Page 104 of Final Drive

“I know.”

“She’s got his chin.”

“Zane.”

“Sorry.” He takes the pan off the stove and starts scrubbing it. “I’m fine. What do you need?”

That’s the whole crew in one exchange, if you want it. Ask any of them how they feel and they’ll tell you what they can do about it.

By seven I’ve got a plan. Tyler gets the comment sections, since he’ll read them clinically and won’t repeat the worst ones to anybody. Eli gets the group chats, since that’s where the rowing world actually lives. Bo takes the phone, on the theory that anyone who calls the house today should have to talk to the largest man in North Carolina. Jackson gets nothing, on the theory that Jackson today is a liability and everybody in this kitchen knows it, including Jackson.

Cameron takes the driveway. He doesn’t say a word about it. He just picks up his keys, goes outside, and sits on his bike at the end of the gravel where anybody turning in has to look at him first.

Gray comes down at seven-fifteen in a shirt with a collar, which he hasn’t worn since the hearing.

“Where’s Reese?”

“Still asleep. I checked twice.”

“Let her sleep.” He pours coffee he isn’t going to drink. “Athletics rescheduled the roster shoot.”

Zane looks up. “To when?”

“Two o’clock. Today.”

“That’s deliberate.”

“Everything is,” Gray says.

He’s not wrong, but he’s got the reason backwards, and it takes me until noon to work out why.

Campus is the part I’m actually good at. I go to my ten o’clock, sit where I always sit, and answer a question in seminar about supply elasticity that I could have answered in my sleep. I do it in the same tone I’d use any other week, since the whole trick is refusing to behave like a person under discussion.

Five people ask me about the article before lunch. I give every one of them the same seventeen words: She said what she wanted to say, it’s in the piece, and we race in four days. Then I ask them a question about themselves, which nobody expects and everybody accepts.

Two guys from the lacrosse house look at me across the dining hall and don’t come over. That’s Quinton’s doing, and I file it.

A woman from the women’s eight stops me outside the library. I brace for it.

“Tell her Adams is done. Not just suspended. The whole boat’s glad.” She adjusts her bag. “That’s all. Don’t make it a thing.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You’re doing it right now. You’ve got your face on.”

I get to the boathouse at one-thirty, and my face stays exactly where it is.

The sports information office has sent a woman named Vance and a photographer who looks about our age. They’ve got the racks lit and a reflector propped against a hull, and Bennett’s standing at the edge of the bay with his clipboard in his hands.

Reese comes in at one forty-five with her hair down. She’s in the black quarter-zip the rest of us are wearing, open at the neck, and nothing on earth is going to make the hollow of her throat other than what it is. Gray’s mark is four days old. It’s darkened to the color of an old bruise, and it’s the first thing anybody sees.

Bo positions himself at her shoulder without appearing to move. Tyler takes his glasses off, cleans them, and puts them back on.

Vance sees it about nine seconds in.

“Ms. Callahan.” She’s pleasant. Genuinely pleasant, which somehow makes it worse. “Would you be more comfortable in something with a higher neck? I’ve got a team jacket in the car.”

“I’m fine in this.”