“You’re upset.”
“I’m upset that you think you’re only worthy of your father’s love if you run his program for him.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Maybe I said it wrong.”
He sets the sandwich down.
“You haven’t done a single thing wrong, baby,” he says, dropping his eyes to the ground.
I look at the stairs instead of him. I hate to see him in this kind of pain. “If I do this and it ever comes out, I don't just lose you. I lose you, and the job, and my father, and the only thing he's ever respected about me, in the same hour. And you lose Carolina.”
“Then don't,” he says.
I look at him.
“Don't do it.” He means it, I can see that he means it. “Log the note. It's true, it happened. I should have never casually mentioned burying it. That’s not who you are, and it’s not who I want to be either. I'll handle the note myself. I'll go to your dad, I'll own it, I'll do the anger group twice a week, and smile about it. I've lived through worse than a write-up. If Carolina doesn’t want me because of something so minor, I don’t belong there.”
And that, of course, is the moment I decide to do it anyway.
Because he doesn’t want me to. That's the whole difference. He handed it back. He'd rather walk into my father's office and jeopardize his future than watch me become the girl who bends. And I’m so tired, so far past tired, of being the person who never bends, who can be trusted with any damn thing because there has never once been anyone she'd break a rule for.
There's someone now.
“Eat your sandwich,” I tell him. “I'll deal with the report.”
“Jasmine.”
“I said I'll deal with it.” I stand and put on the office voice, the one he hates. “It's a compliance matter that wasn’t a big deal. It's my job. Let me do my job.”
He catches my wrist on my way up the stairs. Not hard. Just enough to stop me.
“Whatever you decide,” he says, “decide it for you. Not me. I'll be fine either way. I need us to still be us on the other side of it.”
“We will be,” I assure him, but, truthfully, I’m not even sure myself.
That afternoon, I open the conduct log.
I sit with the cursor for four minutes. I time it, because timing things is what I do when my nervous system is on overload.
Then I write it up. Not the way the assistant wrote it. I write:
Brief verbal exchange during late session, no physical contact, resolved on ice, no action required. Every word of it technically true, and the whole of it a lie by everything it leaves out, which is a thing I didn’t know I was capable of until I watched my own hands do it.
I read it back once. It's clean. It's the kind of note my father skims and forgets. It will keep Caleb eligible, it will keep my father proud of the daughter who never bends, and it’s the first dishonest thing I’ve ever put my name to in this building.
Good for me.
That’s growth.
I save it. Then I sit at my desk and wait to feel sick about what I've done. I wait a long time. What surfaces instead is something I have even less practice with. I feel like a person who finally has someone worth lying for, and surprisingly, that shit feels good.
I have spent my entire life being the person who writes down exactly what happened. I just became the person who decides what didn't.
Caleb
The Carolina recruiter is back in the press box. I can feel him up there the whole first period, a weight on the back of my neck I can't shrug off.
I'm playing clean, I tell myself over and over. Eight weeks of clean, that's the deal, and I've got it nailed to the inside of my skull. Finish the season without an incident, and my brother and sisters never have to worry about the heat or hot water being off ever again. Simple. All I have to do is be a different player than the one I’ve been at three other colleges.
