Page 44 of Fatality on the Field

It makes me want to punch something, but I also deeply want to fix it for her.

I duck through a shortcut behind the tech building to make it to the law building with five minutes to spare before class. Inside, it’s warm, and the halls smell like those chemical air fresheners that are supposed to mask how much it actually smells like students and stress. There’s a cluster of kids waiting outside the lecture hall, all in business casual, some with clipboards. I slide past them, find a seat in the back row, and immediately start drafting a text.

If Morgana’s going to survive this, she’s going to need help. Actual help—the kind that’s bred for this stuff, not just Channing. While our birdy girl is great, Lady M needs someone who can run interference with the board, smooth over the alumni, and make the bureaucrats happy enough to leave her alone. Her savior has to know every dirty trick and social maneuver in the donor playbook, so I’m going to consult the best person I know at that shit: Nana.

Scrolling through my contacts, I skip the group chats to land on her number. I stare at it for a second before I switch over to email. She always said business questions should be asked in business formats, and if I email her, she’ll answer it twice as fast. I tap out a subject line—’Need Advice, Tantalus Bowl’—and start the message. Keeping it short, I lay out the situation and frame it as a university image issue if the Board here is allowed to leave the new, untrained Dean to fail because she doesn’t have the knowledge, resources, or even a warning this could happen.

Nana hates when good old boys set women up to fail, so this is right up her alley.

I’m about to hit send when my professor walks in, his coat flapping around his legs like a murder of crows, and the room goes quiet. Putting my phone away after I send it, I take solace in knowing my plan is well underway. If it works, it’ll take some of the heat off Morgana, and maybe give her a chance to focus on fixing the mess Magnus left behind and finding the bastard who’s trying to frame my mates for murder.

My first-year torts class starts, and I zone out as I imagine the email chain that’s about to explode in the administration’s inbox. Nana will start with a gentle suggestion, then escalate to a firm recommendation, and by the end of the week, she’ll have the alumni steering committee eating out of her hand. I smirk and doodle a wolf's paw on my notepad, feeling better than I have since I got back from Hell.

There’s a long way to go, but at least now I have a play.

twenty-seven

MORGANA

My desk is now immaculate, not a hopeless, soul-sucking landfill. You could eat off its surface—if you were the kind of person who enjoyed dining atop bureaucratic horseshit, which is a fair description of the university’s board. Channing has helped me conjure order from the chaos, and her reward is to see me repeatedly fight the urge to topple the ‘on fire’ pile just to hear it crash. She anchored that one with an ironically placed red stapler, a detail I can’t help but appreciate, even if it means the only thing burning in here is my resentment.

Mind, I never wanted or asked for this job, and it’s well outside of my professional experience, so I don’t give a shit if I sound bitter.

Channing put everything into buckets, which feels less accurate because nothing in here would ever hold water, metaphorically or otherwise. The ‘on fire’ stack is the closest to my dominant hand, and it’s composed of contracts, vendor negotiations, and every half-completed, time-sensitive disaster that the board allowed to come due for this stupid game without telling me. My friend flagged each item with a sticky note and a line of colored highlighter, so I can track the progress of my own impending doom as I chip away at the stack.

The next pile is urgent, and it lives in a manila folder accordion that doubles as a trap for the unwary. If you open it wrong, everything goes flying out onto the floor. It’s happened twice, and both times Channing had to keep me from raging out and setting it on fire out of spite. It has things that need attention soon, but can wait until I slog through the first steaming pile of crap.

She also created a ‘it can wait’ basket that’s shoved to the far right, where I can pretend it doesn’t exist for a bit. The last one, ‘not important’, is a sad, wilted heap placed on the table next to my couch that I’m pretty sure Channing kept around so she can feed it into the shredder for stress relief. We both keep glancing at it like it might crawl off the edge and fall into a wastebasket on its own.

It’s full of complaints and bullshit that I don’t have the energy or time for… ever.

The digital version of this shitstorm is on my monitor in color-coded folders. My efficient friend has relabeled every folder in my inbox to match the piles and mapped the ‘on fire’ stuff to the calendar there. For every one of those emails, there’s a corresponding digital reminder, a Teams meeting, or—horrifyingly—an in-person meeting that I now have to attend. It makes my teeth grind to see the blocked-up nightmare there, especially because a great deal of this does not lighten my original load in the slightest.

Des has been coiled at my left ear for the past hour, occasionally flicking her tongue at a memo as if she’d bite it if she could. When Channing’s voice gets too chipper, Des hisses in harmony to remind me how angry I am about this shit. It’s nice to have a common enemy, so I let her get her usual frustration out by directing it at my paperwork punishment. At this point, we’re midway through the fire stack, and it’s almost exclusively Tantalus Bowl fallout.

“Vendor contract for the field striping,” Channing reads, tapping her stylus on the header. “Apparently, it has to match the color scheme of the media guide, or the sponsors will riot.”

“Fucking let them. Who cares?” I mutter, but my assistant has already clicked to the next item.

“Referee per diem. There’s a line item here that Magnus never signed, and if we don’t fix it, the supernatural officiators’ guild can—and will—pull their refs at game time.”

It sounds important, though I can’t fathom why, and my ‘give a fuck’ about a big football game is fading fast.

The urge to let the entire thing collapse returns. Instead, I groan and make a note on the tablet. “Get it signed, double it if it gets them to show up early for the walkthroughs, and add it to the running agenda.”

Channing nods, then prints out a copy for the homework folder. Behind her, the printer on the credenza spits out a page, which I immediately add to the folder on the left side of my desk. It will join me at home tonight, a parasite on my personal hours that is partially the fault of my dickface ex and partially the lazy ass people he employed.

“Next up, alumni event RSVPs,” Channing says. “The VIP section is overbooked, and Magnus didn’t account for the VIPs needing security sweeps. There’s a memo here from the last time this happened—2014—and it ended in three people being memory-wiped.”

“Great,” I say, glancing at the calendar. The block for that event is already double-booked, so I swipe it to the reschedule list and print another agenda sheet. “We’re never going to get this done. I’m going to die in this office, surrounded by idiotic nonsense that will not fix the rot Magnus allowed to fester in his nest.”

Channing just chuckles and moves on despite my whining.

An hour passes in this fashion, my phone buzzing every once in a while with texts. I ignore all but the ones from the guys, which I triage by opening them, checking for problems, and letting it go if it’s just check-ins. I am getting very good by at least sending a thumbs up so they know I saw it, but not getting distracted by mates who are way more interesting than this crap.

Des gets bored with the paperwork and stretches up to examine the wall clock. When I follow her gaze, I see that it’s nearly three, which means I have survived most of a workday without killing anyone. I am about to reward myself with a break when Channing launches into a long, complicated explanation about the security sweep. I must seem like I’m hitting a wall because she pauses, looking at me over the rim of her glasses.

“There’s a running joke that the Tantalus Bowl turns all hosting deans into alcoholics by kickoff. You’re ahead of schedule on the angry part, but if we keep this up, you’ll start drinking, I bet. You’re fun when you drink, but I don’t think this is the right forum.”