5. Chapter 5
Rory
The plan is simple. In through the front doors, straight down the main corridor, into my office, and then zero contact with the athletics wing until June.
Possibly ever. I have coffee in my travel mug, fresh lipstick on, and every intention of behaving like a woman who can survive an awkward Monday.
The plan survives four seconds, tops.
Because whoever laid out this school gave the front doors an unobstructed view of the athletics wing, no curves, no mercy, and standing at the far end of that hall, next to the locker room, is seven feet of gray granite in a team hoodie.
Staring at me.
He doesn’t glance away when I catch him looking. Doesn’t give me the polite little nod that might allow us both to pretend this is a normal morning. Those green eyes stay locked on me as the November draft shoves me through the door.
My stomach flips. A big, shameless flip, which is completely unhelpful. I want to go over there. That’s the embarrassing truth. I want him to look pleased to see me, and I am absolutely not prepared to find out that he isn’t.
I put my head down and walk.
On a normal Monday I’d have greeted six kids by name before I cleared the trophy case.
Today they get the top of my head and one all-purpose “morning” flung at the general air, because I’m concentrating on getting past Bram without looking at him.
My heels are moving at a pace best described as professionally frantic. Click, click, click on the terrazzo.
Then, at the edge of my vision, he moves.
He pushes off from the wall and starts up the corridor. Toward me, in that unhurried, deliberate way of his, and the distance between us begins evaporating at a rate I don’t care for at all.
Nope.
I take a right into the old wing like a woman with an urgent appointment in 1958.
The old wing is where the school keeps its leftovers, one row of fluorescents doing a mad flicker over converted classrooms full of music stands and mop buckets.
It’s quiet down here, with nobody between me and the storage room halfway along the corridor.
I head straight for it. The storage room door sticks.
I hit it with my hip on the first try, and it gives with its little wooden complaint, and I’m inside with it shut behind me before I’ve fully admitted to myself what I’m doing.
What I’m doing is hiding. Like a coward.
Let’s just be honest, since it’s only me in here with the floor wax and the cardboard. I am a twenty-six-year-old licensed professional with a framed master’s degree and a lockable desk drawer, and I am hiding in a storage room like a naughty teenager. All before eight in the morning.
Because it isn’t his face I can’t handle. It’s what he might say. Some version of “About last night. It was a mistake. It meant nothing,” delivered in that gravel tone, level and reasonable, while the hallway traffic parts around us and all that warm stone goes back to being cold.
I know he hasn’t actually said any of that. He might only want to ask why I left. But I can already imagine standing in front of him, trying to look as if I don’t care, and the thought makes me press my back harder against the door.
Last night mattered to me. There. That’s the problem. I can call it a mistake all I want, but hearing him say it would hurt.
So I left before he could, and now I’m avoiding him at work. An excellent, mature solution that has brought me all the way to a cupboard full of cleaning supplies.
Then I hear a sniff.
It doesn’t come from me. It comes from behind me, deep in the room, back where the tall gray cabinets stand in two rows with a shoulder-width gap between them.
One of the two fluorescent tubes flickers over the cabinets, leaving the far end of the gap in shadow.
The sniff is small and wet and instantly strangled.
Someone is trying very hard not to be heard.
I turn away from the door, suddenly listening for another sound.
“Hello?” I keep it easy, unremarkable, the voice I’d use to offer someone the candy dish in my office. I come around the end of the cabinets slowly, giving whoever it is time to see me coming.
There’s a kid wedged into the far end of the gap, knees drawn up and hood pulled forward. I’d know that particular slight silhouette anywhere, hood or no hood. Overgrown black hair escaping the hood’s edge. Round wire-rimmed glasses catching the flickering light.
“Hi, Eli.”
He flinches. His shoulders pull tighter, and for a second I think he won’t answer.
“Hi, Ms. Hale.” His voice is thick and muffled.
He has a towel pressed to the middle of his face, and he turns his head away as he says it, angling toward the cabinet. Over the towel, his eyes are red-rimmed and enormous behind crooked glasses. He’s been crying, and he doesn’t want me to see.
I crouch at the mouth of the gap, leaving a little space between us.
“Hey.” I rest my free hand on my knee. “Rough morning?”
“’M fine.” The towel muffles his answer.
“Yeah? Okay.” I settle onto my heels like I have nowhere in the world to be. “It’s just, and don’t take this the wrong way, people who are fine don’t usually spend their first period of Monday morning in the storage room. This is more of a not-fine venue. I’d know. I came in to hide, too.”
A tiny sound out of him. Not a laugh. A cousin of one, maybe. Generously speaking.
“Can I see?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Then it’ll be a quick look.”
His fingers tighten in the towel, and his eyes flick toward the door. I stay where I am. The fluorescent tube buzzes overhead while I wait, my travel mug balanced against my knee.
The towel comes down.
His nose has been bleeding hard, crusted dark around one nostril and still seeping at the rim. His lower lip is split, swollen, a blood-dark line through the middle of it. The towel in his fist is blotched red going brown.
For a second, I can’t stop looking at his mouth. That’s going to hurt every time he eats, every time he speaks. He’s been sitting in this cold room trying to hide it, and I want to get my hands on whoever did this.
Eli starts lifting the towel again. I bring my gaze back to his eyes and keep my voice gentle.
“Okay,” I say. “That looks sore. The nurse’s office has ice packs.”
“No.” Fast. Too fast. “No, it’s... it’s stopping. It’s fine.”
“Okay. We can stay here for a minute.” I let a beat go by. “Eli. Who did this?”
He looks down at the towel.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody has quite a swing on him.”
The corner of his mouth tries to lift and he winces, pressing the towel back against his lip. I wish I hadn’t made him try to smile.
“I fell,” he tells the floor. “In the locker room. It’s slippery.”
“In the locker room?”
“Yeah.”
“Was anyone with you when you fell?”
Silence. His thumb picks at the towel’s hem. He looks toward the door again, then back at me. His chin is starting to tremble.
“You don’t have to tell everyone,” I say quietly. “You can start with me. Just so you’re not trying to handle this on your own.”
For one second the wobble almost wins. His chin goes. His breath drags in wet and shaky, and I stay exactly where I am, waiting for him to speak.
“Please, Ms. Hale.” Barely a whisper. “Please don’t make it a thing. If it’s a thing, it gets worse.”
Worse. His lip is split, his nose is bleeding, and he’s afraid this could get worse. I want to tell him it won’t. I want to promise that if he just gives me a name, I can make this stop.
But he’s watching me with those huge, frightened eyes, waiting to find out what I’ll do.
“Okay,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me right now.”
Out in the building the first bell buzzes, harsh, and Eli scrambles to his feet. He tugs his hood forward and pushes his glasses straight with one knuckle. I stand too, moving back to give him room to pass.
Then he pauses, looks at the towel balled in his fist like he’s only now remembering it exists. He lifts the lid off one of the bins on the steel shelving, shoves the towel down beneath the banner paper, and puts the lid back. I look from the bin to his face.
“Thanks, Ms. Hale.” He doesn’t look at me. “I’m okay. Really.”
He says it as if he’s trying to reassure me, and that nearly makes me go mad. He’s the one with blood on his face.
The storage room door sticks for him too. Then he’s gone, and the old wing swallows his footsteps. I’m alone under the strobing tube with a bin full of rally supplies.
I want to go after him. Walk him to my office, sit him down somewhere warm, get him to let me help. But he left so quickly, and I don’t want him thinking he has to run from me as well.
I give him a short head start, because he’s made it very clear that the last thing he wants is to attract attention.
I set my mug on a shelf, then lift the lid of the bin.
It’s right where he put it, balled tight under the banner paper. I fish it out and unroll it.
A towel. Navy, gone thin from industrial washing, the kind that lives stacked in the football locker room and rides around in those canvas laundry bins on casters. I’ve seen a hundred of them draped over a hundred sweaty teenage heads.
School property. Team property.
The blood has soaked in across overlapping blots, brown at the edges, still red at the center. A lot of blood.
I keep looking at the blood, trying to figure out who could have done this to such a sweet, kind kid as Eli Navarro. He handles the team’s laundry. He could have put this with the other towels and washed it. Instead, he brought it somewhere the players wouldn’t be likely to find it.
I think a football player did this.
I don’t know which one. I don’t know what happened before Eli came in here, or whether anyone else saw it. The towel can’t give me those answers, and neither can his silence.
He’s been coming to my office since last year. I thought he knew he could come to me with anything, but this morning I found him by accident, because I was hiding from a man I’d slept with. He’s been hurt, and I still don’t know how to get him to let me help.
I can’t make him tell me a name. But I can make sure he knows I’m still here, and that I haven’t forgotten what I saw just because he said he was fine.
I fold the towel and put it in my bag.
I smooth my skirt. I redo my lipstick by feel, no mirror, a skill I’ve had since I was fifteen. Then I take my coffee and shoulder the sticking door open.
The corridors have filled while I was gone, locker slams and sneaker squeal and five hundred conversations at once. I head for the guidance suite. Getting there still means going past the coaches’ offices, and somewhere during the walk I remember who works in one of them.
Bram. Of course.
His office is the narrow one with the interior window.
The blinds have never been lowered in living memory; I’m not convinced they operate.
His desk faces the glass, faces the corridor, and I have to walk straight past it.
I keep my chin up and my eyes forward, bag strap clamped in one fist, heels at a pace I am keeping deliberately, insultingly normal.
He lifts his head before I’m even level with the window.
I catch the movement at the edge of my vision. I don’t look. My face warms anyway. He hasn’t said anything. Neither have I. A pane of glass ought to make this easier, but I can barely resist turning toward him.
I don’t know what I’d say if I did. So my heels just keep going, click, click, click, all the way past.
I reach my office and step around the doorstop. My candy dish is on the desk, my corkboard crowded with messages from my kids. For a moment, all I want to do is close the door and sit down. I leave it open. Eli knows where to find me, and if he comes, I want him to be able to walk straight in.
I set my mug on the desk and look down at my bag. The towel is still in there. Whatever is happening to that boy may involve Bram’s players. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to look that man in the face.
I’ll deal with it. All of it.
One disaster at a time. Preferably somebody else’s.