I lie there a long time after, holding a phone gone quiet, feeling a thing I don't have much practice feeling. For maybe the first time in my life, somebody knows the whole of it, somebody who loves me. And the world didn’t end just because I told him. In fact, I feel like a weight has been lifted.
I let her choose.
I don't leave first.
I say it to the ceiling a few more times, like a guy walking through a play he's never once run in a game.
I really did mean to remember it. That's the part that's going to take me apart tomorrow. That I knew the right thing. That my little brother handed me a clear blueprint at midnight, no charge, and I still walked into that office and reached for the only trick our bitch ass father ever taught me.
But that's tomorrow.
Tonight I'm just a guy whose brother stayed on the line until he quit panicking.
Caleb
I oversleep.
So Coach's text comes before I can make my grand entrance.
Coach Dixon: My office. Now.
Wendy doesn’t even look at me when I arrive, so I know it's bad before I walk through the door. I've spent my whole life reading the temperature of a room from out in the hall, and this one is cold.
I try hyping myself up and tell myself that I’ve been cold-roomed by better men than Dixon. I know what to do. You stand still, you say ‘Yes, Sir’, and you take the speech. But I've never once walked into one of those rooms with anything to lose but myself, so this feels a whole hell of a lot different. In my head, I repeat back the words Christian made me say last night.
Let her choose.
Don't leave first.
I make it about ninety fucking seconds.
Jasmine's already inside. She’s standing, not sitting, her sleeves down over her knuckles, and that careful blank on her face I haven't seen in weeks. Coach is behind the desk with a folder open in front of him, and I don't need to read it upside down to know it ain’t nothing good.
“Sit,” he says. I don't. But he lets it go.
“I'll keep this short. Jasmine, effective today, you're off Adams's case. Off all of it. I'm handing over the conduct program to the graduate assistant for the rest of the season.”
She doesn't react. She goes still instead. Quiet enough that the room might forget she's still in it.
“Can I ask what changed?” she says in a professionally cool voice.
My girl is tough.
“You got too close to it.” He says it almost kindly, which is worse. Like he pities her or something. “I’ve been watching you, and I think you've gotten invested in this kid in a way that isn't like you, and it isn't good for you. I blame myself. You don't do well with this much. With people. With pressure. You never have.” He closes the folder. “This is not me blaming you; this is me protecting you. Same as always. You're not built to carry this, and I shouldn't have put it on you.”
“I've handled it fine,” she says, softly. “Every metric. His eligibility, his academics, all of it.”
“This isn't about metrics, Jasmine.” He waves it off the way you shoo a kid out of a room. “It's about you. You fixate. You get overwhelmed. You don't always read a situation right, and that's not a knock; it's just how you're wired. I'm doing you a kindness here.”
What a motherfucker. A kindness? He's taking the one thing she's good at, the one place on earth she gets to matter, and calling it a kindness, and she nods like she's heard it ten thousand times, because she has. I watch her shrink smaller by the second. Folding herself down into the shape he's spent twenty-three years telling her she is.
I don’t think I can take it anymore.
Christian's voice is right there. Let her choose. I hear it. I want it on the record that I hear it, in the half second before my mouth opens, and I run flat over it anyway, because sitting still and watching her vanish under that word, fragile, turns out to be the one thing I can't do.
“Why did you need me here to tell her this?” I ask, or more like, accuse.
Coach looks at me like the furniture spoke. “Excuse me?”
