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Is Bett McNeely Too Much of a Behavior Risk for NFL Teams?

I quickly skimmed articles describing the fistfight at a sports bar. He’d been there with a bunch of people he worked with—probably at one of those internships Gracie should’ve had—and things had gotten out of hand.

McNeely had punched a guy twice and screamed at him to get the fuck out of there. The guy had clocked him once under the chin. And then…

“Bett knocked him out,” Rowan said, leaning toward me so she could see the screen, too. “Broke two barstools and knocked over several beer glasses in the process.”

I nodded, eyes still locked on the screen.

“But strangely, there were no supporting witness statements in all of the coverage,” she went on, “other than people claiming they had no clue what triggered the fight. When Bett was asked, he said, ‘No comment,’ until his father’s PR engine put out a statement that he ‘sincerely regretted his behavior,’ blamed it on irresponsible alcohol consumption and ‘boys being boys,’ and pledged to refrain from public alcohol consumption in the future.”

Rowan lowered her voice. “The reporters at CNN think all the witnesses were paid to keep quiet. But my friend Jess bartends at Whimsy, and she heard the guy Bett punched was hassling a twink at the bar. Well, he started off flirting with the twink, then started hassling him when the twink wasn’t interested. Shoved him, called him names. According to Jess, Bett told the asshole to knock it off. The guy didn’t take kindly to Bett’s interference.”

It didn’t make any sense. “If he was defending someone who couldn’t defend themselves, why the hell would his father pay off witnesses? It made him look like he was drunk and belligerent instead of defending an innocent victim!”

Rowan sighed. “Surely you know the answer to that, Vaughn.”

I could feel the righteous indignation curl in my gut. “Because the senator didn’t want his son associated with an innocent victim if that victim was gay?”

She nodded once. “Senator McNeely is very firmly against identity politics. I bet this would have forced the senator to address his views on LGBTQ issues to the media, and maybe he didn’t want to have to do that at this stage of his campaign.”

“Fuck,” I said, running a hand over my head. “What an asshole.”

“Yeah. The senator,” Rowan clarified. “Not Bett.”

“Fuck,” I said again. “Are you sure that’s what happened?”

She nodded. “Very. There’s actually surveillance video from the bar, but no one ever wanted or needed it. The whole thing was managed efficiently by his father’s campaign staff.”

“Why’d he go along with it, I wonder?”

But then I thought back to the first day McNeely had shown up in our room. The shock I’d felt upon realizing who my roommate was.

I still didn’t know why he was spending senior year in the dorm. Honestly, there had been so many other mysteries about the man to solve, I hadn’t thought about it in weeks. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said one of the guys he was supposed to live with had flaked or was a PR risk for his father’s campaign.

But knowing about the fight changed things. Suddenly, it read a whole lot like punishment for the trouble he’d caused, defending a guy who needed help.

And the more I thought about it, the more facts started slotting into place.

His sweet BMW M4 was MIA this semester. And the asshole had actually shown up at the Pit to make a wager, saying he needed money…

“Gotta get to class,” I muttered, squeezing Rowan’s shoulder as I stood to leave. “But thanks for telling me this.”

I’d spent the rest of the day trying to find out more about the fight, but it was as media-washed as I’d suspected. How was it possible there wasn’t a single witness posting their insider scoop—or a video of the whole thing—for clout? Surely there’d been rich enough kids there who wouldn’t need whatever bribery money Senator McNeely’s campaign was handing around.

But there was nothing. The only salacious detail was a quote by one of McNeely’s fellow interns, who’d said McNeely had “lost his shit, man, and just like whaled on the guy.”

That single quote had been responsible for McNeely’s appearance as the villain of the piece. It made me wonder why it had been left in. How that one guy’s take had been allowed to stand while all of the other witnesses had been effectively silenced.

When I got back to my room that afternoon, McNeely wasn’t there. It was no surprise, considering he had practice most days at this time, but when he still hadn’t returned by seven that night, I began to wonder. It was the closest I’d come to texting the asshole to ask him what was going on, but I refused to do that. I had no intention of giving him the idea that I cared.

Instead, I grabbed my laptop and moved downstairs to a study room in the dorm basement to stop thinking about it. Stop being tempted by the scent of him in our room. By the empty bed and rumpled sheets where he slept. The stupid collection of books on his shelf and the prissy set of golf shirts hanging in his closet.

I lasted half an hour before my brain made a lame-ass excuse to go back to the room. I fought it for another fifteen minutes until a text came in from my sister.

Grace

Your roomie is hobbling. If he doesn’t turn up in the next half-hour, send a search party toward the dining hall.