Whistleblower, page 5
“But this is important,” I said.
Mehri and Ellison turned to me. My face grew hot, but I powered on. “What’s the point of trying to save the paper if all we do is print propaganda? Look, I have reason to believe Vaughn was at the Alvarado Resort the same week this girl was assaulted. And maybe it’s just a coincidence—maybe Vaughn really was just there on vacation, and some other guy on some other boat did it—but . . .” I trailed off, staring across the scratched wood surface of the table between us. “I have to know.”
Ellison lifted her mug of tea to her lips, her eyes unfocused as they stared into oblivion through the haze of steam. She was thinking. Hearing me out. I held my breath and waited for her decision.
“Next Monday,” Ellison finally said, “I want to run a profile about Vaughn’s charity.”
My heart sank.
“That’s bullshit,” Mehri said. “Are we supposed to ignore—”
“We’re not ignoring anything,” Ellison interrupted her.
“I’m not saying we can’t look into this. All of it. But what we can’t do is print these tips and throw our hands up and hope they’re true. We have to figure out who sent them and get in contact before anyone else knows they exist, or we compromise everything. We have to do this right.”
Mehri picked at the plastic coating on the binder on the table, peeling away tiny, jagged ribbons. I couldn’t blame her for being impatient and frustrated. I had the same pit of unrest in my stomach.
But I trusted Ellison.
So I said, “Okay. We’ll do a profile.”
Mehri ground her teeth as we sat in tense silence for a long moment. It was Ellison who broke it.
“I have to go to class,” she announced. “But we’ll circle back to this, okay?”
Ellison stood, mug in hand, and shuffled to the door. I watched until it clicked shut behind her. Then I spun in my chair to face Mehri.
“What if we work something into the charity profile?” I blurted.
She blinked at me.
“Like what?”
“Something about Vaughn. The way he talks to his team, the way he talks to reporters. We could go subtle. Just—just something to spark a conversation. I have a friend on the team.
Andre Shepherd. He could be a source.”
Mehri arched an eyebrow thoughtfully.
“Has he ever said anything about Vaughn being a sexist dick in the locker room? Or harassing reporters, staff, anybody?”
“He’s mentioned Vaughn tells dirty jokes. Nothing specific, though. But I can ask.”
“Okay,” Mehri said, one corner of her mouth finally quirking up in a smile. “Okay, good.”
She collected her binder and backpack and started toward the conference room door. I stood from my seat, my knees wobbling, and gathered my things. Cell phone. Bag of room-temperature tacos. Check and check.
“Hey, Mehri,” I called after her, wanting to ask why she’d invited me into this meeting instead of scooping me but too mortified to vocalize it. “Thank you.”
“I got your back, you got mine,” she said.
—
I waited until I’d plopped down on the wall of the fountain in the courtyard outside the student union to check my phone again. I had three notifications from Andre. The first was a text that read Come to based bull hose so much free beet. The second was a Snapchat—a blurry picture of Hanna, grinning and flipping off the camera with both hands in what looked like a very modern and recently updated kitchen, captioned She brat St Jamed!!! Pong queen of three year!!! Where art you???
The third was a text he’d sent ten minutes ago: Were gong home.
Comforted by the knowledge that my friends had ended up having a great time despite my unplanned absence, I tore open my bag of tacos and did what I always did when I felt stressed: turn to culinary comforts.
A part of me was upset that my afternoon had taken such a turn. I’d daydreamed about going to parties at the Baseball House, but I’d never actually been inside. It was a little difficult to picture what it would look like as I sat in some corner, eating my tacos, until Bodie St. James spotted me from across the room, recognized me, and came over to—I don’t know, say hey? Ask me not to spill carne asada on the carpet? My imagination was a bit pessimistic.
My phone lit up with another text right as a huge chunk of pico de gallo tumbled out of my taco and landed on my leg.
It was from my mom.
How did the pitch go? TQM
I brushed cilantro off my thigh and typed out a response. Great! Lie. My editor asked me to write a profile on the football coach. Just had lunch with Andre and Hanna. Headed home to study. TQM.
Half of me was terrified that I’d just convinced Mehri and Ellison that we should dive headfirst into an investigation that might end up being a very shallow pool, and that the three of us would crack our heads open on the bottom of it. The other half of me feared that there was no bottom—just a deep, dark pit of things better left unseen.
I pulled up Gabi de Hostos’s Instagram profile again.
Before I could second-guess myself, I clicked to message her.
Hey Gabi! My name is Laurel, and I’m a student journalist for Garland University’s paper. Your cousin Joaquín mentioned you visited the Alvarado Resort this summer. I was wondering if you’d be willing to speak to me about your experience there I pressed Send, put my phone facedown on the bench, and inhaled all three of my tacos. It probably took me all of two minutes. When I was done, I brushed a few chunks of pico de gallo off my lap, stood, and headed home.
The apartment Hanna and I rented was not glamorous.
Between the two of us, we’d had just enough cash to afford a place three blocks east of the Rodeo, where things got as sketchy as they could possibly get in a town as wealthy and sleepy as Garland. The building was two stories, with one wide hallway down the middle. All the windows on the first floor had bars over them, the intercom had been broken for years, and there was a wasp infestation in the laundry room. Our apartment on the second floor overlooked a gas station and had a busted air conditioning unit that rattled and groaned like a dying animal. But it was ours, and we loved it.
I heard Andre and Hanna before I even made it to our door. Their voices carried through the paper-thin walls, loud and a little slurred.
“It says two eggs.” Andre was shouting.
“Well, I can’t take an egg out now, so we’re going with it.”
I waited a moment, smiling to myself as I listened to them bicker, before I tugged out my keys. Andre shouted my name as I stepped through the door. He was sitting in one of the short, little IKEA chairs around our rickety dining table, his knees tucked up almost to his chest and a crushed cardboard box of cake mix in his hands, the back of which he was consulting as if it were a sacred text.
Hanna stood over the counter in our kitchenette, a spatula in her hand and a wreath of Ping-Pong balls that someone had hot glued together perched on her head like a crown.
“Where did you get that?” I asked her.
She flicked her spatula, splattering one large glob of cake batter onto the linoleum floor, and held her chin high.
“I won it.”
“You should’ve seen it,” Andre said. “She beat half the team.”
“And then Kyle Fogarty—who is fine as hell, by the way—bestowed upon me this crown”—Hanna paused to take on perhaps the worst British accent I’d ever heard—“which I shall be wearing to all social functions henceforth.”
Andre made a show of rolling his eyes.
“Sorry we didn’t wait for you,” he told me. “You were gone for, like, two hours, though. How’d the investigating go?”
I pulled out the seat beside him and plopped down.
“Would you say Vaughn is, like, sexist?”
“Like how sexist are we talking?” Andre asked.
“Enough to call women bitches.”
“Oh, definitely.”
“Or grab their asses.”
Andre reared back. “Damn. I mean, I don’t know. He’s an asshole, but that seems . . . I guess?”
“What do you mean?” I pressed.
“I mean, he’s a good coach and he seems like a nice enough guy, but . . . he says shit. Sexist shit. Nothing awful, but—okay, like, there’s this one ESPN reporter who always gave him hardball questions, right? He hated her. And he used to come into the locker room after games and say shit like She just needs a good dicking down. Just some gross, antiquated bullshit like that.”
“Andre, that’s fucked up,” Hanna snapped. “Did you say anything?”
Andre shrank down in his already-small chair and I felt a fierce burst of frustration—not at Andre, but for him. He was second string. He wasn’t in a position to stand up to the head coach, not when he could count his minutes of playing time on one hand.
“What about the starters?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They don’t really say anything, but I think sometimes you just let things go because . . .” He trailed off.
Because it’s Coach Vaughn. The man who has former players on nearly every NFL team. The man who’s family friends with state senators, B-list actors, and CFOs from Fortune 500 companies. The man who makes dreams come true for the players who serve him like brave knights serve a king.
“Would you be comfortable giving us some quotes for our article?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Andre said with a stifled hiccup. “I’d be honored.”
“Awesome. Remind me to ask again when you’re sober.”
“Look, no lie, I’ll do it,” he said, swiveling in our IKEA chair to face me head-on, so I’d understand how serious he was being. “You know I’ll do it. But you know who you really got to talk to?”
I did, unfortunately, know who Andre was referring to.
Bodie St. James.
Chapter 5
Wednesday came before I was ready for it. I hunched my back against the morning breeze and clutched my paper cup of coffee for warmth, staring out at the training field and doing my best not to succumb to panic. There was a clipboard tucked between my butt and the bleachers. It held a single page of questions I’d drafted. I’d consulted Mehri for advice, but she’d just shrugged and told me to “follow my instincts.”
My instincts were telling me to sprint home and throw myself back into bed, but I didn’t think that was what she’d meant.
My right knee bounced as I exhaled, breath visible in the morning air. I checked my phone again. Seven fifty-eight.
Practice was almost over. The football team had been here for over two hours already. I’d arrived at seven to give myself plenty of time to gather my courage and gulp down a black coffee (which I’d thought would make me feel very mature and put together, but which just left me with a stomachache).
My phone lit up with a pair of texts from Hanna.
You are a strong confident kickass journalist and I believe in you
Also we need more toilet paper can you steal some from campus?
I finished the last third of my coffee in one gulp and peered out across the field. The team had been scrimmaging for the last fifteen minutes, but Andre kept glancing over between plays and waving at me with the abandon of a five-year-old who’d spotted his best friend at the grocery store. Each time, a few of the other players turned and narrowed their eyes at me, trying to figure out if the girl with the clipboard was some kind of undercover NFL scout.
Andre was in a dark-green practice jersey, so I deduced that the guys in white were the starters. Like Bodie. The sight of him made my already-tender stomach twist into knots, so I tried to keep my eyes locked on Andre. Then Coach Vaughn pulled Andre to the side to talk him through a play, and I had to resort to examining a microscopic hangnail on my left thumb. Soon the shrill sound of a whistle cut through the air and made my eardrums wobble. Eight o’clock. Go time. I collected my empty coffee cup and tugged my clipboard from underneath me. Then I climbed over two rows of bleachers and hopped to the ground, feeling like perhaps the least athletic being to ever take the field.
I trudged across the grass to the huddle of players and coaching staff like a member of the French aristocracy on her way to the guillotine. Truman Vaughn’s voice carried across the field. He was my height—about five eight—but built like a panther, with lithe muscle and a cutting stare. His lips were narrow and his dark hair was speckled gray around the temples. Beside him stood the assistant coach, Chester Gordon, a big-eared redhead whose eyebrows were practically translucent. The players stood in a semicircle before them, a patient audience to their pep talk.
“—we’ll run it again tomorrow, bright and early. Lions on three.”
The boys erupted in a single, unified “One-two-three-Lions!”
I took a deep breath and scolded myself for feeling so nervous. I’d interviewed people before. I knew how to do this.
Besides, Bodie and I had already met—briefly and awkwardly, but that still counted. And it wasn’t like I was going on a first date with the guy. I was just trying to figure out if his head coach was a scumbag.
Half the players took off for the locker room. The other half hovered around the field, packing up their gear and talking among themselves and with the coaching staff. I kept my eyes on Bodie’s back as Andre jogged over to meet me a few yards out from the bench.
“Detective Cates,” he greeted me.
I pressed a hand to my stomach and shook my head. “I drank so much coffee, Andre. I’m going to be sick.”
He grimaced and plucked my coffee cup out of my hand.
“Maybe I should—wow, damn. You really killed it. Is this a venti?”
It was. I was a fool. An overcaffeinated fool.
“Hey,” Andre said, as sternly as Andre could. “You’ve got this. St. James is honest to goodness one of the nicest guys I know. He won’t give you trouble. Just do your thing.”
He gave me a quick thumbs-up as I trudged closer to the bench, where the aforementioned nicest guy had shed his jersey and pads, so he was down to just a black, sleeveless Under Armour shirt that was so tight I could see the muscles in his shoulders working.
Madre de dios , please keep your shirt on, I thought. This will be so much easier if you keep your shirt on.
I squeezed around a clump of large, damp, smelly bodies—and then I was standing right there, close enough that I could see the rivulets of sweat running down the back of his flushed neck.
“Bodie?” I asked.
I had only a split second to scrub my sweaty palm against the side of my leggings as furtively as I could before he turned around, eyebrows pinched in question and a Gatorade squeeze bottle held halfway to his mouth.
“Hi,” I croaked. “Could I borrow you for a sec?”
Bodie’s fingers clenched and his water bottle spurted out a cloud of mist. He reared back.
“I’m with the Daily and we’re—”
“St. James!” someone shouted, loudly and directly adjacent to my head. Kyle Fogarty stepped around me, his faux hawk glistening artificial green in the sunlight, and smacked Bodie on the arm. “Baseball House has leftover pizza. Let’s go.”
I stepped to the side, feeling entirely invisible.
“I’ll catch up with you,” Bodie said. “I’ve got to do something quick for . . .”
He trailed off and tipped his chin in my direction.
Fogarty turned and looked surprised. He hadn’t noticed me.
Predictable.
“For who?”
Fogarty directed the question at Bodie, as if I wasn’t capable of introducing myself. But whatever outrage I felt at the slight turned into unexpected despondency as Bodie remained silent. He didn’t remember me. It was fine—I’d grown numb to the sting of people forgetting my name, my face, where they’d seen me before. And I couldn’t blame Bodie. It’d been nearly a week since we caught the same elevator, and he’d been standing a few feet away when I’d told Nick who I was. He probably hadn’t heard me anyway.
I plastered on a smile and held out a hand, channeling Ellison’s confidence and professionalism as I faced Fogarty and said, “Laurel Cates, for the Daily.”
Fogarty shook my outstretched hand. He was, objectively speaking, a ridiculously attractive human being. Flawless skin, shiny hair, arrestingly symmetrical features. If you gave a hundred people a photo of him and a photo of Bodie, my guess was that almost every one of them would pick out Fogarty as the objectively hotter of the two. But there was something in Bodie’s eyes that wasn’t in Fogarty’s. An alertness. A kindness.
But I did not have a crush.
“You writing an article on my boy here?” Fogarty asked me, grabbing Bodie by the back of the neck and jostling him.
“Well, actually, it’s—”
“You should mention how big his dick is.”
I choked on the rest of my sentence.
“Fuck off,” Bodie said, giving Fogarty a shove. “I’ll text you.”
Fogarty laughed like a teenager who’d just executed a that’s what she said joke he was immensely proud of. I watched him sprint off to catch up with a group of his teammates on their way to the locker room and wondered why boys thought it was funny to say wildly inappropriate things to girls just to make them uncomfortable.
“Sorry about him,” Bodie said, cheeks splotchy pink with what could’ve been a sunburn but was more likely embarrassment. “Uh, what’d you need me for, exactly?”
He lifted a hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and my eyes shifted—against my will—to the pale underside of his biceps.
“Do you have some time for an interview? I just have a few questions”—I held up my clipboard and hoped he couldn’t tell that my entire body was vibrating with caffeine and terror—“for a profile we’re doing on Coach Vaughn.”
“I have class at nine thirty. Could we do it right now?”
“Yeah, this shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.
We can go sit down at the library or Starbucks or somewhere quiet.”
“I actually need to grab some food. Is the campus center okay?”
I nodded and opened my mouth to say something absurdly unprofessional, like okey dokey, when Bodie spoke again.
