jason’s number up before I’d even really decided to call him.
Trace saw my face and got to his feet. “I’ll give you a minute,” he said, rapping his knuckles once on the table on his way out. The door clicked shut behind him.
Jason picked up on the third ring. The second I heard his voice, I was sixteen again and back home, where we’d skated the same line in juniors and split the back row of every team bus, before the scholarship and before any of the rest of it.
“Well, if it isn’t the golden boy,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Hey, man.” I made myself say the next part. “You still skating?”
He paused long enough that I already knew. “Nah, not really. Beer league when the leg lets me. You’re not calling to catch up, though. You never call to catch up. What’s going on?”
I told him as much as he needed to know. Marcus was at my school now. He was making a girl’s life hell, and I wanted to know if there was any way to make it stick.
Jason laughed, but not like anything was funny.
“Marcus Kane,” he said. “You want my Marcus story? Which one — I have a few.”
“The worst one.”
“He broke my femur.” He said it like he was bored.
“Junior year. You weren’t at that tournament — you’d already left for the academy.
Clean break, surgery, the whole thing, eight months.
And before he did it, Way, he leaned over me on the ice and called me —” Jason stopped, and then he said the word, the slur, carefully.
“Said it right in my ear where the refs wouldn’t catch it, and then two shifts later he caught me with my head down, and that was the leg. ”
My hand ached around the phone. “Did you —”
“Filed charges. Assault.” His voice flattened out even more.
“His father had three lawyers there inside of a week, and by the time it was all done, it was a hockey play, an unfortunate collision. And me, I was the kid with the temper who’d probably said something first. They had character witnesses lined up, and all I had was a metal rod in my femur and a closed file. ”
I closed my eyes. It was exactly what Trace had described ten minutes ago, just a different kid.
“I’m sorry, man.” I meant it more than he probably knew. “I should’ve called you after.”
“You were a kid too.” He blew out a breath. “Look, you want a pattern, right? Because that’s what this is.”
I went still. That was the word I’d been thinking about for weeks without letting myself say it. “How’d you —?”
“Because it’s the only thing that ever works on people like him.
” He was quiet for a beat. “There was a girl, and you probably want this part more than you want my leg.” Something rustled on his end, like he was sitting up.
“Allysa. Allysa Beckner, I think. She was a year below us. She and Marcus were a thing for about a summer, and at the end of it, she filed too — said he hit her. His word against hers, no marks that anybody photographed in time, nothing solid. You know how that goes.”
I knew how that one went. I’d watched my mother do the same thing for years, tugging her sleeve down over her wrist, her voice going bright and fake.
“It got buried,” Jason said, “the way mine did, probably the same lawyers. But she filed, Way, and that’s the thing that matters. There’s paper somewhere. Even if the paper went nowhere, somebody still wrote it down.”
I was already reaching for a pen. “Beckner,” I repeated.
“I don’t know, something like that.” He paused. “You’re really gonna do this?”
“Yeah.”
“Then do it right.” His voice went low and tired, older than a guy our age had any business sounding.
“Don’t make it about getting him, because the second you make it about your own pride, you’re just another guy who wants to win, and his lawyers have seen a thousand of you.
Make it about her, whoever the girl is. Tell her somebody believed the last one and it still went nowhere, and tell her she should write everything down anyway.
Dates, times, what he said. You hear me? ”
“I hear you.”
We hung up. I sat there holding a name scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt.
Then the rest of it hit me. The first party, back in week one, before I’d known her name or run a single dawn mile beside her.
I’d watched Marcus come out of that hallway and slide his arm around the one girl in the room I couldn’t stop looking at, and I’d seen his hand close hard around her arm.
It hadn’t been hard enough to leave a bruise.
It had been hard enough to stop her cold. I’d told myself it wasn’t my business.
But she had flinched that night. I saw it happen, and I told myself it was nothing.
It all added up now. Eight months of Jason’s life, a closed file with Allysa Beckner’s name buried somewhere inside it, and a girl flinching in a hallway while I stood three feet away and decided it wasn’t my problem.
Josie had never once told me that he hurt her, not at that first party, and not after the game, when I’d shown up to find her already cleaned up, but I recognized the signs.
I picked the phone back up and let my thumb hover over her name.
Then I set it back down. Jason was right — this couldn’t run on anything I was feeling, not the rage, not the guilt, not the part of me that wanted to drive to Marcus’s place that minute and find out how much like my father I really was.
It had to be about her, and it had to be solid enough to hold up. So I grabbed a notebook and started making a list. It came fast. The hallway grip, week one. The bathroom after the game. The car outside the media office. I’d been keeping this file in my head for months.