Chapter 5
five
BEN
The monthly team dinner is an ambush.
I slouch deeper into my chair, but even that’s a mistake, because my knees slam into the underside of the table hard enough to make the water glasses jump. A small wave sloshes over the rim of mine, and Erik Schmidt raises an eyebrow at me from across the table.
“You good, Kell?” he says, his expression somewhere between amusement and the look you’d give someone about to step on a rake.
“Yeah,” I mutter, rubbing my kneecap through the dress pants I borrowed from Rook. “Living the dream.”
I reach for my water glass to give my hands something to do, then think better of it. The safest move at this point is to keep my limbs as still as possible, focusing instead on laughing when everyone else does and pretending to listen to the surrounding conversation.
Because the truth is, my mind isn’t here.
It’s back at The Rusty Tap.
The stage. The rescue. The fury. The silence. The spilled beer. The retreat.
The whole humiliating sequence plays on a loop. It’s—she’s—stuck in my head like a song I can’t turn off. The choppy blonde hair falling across her face. The ripped fishnets. The plaid skirt. The way her fingers flew across the fretboard with brutal, perfect precision.
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
And I’d ruined it, first by grabbing her like some caveman, then running.
The worst part isn’t even the humiliation. It’s that for a split second, when she was standing in front of me at that sticky table, backlit by cheap neon beer signs and offering to buy me a drink, I’d seen a different version of my life.
A version where I wasn’t the team’s bumbling little brother.
Where I could talk to a girl like that and not dissolve into a mess.
“Ben.” Rook’s voice cuts through my spiral, and I look over to see him grinning at me from the other end of the table. “Are you listening?”
“Yeah,” I lie, sitting up straighter. “Totally.”
“Good,” he says. “Because Coach is about to start his speech.”
I nod and turn my attention to the front of the room where Coach Pearson is standing at the podium in his suit, looking like a CEO about to announce layoffs. But before he can start, Nash and Stiles rise from their seats near the back.
My stomach becomes a trapdoor, and the bottom falls out.
Nash is carrying a battered acoustic guitar covered in peeling stickers. Stiles has a shit-eating grin and a crumpled piece of notebook paper, which he holds like it’s the Magna Carta. And everyone else in the room—the entire team, including me—is wondering what the hell they’re up to.
“Excuse me, Coach,” Nash says. “Before you start, Stiles and I have a little something we’d like to share with the team.”
Coach Pearson’s jaw tightens slightly, but he steps aside with a resigned sigh. “Make it quick, Nash.”
“Oh, we will,” Nash says, slinging the guitar over his shoulder with the casual confidence of someone who’s never experienced genuine humiliation. “See, we were so moved by our boy Kellerman’s recent adventures that inspiration struck.”
I feel the blood drain from my face, even as the room stays so silent you could hear a pin drop. But I know there’s no stopping this, and to interrupt or flee would just make it worse, so I plaster on a fake smile as Nash strums the guitar badly.
Stiles unfolds the notebook paper and grins. “We call this one,” he announces, “‘The Ballad of Kell the Sasquatch.’”
The room roars.
I would like to be literally anywhere else. A dentist’s office. The DMV. A prostate exam performed by Captain Hook. Hell. I’m not picky. But the universe is not that kind, so I sit there while they launch into the first verse in voices that can only be described as a crime against music.
“There once was a boy named Kell,”
“Who loved his nerd shit too well,”
“He talked ‘bout circuit boards and amps,”
“But the ladies all said, ‘Hard pass, champ!’”
The room explodes, and even my trusty fake smile falters as the shame crawls up the back of my neck. But there’s no escape from here, or from this, so I just sit there as Nash strums another chord, louder now, ramping up to the finale.
“But then one night, at a dive bar show,”
“Our Sasquatch saw a punk-rock ho—”
Someone in the back whoops. Stiles grins wider.
“She crowd-surfed high, but hands grabbed low,”
“So Kell swooped in like G.I. Joe!”
The laughter is deafening. I force myself to keep my hands unclenched and my expression neutral. I’m determined not to give them the satisfaction of seeing how much this is destroying me, because I know it’ll just give them more ammunition later.
Across the table, Erik catches my eye and gives me a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head. Not sympathy, exactly. More like hang in there, this’ll be over soon. It’s the kind of look a combat medic gives you before he digs out the bullet with no anesthetic.
Nash and Stiles are really into it now, their voices rising.
“He scooped her up in a fireman’s carry,”
“Our big Sasquatch, huge and hairy,”
“He saved the tiny punk-rock chick so fair,”
“And the crowd went wild—a hero stood there!”
The word hero hits me like a fist, again bringing back the memory of her on stage, five-foot-seven of concentrated defiance. She wasn’t tiny and she wasn’t helpless. She was a storm in combat boots, a live wire who commanded that stage. They sang about a damsel. I remembered a riot.
“But wait, there’s more to this tale,”
“Of our Sasquatch boy who tried and failed,”
“The punk-rock girl, she walked right up,”
“And offered to buy him a victory cup!”
Oh no.
“But Kell, he panicked, knocked over his beer,”
“Stammered like she’d punch him in his gear,”
“He ran away like she had the plague,”
“The Kellerman Retreat—it’s all the rage!”
The room erupts in a massive, jeering standing ovation as the last strum of the guitar fades. Someone near the back—I think it’s one of the freshmen—yells, “You should’ve carried her home, Sasquatch!” and the laughter rolls through the hall in waves.
I’m used to being on the end of gentle mockery, but being the punchline to a team-wide joke like this stings. Doubly so, because it’s true. I was spectacularly incompetent in front of a girl so far out of my league she might as well be in another solar system.
I force a smile onto my face and lift my hand in a weak wave, acknowledging the applause like a performer taking a bow after dying on stage. The room loves it, while Nash and Stiles take their own theatrical bows, soaking in the adoration like they just performed at Madison Square Garden.
Rook claps me so hard on the shoulder I nearly face-plant into my leftover chicken. “You’re a goddamn legend, Kell!” he bellows, his face beaming with genuine brotherly pride. “You actually did something! You went for it!”
“Legend or not,” Erik drawls, not looking up from his plate, “next time maybe don’t drop the beer.”
The other guys join in, clapping and cheering, and I realize with a sinking feeling that they’re celebrating me. Because they saw me act. They saw me try. And in their world of simple, decisive action—where you see a problem and you fix it—that’s a victory worth singing about.
Even if the execution was a train wreck.
They don’t see the nuance, that I’m a coward who tried to do the right thing and fumbled it so badly I made everything worse, and suddenly the gap between what they see and what I know is the loneliest feeling in the world.
It’s like standing in a room full of people who are all speaking a language you don’t understand, celebrating a victory you know is a defeat.
I manage another weak wave, and the team finally settles down. Coach Pearson reclaims the podium and launches into his speech about defending our championship, about legacy, about the rest of the season ahead of us.
But I’m not listening.
I’m sitting here, surrounded by the only family I’ve ever really had outside of my mom, and all I can think about is how badly I need this to stop. I need to change the narrative. I need a win—any win—that will finally get my well-meaning, torturous teammates off my back.
I need proof I’m not the Sasquatch, the Retreat, or the punchline.
I need a social cheat code, and I need it now.
Because if I don’t find one soon, I’m going to spend the rest of my college career as the team’s bumbling little brother, the guy who’s in but never really in, the cautionary tale they tell freshmen about what happens when you overthink instead of act.
And that’s worse than any embarrassment Nash and Stiles could ever cook up.