Whistleblower, page 25
Garland was up by fourteen points in the third quarter.
I wish I could say I was enjoying our first real triumph since the first game of the season, but it was hard to see any silver lining when Vaughn’s face kept popping up on screen. I hated his face. His empty, glaring eyes. His wicked-witch nose. His graying stubble, his baseball-cap tan and pale half-moon of a forehead that poked out whenever he tried to adjust his headset. But worse than his face was the fact that the commentators hadn’t said a word about the Daily or our article.
It was like our article had never happened—like nobody gave a shit that the man on the field had groped a student, siphoned off charity funds, and said ragingly sexist things. All they cared about was the game he was going to win for them.
Bodie, for his part, was the driving force of our success.
Four touchdowns, one two-point conversion, so many passing yards that I’d stopped being impressed when they read off the count. It was the best game Garland had managed in months.
And, like, good for him. So glad one of us had escaped this whole debacle unscathed. I totally wasn’t bitter and absolutely did not want to angry vomit having to watch Bodie conquer the field like some kind of warrior of old.
And then, less than a minute into the fourth quarter, Bodie had a little hiccup.
After the snap, chaos. Both tackles—the guys in charge of protecting Bodie’s blind side—seemed to disappear, taking the defense with them. Bodie faked left and took off right. At the very same moment, the opposition’s broadest and heaviest linebacker appeared in a gap left by the scattered offensive line, charging like a bull aiming to skewer a matador on its horns.
It was a brutal hit. A head-on collision with a semitruck hit. But for the split second after Bodie was knocked back, it felt good. I wanted him to hurt the way I hurt. Selfishly, I thought it was something that could be balanced out. Like a linebacker to the chest for not believing in me, for not standing by me, was a fair trade-off.
But after that initial wave of bitter hurt passed, my stomach knotted tight with guilt. When Bodie sat up, there was blood trickling out of his nose. It was already swelling—broken, probably. His helmet had been knocked clean off.
It was a small relief to see him get to his feet and jog off the field, instead of being loaded onto a stretcher like I’d briefly worried he might be, but his head was down, his sweat-soaked bangs hanging over his forehead and casting his face in shadow. We won the game by twenty-one points. I didn’t celebrate.
—
On Saturday morning I texted PJ in an attempt to mooch a ride to Rebecca’s charity golf tournament, but her sore throat had turned into a full-blown case of the flu, which meant that—not for lack of trying—she was unable to get out of bed. The bus would’ve taken hours, so I was left with no alternative: I walked to the parking garage across the street from the Palazzo, where she was still hidden, climbed three flights of stairs, and got into my vandalized car.
I told myself I’d be all right. I would get through today. If I swung around the side of the clubhouse and parked in the very back corner of the employee lot, under that awful tree that perspired sap, then nobody would even see me.
It was a solid plan. And it totally went to shit when, on the freeway, I glanced down at my dashboard and realized my engine was running on fumes.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I chanted as I took the next exit and pulled into the first gas station I could find. “Fuck”—I climbed out of the car—“fuck”—I jammed my card into the machine—“fuck!”
I only had the patience for half a tank. Rebecca was going to have my head on a gold platter.
It was a full ten minutes into my shift when I pulled up to the clubhouse. The parking lot was packed. As I maneuvered into the corner-most spot under the sappy tree (a tricky feat, considering Rebecca had parked her black Lexus in the adjacent spot with its wheel halfway over the white line) my phone buzzed twice in my cup holder. I cut my engine, ripped my phone off the charging cord, and found a pair of texts from my boss.
where are you?
laurel if your sick get someone to cover for you. their are already tons of people here ok today is very important
I uttered my twenty-seventh fuck of the morning, pocketed my car keys, and booked it to the workers’ entrance by the kitchen, where the catering staff was wheeling carts of supplies into the clubhouse. I was all of two steps into the building when Rebecca materialized before me like a polo shirt–clad poltergeist. Her hair was slicked back into a tight ponytail and she had mascara on. I’d never seen her in mascara.
“Laurel,” she said, followed by a phrase I never thought I’d hear come out of her mouth: “Thank god you’re here.”
“What happened?”
“PJ was going to be my cart girl for the back nine today but she’s got allergies or something—”
“She has the flu.”
“—so I need you to step up.”
The cart girls always made more in tips in an hour than I made in a whole weekend of work. PJ was good at the job, since golfers preferred being served drinks out on the course by girls who laughed at their jokes and twirled their hair and made a mean cocktail. But I didn’t have the patience for it.
And, also: “I’m not twenty-one. All I can serve is beer.”
Rebecca waved me off. “We have enough beer to fill the swimming pool. Come on.”
I followed her through the bar and into the lobby. The clubhouse looked vaguely like the set of a Real Housewives reunion, with its ostentatious flower arrangements and hors d’oeuvre platters on crisp white tablecloths. Through open double doors, the main ballroom was set up for the evening’s silent auction. Some of the reps and sponsors from the participating charities were snacking away, mimosas in hand and conversations loud and boisterous.
“Now, before you get out there,” Rebecca said abruptly,
“we need to have a quick chat about professionalism.”
I jerked to a stop in the middle of the lobby. Rebecca didn’t need to say more. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the course, I could see a pair of men on the practice putting green beside the first tee, golf bags propped up on the cart path and a pair of caddies hovering on standby.
One of the men was President Sterling, Garland University’s long-standing head of school. The other man had his back to me, but it didn’t matter. I recognized him anyway.
“Truman Vaughn is here to represent the foundation,”
Rebecca said.
“I’m not—I can’t—” I spluttered.
“I know,” she interrupted, huffing in impatience. “I’m not asking you to apologize to him. I don’t want you anywhere near him. But we’ve got two hundred people here, half my staff is out sick, and I’m out of options. If Vaughn asks you to serve him something, do it with a smile, okay?”
I wanted to put my foot down. I wanted to tell her I probably had the flu, too, and that I should really go home and get back in bed before I smeared my germs all over these rich people. But if Rebecca thought for a second that I was going to pass up the chance to look Truman Vaughn in the eye and make him squirm, she was a moron.
“Okay,” I said, doing my best impression of PJ’s pageant smile. “Whatever you need.”
The drink carts were, in essence, regular golf carts that were weighed down by approximately a thousand cans of beer and one heaping spoonful of misogyny. Normally the cart girls wore skintight tops and little tennis skirts (“The shorter the hem,” PJ had once informed me, “the better the tips.”) but I’d worn my usual hideous khaki Bermuda shorts and shapeless polyester uniform polo, in which my own parents probably could’ve mistaken me for a pudgy twelve-year-old boy. Didn’t matter. People were here for a charity tournament—the social pressure to tip me would more than make up for the lack of eye candy.
When I pulled the drink cart around to the front of the clubhouse, Vaughn had disappeared, but James Sterling, the president of Garland University and one of the most successful private fundraisers in California, stood on the practice green with a putter in one hand and an honest-to-god cigar in the other, like some kind of mob boss. There was a no-smoking rule at the club, but clearly Rebecca wasn’t enforcing it today.
Beside him stood Jessica Kaufman and Diana Cabrera—two of the Real Housewives.
I stomped on the brake. The drink cart lurched to a stop, wheels creaking.
Sterling and the two women turned abruptly. Jessica stared at me, eyes vacant of any and all recognition, before turning back to Sterling and picking up whatever conversation I’d interrupted. Diana, at least, had the decency to look nervous as I hopped out of the cart.
“Ms. Cabrera?” I called. Then, in Spanish: “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Good morning, Laurel,” she replied in English. Her smile was toothy and bright, but she was wringing the grip of her putter like it owed her money. “You wouldn’t happen to have a frozen marg machine in that cart of yours?”
I stopped at the edge of the putting green. “You read our article.”
Her smile dropped. “I did, yes.”
“And you’ve heard the university’s rebuttal?”
Diana exhaled and cast a glance over her shoulder at Jessica.
“Which one of you went back on what you said to me?”
I asked.
“Laurel, this whole thing is a lot more complicated than we realized—”
“You said he was falling over drunk,” I said, trying and failing to keep my voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry across the green. “You said he was hammered, and that he invited you onto his boat. Right? All four of you confirmed that. Twice. So either you guys have a seriously distorted sense of sarcasm that I can’t read or you got scared.”
Diana met my eyes.
“Jessica called the media,” she murmured. “The twins and I haven’t said anything.”
I nodded. “Are you going to?”
“We stand by what we told you, Laurel—”
“I mean, are you going to speak up?” I asked. “Are you going to let people know I quoted you correctly?”
Diana pressed her lips shut, and I had my answer. I wanted to call her one of the words my cousins had taught me—something wicked. Something dirty. Something that would convey just how little I thought of her right now.
Instead I asked, “Can I get you anything to drink, ma’am?”
Diana had the grace to wince. “No, thank you.”
I climbed back in my cart and floored it to the eighteenth hole.
—
I had none of the grace and none of the patience of a good cart girl. Twice, I grabbed the wrong brand of beer and handed it over with the unjustified confidence of a blissful idiot.
Once, on a particularly narrow stretch of the cart path by the sixteenth fairway, I nearly took off the front bumper of my cart on a rocky outcropping. I was a hot mess. This became a far more literal self-reflection as the morning sun climbed higher in the sky. The back of my hideous polyester uniform polo soaked through with sweat. My cheeks were hot as frying pans to the touch. A single drop of perspiration rolled from my underarm to my elbow, unimpeded, and I shivered with my full body.
And if feeling like the human equivalent of an enchilada (steaming hot and floppy) wasn’t bad enough, I pulled up to the shady patch of the course between the tenth and eleventh holes to find three men on foot coming down the fairway toward the putting green, a caddy in a cart trailing behind them.
Truman Vaughn and James Sterling walked side by side, heads down as they spoke.
Behind them, lurking like a shadow, was a tall, broad-shouldered boy with a green baseball hat pulled low over his eyes. My heart hiccupped at the sight of him. Bodie. His nose was still swollen and dark bruises bloomed under his eyes, spreading out from the bridge of his nose like moth’s wings. He looked miserable. He looked beautiful. He looked, inexplicably, like Troy Bolton about to launch into an angsty musical number across the fairway.
Neither Vaughn nor Sterling noticed the arrival of a sweaty drink-cart girl, but from across the rolling grass, Bodie’s eyes locked on me and the toe of his shoe caught a clump of grass.
He stumbled forward a step.
“I’m playing like shit,” Sterling said with a barking laugh.
“You know what, I’ll write a check out to the foundation for twenty grand just to apologize for singlehandedly dragging down our team score.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got our secret weapon,”
Vaughn said, thumping a hand on Bodie’s shoulder and jostling him so hard he winced. “Look at the size of this kid! He can hit a driver better than some of the pros.”
I was so mad I didn’t know what to do with myself. Mad at Vaughn for being so rough with a boy whose broken nose he was responsible for. Mad at Bodie for existing. Mad at myself for being so relieved to see him alive and well after last weekend’s game that I almost forgave the fact that he’d come to the country club with the very man I’d warned him he should steer clear of.
Bodie was first up to putt. It was an easy enough shot, since his ball was only a few yards from the hole—a quick swing of his club, a round of hearty applause from the others in his party, and a humble tip of his baseball cap.
“I’m going to grab some water,” he announced.
He started toward my drink cart. I kept my hands tight on the steering wheel, refusing to fuss with my hair.
“Hey,” he said gently. Uncertainly. Something about the broken nose made him look like a brutal mythological warrior or a cologne model. I hated it. “I didn’t know you worked here. It’s really good to see you, Laur—”
“Bottled water’s three bucks.”
Bodie winced but fished his wallet out of his back pocket anyway.
I averted my eyes from his hands—his hands that’d looked so beautiful wrapped around a Fosters Freeze cone and had been so warm against the back of my neck—and took some consolation in the knowledge that Truman Vaughn was perhaps the worst golfer I’d ever witnessed, and I’d once watched an elderly club member send her putter flying into the man-made pond on the second hole.
“Goddamn it,” he shouted as his ball skated past the hole and over the lip of a sand trap.
Vaughn turned, saw that I was closer to his cart than their caddy, and snapped his fingers to get my attention.
“Get me my chipping wedge,” he said. It wasn’t a request, nor a question. It was a demand. “Actually, you know what, just bring the whole damn bag.”
I wasn’t sure what was worse: that he thought all staff should be at his beck and call, regardless of our job titles and responsibilities, or that he didn’t recognize me.
I slipped out of the drink cart, shouldered my way around Bodie, and marched over to their abandoned cart. Vaughn’s bag was enormous and dark green, with the Garland school crest on one side and the Titleist logo on the other. It pained me to think that this hideous display of school pride had probably cost him more than I made in a week of work. I hooked my hand under the strap and tried to lift it with all the strength of one biceps.
Bodie appeared at my side. I braced one foot on the back bumper for leverage and hauled Vaughn’s bag up and over the barrier. The bottom end of it hit the pavement with a thunderous clanking of clubs.
“You got it?” Bodie asked.
“Yep,” I grunted. “Keep walking.”
But Bodie was, well, Bodie. “Here, let me help.”
He didn’t even give me a chance to wield the attitude.
Before I could manage a single word of protest, he’d slung the strap of Vaughn’s Titleist bag over his shoulder.
“I can carry it,” I snapped.
“I know you can,” Bodie said, meeting my eyes. “I just want to help.”
“Shouldn’t you be resting or something? Isn’t your head fucked up?”
“That’s an understatement,” he muttered under his breath.
Vaughn’s eyes narrowed a fraction when he saw Bodie was the one who’d brought over his bag, but he didn’t comment on it. He took three mediocre practice swings before attempting to chip his ball out. It ricocheted off the lip of the grass and tumbled back into almost exactly the same position it’d started. It took Herculean effort not to scoff. Bodie seemed to notice. He jogged back to the drink cart and ducked his head, as if to adjust his baseball hat.
“Laurel, can we—”
“I’m not talking to you with them around,” I snapped, tipping my chin discreetly at his head coach, who was cursing under his breath as he lined up his second shot out of the bunker. It was a solid excuse. Much better than I’m not talking to you because if I do I’m probably going to cry about your stupid broken nose again.
Bodie handed me three one-dollar bills. I reached into the cooler strapped to the passenger’s seat and dug out a bottle of water so cold it was clouded and speckled with condensation.
I shoved it at him, then shook out the front of my shirt, trying to dry up the river of sweat between my boobs. What I really wanted was to slip away unnoticed to the women’s bathroom and blot my armpits with paper towels. But I wasn’t going to look Bodie in the eyes and tell him that. I peeled my hair off the back of my neck and bunched it up in one hand, longing for PJ and her infinite supply of hair ties.
I let out an embarrassing squeak when Bodie lifted his bottle of water and pressed it to the back of my bared neck.
My shoulders pinched up to my ears against the cold, and then I slumped over the steering wheel, sighing in relief against my will.
“Too cold?” Bodie asked.
“No, s’perfect.”
It dawned on me after several long, euphorically cooling seconds that, should Vaughn look over, he’d see his beloved quarterback attending to the girl who’d done everything to try to take him down. I reached back, fumbling for hold of the bottle. If I happened to grab Bodie’s wrist first, and then trace my fingers over his knuckles, it was entirely accidental.
“I got it,” I told him.
“I don’t mind,” he said. Then, more quietly: “Look, ESPN’s doing a series of player interviews with their top ten collegiate prospects. I’m here because Vaughn said he’d pull some strings if I came out and participated in the charity thing.”
