Fuck that.
If they were going to be meeting in my coach’s office in fifteen minutes, then I was going to be there too.
Twenty minutes later, I thought I was going to get sick. A part of me hoped there was a miscommunication or something explanatory about what was going on, but the more I thought about the texts, the angrier I got.
Does Jeff know?
No.
Do I know what?That was what bothered me. My coach could be involved in this entire thing and while I understood her uncle’s threat the night before might’ve spooked her, meeting up with my coach was out of left field.
How did she even have his number? Did she steal it from my phone when I was sleeping? The amount of questions I had clouded my patience and the second I saw Amber walking into the stadium, I bolted from my car. She had a notebook held tight against her chest like she always did and looked over her shoulder every couple of seconds.She’s worried.
A part of me was glad she was. She was lying to me and I wanted to fucking know why. I hid behind a car until she went through the double doors and almost ran straight into Brandon in the process.
“Dude! You’re cleared?”
“No. Don’t tell anyone you saw me.” I must’ve looked terrifying because he flinched and cowered away from me. He nodded and I continued my path to my coach’s office. The walk seemed ten times longer than normal as each step was like apunch in the gut. Amber was here, with my coach, discussing something about me they felt I shouldn’t know.
The door was shut, but it didn’t block angry voices from carrying through it. I took my fist and pounded on the door four times, debating the first thing I would say. Would I shout? Yell? Accuse them of…something. The voices quieted in the seconds between my knock and waiting, and soon enough, Coach opened the door and his expression went from concern to confusion.
“Jeff, why are you here?” He made no moves to open the door wider. “I told you to be at home.”
“Why is Amber here?” I pushed past him and forced my way in. Amber sat, wide- eyed and paler than I had ever seen her, on a chair in the corner next to a middle-aged man dressed in a suit. “Is this yourprofessoryou mentioned?”
She blinked and looked at my coach instead of me, as though she was going off his lead, and it pissed me off. “Amber. Why did you lie? Why are youhere?”
My coach shut the door, locked it and moved to sit behind his desk. Tension filled the room as the silence went on and I had to grip the back of a chair to give my adrenaline a way to escape. “Someone tell me what the hell is going on, I swear to god.”
“Jeff, this is Dean Sanders, head of the university’s athletics department. He’s here to discuss the investigation that you and Ms. Henderson started regarding bribery and scams happening with our athletic teams.”
I glanced at Amber and found her staring at me with pleading eyes. She seemed to have forgotten to tell me she was on speaking terms with the fucking dean and my coach. “Okay. Why am I not a part of this?” I asked her.
“Because the Tony I saw my uncle with is one of the associate deans.” She stood and walked a few steps closer to me. Not enough to touch me but enough for me to see her reddenedcheeks and shaking fingers. “None of this was to keep things from you or lie. This was all about protecting you.”
“You meeting withmy coachand the dean was to protect me? Even when I was terrified he was involved in the entire thing?” I yelled, not giving any more fucks about who was in the room. “Please explain your reasoning to me.”
“Jeff, sit down.” My coach’s command didn’t register and I remained standing with my hands on a chair. “I’ll explain.”
“Start explaining.”
Dean Sanders spoke first. “It seems about the same time you brought the story to Amber’s attention, your coach found a document with various student athlete names and dollar amounts that were not permitted for his recruitment allocation. He came to me to start looking discreetly at the paper trail and up until this morning, we couldn’t find anything.” He spoke in an even manner, as though this was old news, but I did note the tired look on his face.
He continued, “When Amber went through her professor to set up a meeting with me Monday, I called your coach in to be there so we could pull her aside to find out what she knew. We’re not imbeciles and caught on that you two knew something. I don’t want to speak for your coach when he is here, so why don’t you touch upon things you picked up?”
“You’ve been tense around me for two months, Jeff, but what really led me to believe you were involved was overhearing one of our coaches mention Dillon Cage a couple of weeks after I saw it on a sheet of paper. Turns out, the punk got scared you asked him questions and reported back to Coach Tee.”
“I knew Coach Tee was fucking involved. He looked way too happy about the drug test. He framed me or falsified it or something, I swear it,” I said, praying he would finally believe me now that everything was out in the open.
“I know it was fake. It was actually our idea to do that.”
“What?” I asked, unsure if I heard him correctly. “Your idea?”
“When we talked Monday, Amber told us about the threatening texts you’d gotten and how a coach paid too much attention to you. We came up with a plan to pull you from practice so Tee wouldn’t be able to do anything to hurt you.”
“So you all put me through misery for four fucking days and didn’t tell me,” I said, each syllable difficult to get out because of the ball in the back of my throat. “You knew, Amber?”
“Yes.” She recoiled and gave me an odd look, like I was an idiot.
