Chapter 22 — The Confession （Beck）
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Three breaths steadied me. The library printouts stayed warm beneath my palm, timestamps lined up in black and white.
Cole hovered by the tall windows with his back half to me, twisting his wrist tape around and around his thumb. Rip. Twist. Rip. The sound sawed through the hum of the pipes. He'd torn the same strip down to threads, and white flecks of adhesive clung to his fingers.
“You gonna sit down or what?” I asked.
“Can't.” Twist. Rip. “Sitting makes it worse.”
The door stood open behind me, and hallway cleats clacked past in bursts. Somebody laughed too loud by the water fountain. Cole kept his eyes on the parking lot, where frost still sheeted the windshields pale blue.
“Cole.” I waited till his shoulders stopped climbing. “Come here.”
I counted three breaths and laid the timestamp printouts face-up on the scarred oak, side by side, smoothing each one flat with my palm.
If these failed, I stayed benched and Nora stayed smeared as the tutor who leaked, and Trey walked into that Clearwater job clean.
He came slow, sneakers squeaking, and dropped into the chair across from me. The metal legs screeched. Up close his eyes were shot red, and his bottom lip had a chewed spot he'd worried raw. My chest went tight and hot, pressure climbing my throat. I pressed my thumb harder into the pen.
“Talk,” I said.
“I didn't mean for any of this, Beck. You've got to believe me.” The words rushed out of Cole like he'd held them until they burned. “Whatever you think I did, I never wanted you hurt.”
“You gave him my book.” My voice came out flat and strange. “Didn't you?”
Cole's head jerked up. “Beck —”
“Say it plain.” I kept my thumb hard on the pen. “Who handed him the pages?”
A long breath shuddered out of Cole. “Me.” His eyes went glassy. “It was me. Every time.”
“Slow down.” I slid one pen half an inch left so it sat square again. “Start at the papers.”
Cole stared at the pens. His hands shook. He tore another strip of tape clean off and balled it.
“Trey said he'd handle them.” Cole's voice dropped. “The eligibility forms. Compliance stuff. He said my handwriting made it slow and he'd type it up, no big deal. So I let him.”
“You never told compliance?” I asked.
“What was I gonna say?” Cole laughed, cracked and ugly. “Hey, Coach, I need baby pictures to learn a slant? They'd have pulled me so fast —”
“They'd have helped you,” I said.
“You don't know that.” Cole's voice broke clean in half. “Trey said he'd bury it. He said nobody ever had to know.”
My stomach turned to ice water. “Which papers.”
“All of them.” Cole ripped the tape ball in half. “Every form since sophomore spring. He wrote them, and I can't read fast enough to check.”
The radiator knocked once, hard, like a fist in the wall. I counted my breaths. One. The sun stripe crawled across Cole's knuckles. Two. My ribs ached where the cold had settled. Three.
“Say the rest,” I said.
Cole reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out a stack of index cards so worn the edges had gone soft and gray.
Cracks split two of them straight across the middle, held together with yellowed tape gone brittle at the corners.
My throat closed. I knew that tape. I'd cut those strips myself, sitting cross-legged on a dorm carpet with a pair of safety scissors, sounding out route names one syllable at a time while Cole repeated them back.
“He kept them for you?” I asked, quiet.
“He said if anybody found out I needed pictures to read a playbook, compliance would sit me.” Cole fanned the cracked cards on the table like a bad hand.
“He said he'd keep it quiet. Then after the lake week he said I owed him.
A few pages from your locker notebook, that's all. Old looks, nothing live.”
“How many pages?” I asked.
“Four.” Cole swallowed loud. “Maybe five. I slipped them out during film and shot pics on his phone. He stood right there smiling. Said I was saving my own skin.”
“And the pod read my words back,” I said.
“Word for word.” Cole covered his face with both hands. “I threw up after. In the facility can. Nobody saw.”
“Decoy pages,” I said.
“Yeah.” Cole's face crumpled. “Yeah, and then Kip read that phrase on the pod, the one only your notebook had, and I knew. God, Beck. I knew what I'd done.”
Footsteps clicked in the hall, quick and light, and Nora appeared in the doorway with her tote banging her hip and her cheeks pink from the cold. Her copper-brown ponytail had come half loose, and her fingers were red at the tips. She looked at Cole, then at me, and shut the door soft behind her.
“Hey,” she said. “I'm here. Got them.”
She crossed to the table and laid the second screenshot beside the first one I'd set face-up, lining the edges true.
Her hand stayed steady the whole time. Warm printer paper.
Two upload logs, side by side, time stamps stacked clean: evening, late, the file names matching my decoy phrases word for word.
“Where'd these come from?” Cole whispered.
“Priya pulled the cloud logs,” Nora said. “You don't need to know how. You just need to look.”
Cole bent over the screenshots, squinting. “These times — that's the night after the away trip, right?”
“Late,” Nora said. “After quiet hours. Somebody logged in from a staff account and pushed them both at once.”
“My decoy phrase went up on the pod right after that,” I said. “Same words. Same order.”
Cole's hands curled into fists. “Trey texted me that same night. Said to keep my mouth shut and he'd keep mine shut.”
“He's done trading your silence,” Nora said, soft but iron. “We're done letting him.”
The door banged open so hard it hit the stop. Trey leaned in the frame, smirking, all teeth and easy shoulders, his staff polo crisp and his lanyard swinging.
“Well,” Trey said. “Study hall's crowded today.”
Nobody answered. The pipes hummed. Trey's smirk thinned at the edges when he saw the printouts spread face-up on the oak.
“What's this?” Trey asked.
I stood. My chair scraped back loud. I stepped between Trey and the table and put my back to the door frame, blocking it without touching him, close enough to smell his cologne over the radiator dust.
“Stay,” I said.
Trey laughed once. “Move, Hale.”
“No.”
“You can't prove that. I've been careful all year.” Trey's eyes flicked past me to the screenshots. “Whatever that is, it's kid stuff. Printouts.”
“You've been selling my looks to Clearwater,” I said. “Say it to my face.”
Trey's smirk didn't move. “You've got a big imagination for a backup.”
“I've got time stamps with your login on them,” I said. “You've got nothing but a lanyard.”
“You think Pruitt benches a grad assistant over library paper?” Trey leaned closer, eyes flicking to the screenshots. “Please.”
Boots sounded in the hallway, heavy and unhurried, and Coach Pruitt filled the doorway with a mint toothpick rolling at the corner of his mouth and a binder tucked under one arm. His eyes moved from Trey to me to Cole's wrecked face to Nora's squared shoulders. He chewed once, slow.
“Son, you'd better sit down, I've seen enough. That one by the windows. Now.”
Trey stayed standing. “Coach, this is —”
“Sit.” Pruitt's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to.
Trey sat. Pruitt stepped to the table, set the binder down, and picked up the first screenshot. He read it. He picked up the second. He read that one twice, toothpick gone still between his teeth, mint cutting through the dust smell as he breathed over the paper.
“These upload times,” Pruitt said. “That's the night the pod ran the playbook phrase.”
“Yes, sir,” Nora said.
“That's a staff login,” Pruitt said, holding it to the light.
“Coach, check the second page,” Nora said. “Bottom line. That's the file name from Beck's locker notebook. The fake one.”
Pruitt flipped the sheet. “Saw it.” He held both pages side by side, arms straight out, and read under his breath. “Same minute. Same account.”
“Because he pushed them together,” I said. “He didn't even split them up.”
Pruitt's jaw worked the toothpick. “Careless.” A beat. “Guilty men get careless.”
Trey's lanyard had gone quiet against his chest. “Anybody could've —”
“Quiet.” Pruitt read both time stamps twice more, lips moving, then set the pages down square. He looked at Cole. “Son. Did he write your papers?”
Cole's whole body shook. He nodded, then forced the words out. “Yes, sir. He said he'd keep my reading quiet if I — if I got him the notebook pages. I gave him Beck's decoy looks. I didn't know they were decoys. I thought they were real. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
Pruitt chewed the toothpick clean through. He pulled it from his mouth and stared at it a second, then dropped it in the trash like he'd decided something final.
“You're done here, and I won't hear another word.” Pruitt held his hand out to Trey, palm up. “Badge. Now.”
“Coach —” Trey started.
“Badge.” Pruitt's palm did not move. “Your facility access is revoked now. Compliance, campus security, and Clearwater are getting the full file before you reach the parking lot. You don't coach here, work here, or walk these halls again.”
Trey ripped the lanyard over his head and slapped the badge into Pruitt's hand. The plastic cracked against the coach's ring. Trey stood, smoothed his polo with one shaking hand, and looked at me with pure hate.
“This isn't over,” Trey muttered.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
Trey walked out. His footsteps hit the hallway fast, and a door slammed somewhere below us. The room exhaled.
Marisol appeared in the open doorway, pale and furious, a folder clutched against her blazer. Her eyes went to Trey's abandoned badge in Pruitt's hand, then to me and Nora.
“That's why you kept warning me about notebooks,” Nora said.
Marisol nodded, shame tightening her mouth. “Last spring I caught him leaning over an open tutor notebook with his phone out. He called it a schedule check. I reported it, but there wasn't enough to hold him, and I let myself believe a warning was safer than an accusation.”
“You could have told me plain,” Nora said.