Whistleblower, page 7
“How is it this hot already?” I demanded, hand shielding my eyes. “It’s nine in the morning.”
Hanna tugged her tube top up with a frustrated huff.
“I really wish I had boobs.”
“No you don’t. My boob sweat is unreal right now.”
I’d worn my usual game-day outfit—Andre’s practice jersey from freshman year, with his last name and number on the back. It stilled smelled vaguely of sweat despite the number of times I’d run it through the wash, but it was comfortable and large enough that I could drink as much beer and eat as many snacks as I wanted without worrying about bloating. Hanna had chosen a black corduroy overall dress and a Garland-green tube top. She looked entirely too trendy to be gallivanting around muddy lawns in search of friends and free alcohol.
We were halfway down the Rodeo, both of us slinking along under the hot sun like animals in search of a watering hole, when Hanna tugged my arm to point out a cluster of fifty or so students gathered under a pop-up tent in the middle of the Baseball House’s front lawn, surrounded by rickety beer pong tables and cornhole boards.
“Shit,” Hanna said. “I think it’s wristbands only.”
“Wait here.”
While Hanna hovered at the edge of the crowd, I dove headfirst into the chaos, murmuring excuse me and sorry as I brushed shoulders and sidestepped the crushed beer cans littering the ground. In the middle of the tailgate I found a makeshift plywood bar manned by two baby-faced boys who were trying to field drink orders.
“Have your wristbands ready!” one of them shouted.
“Mine fell off!” a girl whined. “Swear on my life, I already paid!”
While the unlicensed bartenders explained that no wristband meant no alcohol, I darted around the side of the bar and stepped up to the counter. They had vodka—giant plastic jugs of it, each one larger than my head—and off-brand lemonade, along with several plastic bags of plastic cups. No one was watching me.
It took all of fifteen seconds to make one vodka lemonade so strong I could’ve used it as nail polish remover. Then, with my red cup bounty in hand, I slipped out from behind the bar and darted back into the crowd again, quick as a woodland animal weaving through trees.
When I surfaced on the other side, Hanna slow clapped.
I shrugged, feigning nonchalance even as I grinned at her.
Invisibility. My favorite party trick. I passed Hanna the cup and she took a long sniff, one eye scrunching shut as a shiver of revulsion rolled down her spine.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Laurel. This might actually kill me.”
She coughed and spluttered after the first sip, then passed me the cup so I could also poison myself before we made our way onto campus.
The Art House had no front lawn to speak of, so they usually set up their tailgate on a shady lawn by the architecture school where the grad students congregated to smoke cigarettes and chug black coffee. But Hanna led me to a tent along the parkway, over near the student union, where a hand-lettered sign that read patties for pollock was strung up over a folding table.
Mehri Rajavi stood behind the makeshift counter, the sun glinting off her gold nose ring and the glittery temporary tattoo of Leopold the Lion (Garland’s mascot) on her right cheek.
“Five dollar burgers!” she was calling out to passersby.
“Help students in need buy art supplies!”
A pair of middle-aged alumni stopped, persuaded by Mehri’s sales pitch, and pulled out their wallets. I almost laughed out loud. Mehri wasn’t technically lying—the Art House was going to buy paint. It just so happened to be for Pollock, the black light paint party they hosted in a giant tent in their backyard every October. While the sports-centric houses on the Rodeo were typically known for throwing better, wilder parties, Pollock was the exception. Last year, three people had left the party in ambulances (one for alcohol poisoning, two for crowd surfing–related injuries). Hanna and I already had our all-white outfits picked out.
We waltzed up to the counter just as Mehri was passing a paper plate of hamburgers to the alums. Hanna tugged a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from her pocket and slid it across the table.
“I’d like to make a donation.”
Mehri shoved Hanna’s money back at her.
“You’re helping with setup.” She scolded Hanna in a way that told me they’d already had this discussion before. “And you’re going to need cash to buy a bottle of water at the game.
I can smell whatever’s in your cup from here.”
Hanna held the drink out in offering.
“Vodka lemonade,” she singsonged. “Want some?”
Mehri sighed, like she really had to think about it, then plucked the cup out of Hanna’s hand and tossed back a sip.
“Nice,” she said with a smack of her lips, then turned her attention to me. “We still on for tonight?”
Mehri and I had a hot date with our shared Google doc.
“Are you guys still drafting?” Hanna asked.
“There’s a lot to cover,” Mehri said. “And a lot to unpack.
I mean, just pulling a decent quote out of St. James’s interview took us hours. He’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the marquee, is he?” Mehri laughed and launched into a stuttering impression of Bodie’s first few responses from my interview with him.
I bristled. “He’s actually a smart guy.”
“Yeah, sure. Which is why he thinks it’s totally normal that his coach says shit that female reporters shouldn’t hear. ”
Hanna sucked in a breath through her teeth. “Yikes.”
“Right? We’re giving Ellison our final draft tomorrow so she can review it.”
“Did Joaquín’s cousin ever message you back?” Hanna asked.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t look like she’s been active on Instagram since August, so she probably hasn’t seen mine yet.
I sent her a LinkedIn request because that was the only other social media I could find her on.”
Hanna’s phone buzzed.
“Oh shit,” she said. “Thirty minutes until game time. We should go.”
“I’ll see you tonight, Laurel,” Mehri said.
“You’re not coming to the game?” Hanna asked.
Mehri threw back her head and laughed as she passed back Hanna’s drink. “Me? Voluntarily attend a sporting event? Absolutely not. My dumb ass signed up to cover sports photography freshman year. I went to something like fifteen games in one semester. Torture. I mean, football’s not the worst— baseball, baseball’s definitely the worst—but I’ll pass, thanks.”
—
Oregon State, our opponent for the afternoon, won the coin toss and gave Garland the chance to play offense first.
Hanna and I, both sweating excessively under the blazing California sun, watched player stats cycle on the big screen and sang along to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which was blasting over the loudspeakers for what had to be the tenth time that morning—an unfortunate side effect of having a lion for our school’s mascot.
We’d managed to grab a pair of seats in the second row of the student section. The trio of girls in front of us, down in the first row, were all wearing knee-high socks and replicas of Kyle Fogarty’s jersey (available for purchase at the campus bookstore if you were prepared to pay a hundred bucks for some green mesh with a Nike swoosh on it). When Fogarty’s face appeared on the big screen, side by side with his height and weight and other numbers nobody except the diehard fans actually cared about, they erupted in drunken giggles.
“Guys, look, it’s our husband!” one of them shouted.
Another cupped her hands around her mouth and called,
“Hey, you forgot a stat! He’s got a ten-inch dick!”
The three of them dissolved into hysterical laughter.
Hanna shot me an exasperated look.
“Seriously, though,” I said. “What is with the penis size fixation?”
“I know,” she grumbled in reply. “And he’s actually my husband, so if they could please stop objectifying him—”
The rest of her sentence was drowned by the roar of the crowd as Bodie St. James appeared on the screen.
Six foot five. Two hundred and thirty pounds. You should mention how big his dick is. Kyle Fogarty’s voice echoed in my head. I quickly averted my eyes from the big screen and turned to look onto the field, squinting under the shade of my hand.
But of course, the second I started searching the crowd of uniforms for Andre, my gaze landed on the very person whose stats I was trying not to think about.
Bodie stood with his back to me, his head bent low to examine the playbook Coach Vaughn was holding in one arm.
Hanna, who misinterpreted my sigh of frustration, nudged my side with her elbow and said, “I know. I can’t even look at Vaughn without wanting to punch him in the face.”
The song over the loudspeakers shifted to some angsty rap music. The bass shook the concrete under my feet in rhythmic earthquakes.
“What if we’re making a huge mistake?” I blurted. “What if the tips are fake? What if Bodie’s just really bad at math and the books are fine? What if the women at the country club made a mistake about seeing Vaughn in San Diego? Maybe they ran into someone who just looked a lot like him, and—”
Hanna spun on me and clapped a hand on either side of my face, forcing me to look her right in the eyes.
“Laurel,” she said very seriously. “Chill.”
“I’m trying.”
But the stakes were too high. Mehri and I were treading lightly in a minefield. One wrong step and it was mission failed. Game over. The truth—whatever it was—would stay buried.
The student section erupted with noise. Hanna and I abandoned our heart-to-heart and looked at the field, quickly deducing that we’d gotten a first down, and threw our arms in the air and cheered.
The next two downs were far less thrilling—two lousy runs, each eating up only a few yards to the next first down.
And then came the third-down play. After the hike, chaos.
While the defensive line and the offense crashed together, Bodie leaped back two long strides and surveyed the field. A few seconds passed like some kind of eternity, and then Bodie cocked his elbow back and launched a throw.
It was the cleanest spiral I’d ever seen—and it landed square in the palms of Kyle Fogarty, who’d somehow found a pocket of negative space forty yards down the field, right on the edge of the end zone. The nearest defenders scrambled to catch up to him, but it was already done. He tucked the ball to his chest, turned, and took two steps.
Touchdown.
The stadium exploded with noise. In the row in front of us the three girls in Fogarty jerseys were beside themselves with joy.
“That’s my husband!” one of them bellowed.
I suppose Kyle Fogarty was doing some kind of celebratory posing and peacocking for the crowd, but I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t watching him. I was watching Bodie St. James, who punched a triumphant fist in the air and then turned to chest bump his nearest teammate. His elation was contagious.
I found myself clapping along with Garland’s fight song.
But my joy dissolved to dust the moment I saw the image on the big screen. It was a close-up of Truman Vaughn on Garland’s sidelines. His headset and mic were resting around his neck, and his baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes, casting them in shadow. He stood with both arms stretched out, palms to the sky, welcoming the roar of the crowd. He looked like a deity. And the crowd was willing to treat him like it, because Truman Vaughn was the kind of mastermind who knew how to orchestrate the perfect play.
Over the loudspeaker came the announcement that the Vaughn Foundation would be donating $5,000 of sports equipment for this touchdown. The Godfather of football had, once again, secured his standing with the community.
The lukewarm vodka lemonade in my stomach was like battery acid as it crept up the back of my throat. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that Truman Vaughn might not be the man he’d convinced everyone he was. But I didn’t. I just stood in silence and let the crowd cheer, hoping that on Monday, Ellison Michaels would choose a side—our side.
Chapter 7
Ellison Michaels was the first female editor in chief the Daily had ever had and the recipient of a full-ride to Garland University.
She was smart enough to know that Mehri and I were right.
On Sunday, Mehri and I met with her in her office to deliver our article. It wasn’t the charity profile she’d asked for.
The first half detailed the university’s harassment training program, and the second half outlined the allegations of Vaughn’s locker room talk from the mouths of his own players.
“This is solid journalism,” Ellison said a bit reluctantly.
“So you’ll run it?” Mehri pressed.
Ellison flipped back to the first page and picked at the staple with her fingernail.
“The university won’t like it,” she said, eyes glazed over in thought. “But they can’t point fingers at us if we’re just calling attention to program failures. They’ve put a lot of resources into this harassment training. If it’s not working—or if someone on their payroll is undermining it—then it’s a PR opportunity for them.”
“They’ll get to make a big show about it,” I agreed.
“Promote a woman in the athletics department. Print a bunch of pamphlets about consent and sexism. Invite a big-name feminist speaker to campus.”
Ellison nodded, like this decided it. “We’ll run it.”
—
Between the text I received from my mother ( Felicidades on YOUR ARTICLE mi compañera mi amor TE QUIERO so proud!!! ) and the email I received from my Writing 301 professor ( Hi guys, unfortunately I have to cancel class today. Someone stole my car last night) Monday morning felt eerily like Christmas. Then I slipped out of my bedroom and found my two favorite elves waiting for me.
“Congratulations!” Hanna shouted, tossing a handful of glittery confetti that rained down on my head.
“Oh, come on, I just swept in here,” Andre protested.
The two of them had hung dark-green streamers on the kitchen window and tied a bouquet of multicolored balloons to the back of our IKEA chair. There was a pink box of donuts on the counter and a newspaper attached to front of the fridge.
“Is that—” I began, tears welling in my eyes.
“Your article,” Hanna whispered, steering me to the fridge with a hand on my shoulder. “I jogged over to campus this morning to grab a hard copy. Took me a while to find one, but I got it. Your article’s on the second page.”
I ran my fingers over the newsprint, tracing a line between the page number and my own name, printed neatly beside Mehri’s.
The second page. We’d done it.
—
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous to see Bodie again. The thought of him having even the slightest bit of resentment toward me made my stomach churn, but I was able to comfort myself with the knowledge that nobody really read the Daily anyway.
Besides. I had faith that, once our investigation was done, he’d understand why I’d interviewed him. He’d appreciate the investigation and he’d forgive me for asking him about Vaughn’s obsession with The Godfather.
The elevator in the biological sciences building was much roomier without a six-and-a-half-foot-tall quarterback crowding the cramped space. Down in the basement, the lecture hall was mostly empty, since only a handful of people had beaten me to class. They were scattered around the auditorium, heads bent over their phones and laptops as if in prayer. I sauntered down the aisle to the pair of seats three rows from the back where Andre and I had been sitting since the first day of class, dropped my backpack to the floor, and plopped into a chair.
Eight minutes until class.
While I scrolled through Instagram, students trickled in and the lecture hall filled. I had just tucked my knees to the side so a pair of guys could slip past me and take the last pair of empty seats farther down the row when my phone buzzed with another pair of texts from my mom.
The first read: Don’t be mad at me!
“Oh god,” I muttered.
The second explained: I sent your article to your tia. She read it to Mama and forwarded it to Tony and Gloria. She also reminded me Alicia’s quince is next month. You should call her.
It would mean so much to Alicia to hear from a FAMOUS WRITER. Ay dios SO proud. TQM
A backpack hit the floor beside my feet, startling me so bad I jumped an inch in my seat. Andre plopped down next to me. He was in a pair of baby-blue shorts that hit just above his knees and a short-sleeved button-down shirt with little pineapples embroidered on it, and his face was freshly shaven.
Like he’d had time to kill that morning and had spent every minute of it on looking nice.
“Look at you!” I cried. “So did you just come from a photo shoot or—”
“Thanks,” he interrupted me, his voice a hurried whisper.
“But you should know, this morning the whole team got an email from Coach Vaughn. He canceled practice.”
The thinly veiled panic in Andre’s voice made me uneasy.
“Did he say why?” I asked.
“Um,” Andre drawled, averting his eyes. “Hey, you thirsty? I didn’t drink my Gatorade this morning—I usually kill it during practice no problem, but—”
He reached for his backpack. I leveled him with an unamused stare.
“Andre.”
He winced.
“He said you and the Daily are going to write an article about his sobriety problems. The guys in the team group chat are saying they think next time you’re going to try to spin his charity trip this summer to sound like some big binge.”
