Page 23 of On His Team

A guy two seats down from me raises his hand. “How long does the final report have to be?”

Professor Ives looks at him for a second. “That’s the question you have.”

“I mean––”

“Twelve pages,” she says. “Which is going to be the easiest part of your semester.”

She goes to the next slide.

I’m already thinking about what my project could be. I’ve got my notebook open and I’m not taking notes on the lecture. I’m writing down four things, and then a fifth thing, and then crossing out the second one because it needs a liquor license.

“Two more things,” Professor Ives says. “First, you will be graded on execution, not on ambition. A small event that happens is worth infinitely more in this class than a spectacular event that collapses in week ten.”

Fine.

“Second.” She puts up a slide with a flowchart on it that has maybe nine boxes. “Every event has an approval chain. For most of you, that chain is short. Reserve a room, submit a form, done. But if your event involves athletics, university facilities, sponsors, minors, alcohol, outside vendors, media, or ticketing, your chain changes, and it gets longer, and it involves people who have never heard of you and do not care that you have a deadline.” She taps the screen. “Find out what your chain is in week one. Not week six. I have watched three separate groups lose an entire semester because they built something beautiful and then found out in March that they needed a signature from Risk Management.”

I write that down. Then I look at my list of five things and realize four of them are in the rink.

I start the group chat from a table on the second floor of the library, eating a sandwich.

Gianna: TONIGHT. GIRLS NIGHT. NO MEN.

Lucy: I have a date with Benson. First one we’ve had in like two weeks.

Penelope: I have studio and my internship. Sorry.

Melly: I told Blue we’d do a thing. Let’s plan another time.

Aspen: Can’t. I’m busy with work. Swamped actually.

Mara: I’ll go.

Mila: Same.

Gianna: Thank God!

Lucy: Love you too.

I put my phone face down and eat the rest of the sandwich.

Nobody did anything wrong. That’s the annoying part. There’s no one in that chat I can be legitimately mad at, because everyone is busy and has something going on.

Last year, I could put four people in a car in twenty minutes. Now it takes eight messages to find out that two of them are free. It’s not that anybody doesn’t want to. Everybody’s life just got bigger, and mine got bigger too, and the parts don’t line up the way they used to. I think that might be the part bothering me more than everybody getting boyfriends: nobody decided to change anything. It just changed.

I sit there for another minute.

Fine.

If I can’t get everybody out, I’ll go where everybody already is. Because at any given moment, half of the people in that chat are in one house, and it’s the house my brother lives in, and nobody there has ever once asked me why I go over as much as I do.

My shift starts at two. Practice is at three-thirty, so between two and three the equipment room is the busiest place in the building.

Guys come through in twos and threes on their way to the locker room. Somebody wants a new stick. Somebody wants his old stick, which he broke, and wants to know why we don’t have another one exactly like it, since it was discontinued in 2019. Somebody’s helmet clip snapped. Casey Brogan cannot find his left glove and is genuinely upset about it.

I’m at the bench with a bin of blade guards, matching numbers, because Donovan wants the skates back in the stalls by three and about a third of them have tape on the guards with no number on it.

Rowan comes in carrying one skate.