“What?”
“If I were you, the first thing I would do is look it up. Are you going to? Of course you are. You’re human! You’re going to be curious about all the incredibly embarrassing, juvenile, asinine stuff I said. I totally humiliated myself. Utterly. Unequivocally. I’m…” Well, “ashamed” wasn’t really strong enough for what I was feeling. “I’ve been walking around campus and hearing strangers whispering and talking about me. It’s not some kind of delusion. I wish I was being delusional,” I told him. “I feel so stupid.”
“Here.” He reached into the back seat and grabbed a T-shirt. “Go ahead and blow your nose on that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t give a hang. What happened to those frat boys?”
“Nothing. They didn’t really do anything,” I said. “They didn’t touch me or pour the liquor down my throat and I’m legal to drink. I’m twenty-three, much too old to go to a party and try my first shot and then throw up on my shoes. I’m too old to sit in someone’s car and cry into a T-shirt, too.” But I did use it to wipe away some snot. “I’ll wash this for you.”
“Quite a few people have cried in this car.”
“Why? What are you doing to make them upset?”
“This is my first year working for the Woodsmen,” he said. “After I graduated from college, I spent some time with the Crawfish football organization in Baton Rouge as an unpaid assistant. I got money from running camps for kids,” he explained. “Aroundthe team, I had to do everything that everyone else avoided. One of those things was to tell the players that they were being let go, not signed, however you want to call it. I had to fire them.”
“That was your first job out of college?”
“It was awful,” Shane said fervently. “Terrible. The head coach didn’t want me to do it in the building because he thought it brought bad energy. It meant I had to take them outside and I hated being in the parking lot where other people could watch it happen, so I would drive us around in my truck. The guys all got to know that if I wanted us to go for a ride, it was bad news. I used to keep a box of tissues in here, but I used them all up when I came to Michigan.”
“You were sad about moving?”
“What? No, this is a much better job,” he told me. “I caught a bad cold and my nose ran for about a month.”
I nodded and patted my cheeks with the T-shirt.
“People will forget about the video and everything else,” he said. “Someone will do something even stupider, then you’ll all graduate, and you’ll move on with your lives.”
“But every time someone searches for my name, that will come up.”
“You gave them your name?” He squinted again and then reached for his face, as if he was going to rub his eyes. But he put down his hand.
“They asked my name and age in the interview. I wasn’t thinking straight enough to lie. I wish I had just left.”
“How did you get home if you were so drunk?”
“Another girl saw me trying to order a car to come pick me up but I think I was already over the limit on my credit card, so I couldn’t get one. I know I was already over it, because my mom had taken it to pay for a delivery…it doesn’t matter. That woman drove me and she was really nice. I should bring her flowers or something.”
When I’d gotten home, I’d stumbled inside and fallen face-first onto my bed, feeling sick but not knowing how bad things would turn the next morning. I wasn’t hugely into social media, mostly because I was so busy and also because it pissed me off to see my sister constantly glued to it.
In fact, Morgan had been the one to tell me that there was a video. Then my brother Max had come barging into my room, saying that I was an idiot and laughing at the same time. At least we’d been able to keep it from my mom so she didn’t get upset, and Dad had ignored my brother when he’d tried to share the joke. At one point, he would have hung on Max’s every word but those days were long gone.
We still weren’t heading toward Woodsmen Stadium—Shane hadn’t even started the car yet. Instead, he was frowning at the mucus- and tear-covered shirt I held. “I’ll wash it,” I told him again.
“No, I really don’t care. I was just wondering why people act like that. What was their motivation?”
“They thought it was funny,” I explained. “I guess they had planned it out beforehand. That was why Corbin invited me inthe first place, so I could be the joke. It worked out perfectly for them and I’m glad I don’t remember everything. I still have some sequences stuck in my mind, like when I tripped on the steps going outside and I fell. I remember people laughing but they didn’t put that part into the video.”
“Did you get hurt when you fell? There are trainers at the stadium.”
“No, I don’t need anything. But thanks.”
We still sat in silence.
“You don’t have to take me there,” I said. I figured that he deserved an out after listening to that long, ridiculous, shameful story.
But Shane started the engine and drove slowly over the ice. Then he started talking about something that had happened when he was in high school, when he’d had a friend who had gotten her period and had bled through onto her pants.
