Whistleblower, page 9
“You’ve got your mother’s smarts, that’s for sure,” Dad tossed in, fully ignoring what I’d just said. “I never would’ve been able to connect the dots like that.”
I let out a wet laugh. “Yeah, but which one of us knows how to do an oil change?”
Dad laughed at that. Then, because he’s my dad, he said,
“How’s the car doing? The AC giving you trouble again? I can always drive down on the weekend and give it a quick once-over—”
“Patrick, not now,” Mom chided him.
“All right, all right. Text me about the AC, though.”
“Te quiero mucho! ” Mom shouted.
“Yeah!” Dad seconded. “Te quiero mucho, kiddo.”
Tea-queer-uh-moo-cho.
I smiled and shook my head. “Love you too.”
Chapter 9
On Thursday morning I convinced myself that I needed to skip Human Sexuality. The carpet in the bedroom was a hair magnet. The fridge smelled a little funky. The bathroom mirror was splattered with water droplet stains. It was therefore justifiable—nay, imperative—that I stay home and, in the pursuit of cleanliness, address these very urgent matters. It totally had nothing to do with the fact that I’d heard the entire football team was fuming about our article.
“I can just take notes for you,” Andre had told me the night before. “But I really don’t think they’re going to do anything, Laurel. It’s all talk.”
I wasn’t scared. I just needed to clean the apartment. That was the plan, at least, until Andre texted me fifteen minutes before class: Okay so Fogarty said Nick warned St. James there’s a pop quiz on the reading today.
I spat out an expletive and tore off my rubber gloves. There was no time to change into something more flattering than the stretched-out leggings and my dad’s old XL shirt, which I’d thrown on that morning. I grabbed my backpack and booked it to campus, wishing the whole way that I was one of those kids who didn’t care about disappointing their parents.
The auditorium was crowded when I slipped through the double doors behind a pair of blond girls who were bitching loudly about a chem midterm with a bad curve. I scuttled straight to my usual seat—the third row from the back, second in from the aisle—and slapped my notebook and a mechanical pencil onto my desk, then scanned the auditorium for signs of trouble. Nick stood up at the front, shuffling stacks of papers at his podium. Fogarty and a couple of the other starters were sitting in the middle of the room, their voices lowered and significantly less rowdy than I’d grown accustomed to. There was no sign of Bodie.
I pulled out my phone and shot off a quick text to Andre.
Okay made it
His reply was immediate and overpunctuated.
Typography ran late!! Be there in 5!! Save my seat!!
I flipped up the too-small swivel desk on the aisle seat so people wouldn’t throw their stuff down without stopping to ask if it was taken. Then I cradled my phone in my lap and scrolled through Instagram while I waited for Andre to come be my human shield.
I was six months deep in a meme account when I heard the snap of a swivel desk being shoved back between seats. A backpack hit the floor at my feet. I looked up, fully prepared to warn Andre not to make a single comment about how horrible I looked unless he wanted me telling Mehri about the enormous crush he’d had on her before we learned she was exclusively interested in girls.
But it wasn’t him. It was Bodie St. James. In a suit.
He wasn’t wearing a tie—just a crisp white shirt with the top button undone—and his dark hair was slicked back into a perfect wave that suggested he’d skipped the tie by choice. He looked like a Sports Illustrated cover story. Tall and handsome and perfectly composed, the favorite son of a multimillion-dollar athletics empire.
Bodie stood in the aisle for a moment, blinking down at me like I was a cockroach in a bathroom stall on the first floor of Buchanan. Like he wanted to crush me under his shoe but was sort of hoping I’d just skitter off and he could pretend he’d never seen me. Our stare down lasted either a half a second or twenty-five years. It felt like the latter, given that my entire body was tensed with fear, like a newborn deer in the head-lights of a semitruck.
Bodie finally took a bolstering breath, a muscle in his jaw ticking, and dropped into the seat next to mine without a word. And then it got worse. A few rows down from us, Kyle Fogarty twisted around in his seat. When his eyes landed on Bodie, he smirked and raised his eyebrows in question. Bodie nodded once, curtly. Fogarty saluted him with two fingers to his forehead, then tipped his chin up in a way that said, You got this, bro.
I did not care for this nonverbal conversation at all. I considered grabbing my backpack and sprinting out of there (screw the pop quiz—I’d email Nick to tell him I had food poisoning and beg for mercy), but Bodie and his ridiculously long legs were blocking the aisle. I wasn’t about to ask him to move his knees. And I most definitely wasn’t going to try to squeeze around him or crawl over his lap, even though it looked very welcoming in navy-blue dress pants.
Except his hands were shaking. I only noticed it when he leaned forward to fidget with his backpack, and then again when he sat up and reached between our seats to pull his swivel desk back up in one violent tug. The tiny slab of faux wood locked into place with a hollow thunk so loud I flinched.
“Sorry,” he snapped. Then he exhaled sharply, splotches of pink blooming on his cheeks, and turned to face me. “Hi, Laurel.”
“Hi,” I croaked.
I braced myself for a follow-up of some kind, but Bodie just pressed his lips into a solemn line and turned back to the front of the lecture hall, seeming suddenly very interested in the bright blue loading message on the projector screen that warned, in blinking letters, that no HDMI input was detected.
The tips of his ears were pink.
Is that it? I thought.
In my peripheral, I saw someone very tall pause at the end of the aisle, then keep walking. It was Andre. He darted into a row across the aisle and a few down, muttering apologies as he squeezed past a few people to get to an empty chair. When he was seated, he turned over his shoulder to shoot me a wide-eyed look and mouth the words, What the fuck?
Great question. I didn’t have time to answer it, because up at the front of the auditorium, Nick cleared his throat and started his introductory spiel.
“We’ve got three graduate students sitting in on the class today,” he announced, sweeping one hand toward a trio of twentysomethings in the front row who turned in their seats and waved awkwardly. “They’re going to help me with a few things. Let’s actually kick things off with”—he held a stack of papers aloft—“a quiz on the reading!”
This was met with a chorus of groans and expletive-laden whispers.
“It’s only five questions,” Nick added, sounding a touch peeved. “One point each. This is really straightforward stuff, guys. We went over most of it in lecture on Tuesday.”
The three teaching assistants started up the aisles, handing out stacks of quizzes to each row as they went. When one of them reached ours, Bodie offered her a tight smile, took a sheet off the top, and passed the rest to me without looking up.
“Thanks,” I said, my voice reaching an octave higher than was audible to the human ear.
I grabbed my mechanical pencil, tucked my hair behind my ears, and tried to focus on the sheet of paper in front of me—which got a little challenging when Bodie started bouncing his knee so hard it made my chair shake.
The first question was easy. Name an STD that condoms can help prevent (when used properly). I cleared my throat and hunched over my desk, hoping that my hair would shield me. Something about having to write the words genital herpes while Bodie St. James sat close enough I could smell spearmint on his breath was unspeakably embarrassing.
What contraceptive methods can be used during oral sex to help protect participants from STDs?
I scribbled down my answers in an increasingly small, condensed version of my usual chicken-scratch handwriting.
The other three questions were simple enough. I finished the whole thing in less than a minute, then flipped the quiz over and sat back in my chair to twiddle my thumbs.
Beside me, Bodie exhaled in a huff. I shot a discreet glance at his paper. He still hadn’t written anything other than his name. I knew it was just a five-point pop quiz, and that it was probably his own fault that he hadn’t studied for it even after Nick tipped him off, but Bodie seemed like a nervous wreck. His knee was still bouncing wildly and he’d given up on trying to answer the questions and resorted to staring at his teammates on the other side of the room.
He was probably having a rough week. The whole team was, obviously, but Bodie was the one who’d been named in the article. It was bad luck that, buried in all the well-meaning praise, Bodie had accidentally offered up something damning.
I wondered if Vaughn was mad at him. The thought made me sick.
So it was an unholy combination of empathy and guilt and that drove me to attempt—for the first time in my life—to cheat. I sat up as straight as I could and lifted my paper, just a little, like I needed to double-check my answers but had suddenly become farsighted. Bodie glanced over at my quiz, then averted his eyes.
Come on, you noble moron, I thought. It’s five points. You gave me quotes, I’ll give you my answers. We’ll be even.
I set down my quiz, faceup, then faked a stretch and let my hand accidentally knock the corner of it, so it was better angled for him to read.
He didn’t look over again.
But why would he take anything I offered him? Bodie St. James probably thought that I was the kind of girl who closed elevator doors in people’s faces. The kind who interviewed people and then used their own words to cut down the people they cared about. The kind who felt comfortable cheating on pop quizzes. I felt a sudden and unrelenting urge to say something. To turn to him and explain myself—that this was about much more than a few sexist jokes.
When one of the TAs came up the aisle to collect our quizzes, I caught another glimpse of Bodie’s (blank, save for his name in neat block letters in the upper left corner). I sank lower in my chair and busied myself with picking little torn scraps of paper from the spiral ring of my notebook.
Up at the front of the lecture hall, Nick waited until he had our quizzes to click on the projector. The words Unit Three: STIs and STDs appeared on the screens.
“All right, guys,” Nick said, tapping the stack of papers against his podium to even them out. “I’d like to start off the lecture today by having you turn to the people around you and talk about what you think some of the common myths are surrounding sexually transmitted diseases.”
I’d rather get syphilis and die, thanks was my first thought.
My second was that I should probably identify someone who was not named Bodie St. James to discuss STDs with.
The pair next to me—a small, skinny boy with perfectly coifed black hair and a girl with wavy hair and bushy eyebrows—had already started talking, but the sliver of conversation I caught seemed to be a private one that had absolutely nothing to do with class. I wasn’t brazen enough to interrupt them, even in such desperate circumstances.
I risked a glance at Bodie. He was still looking at his teammates, so I took half a second to stare shamelessly at his face, tracing the sharp lines of his profile and the tan on his cheeks and forehead. Then I followed his line of sight just in time to catch Kyle Fogarty nod once, firmly, before shooting me a mocking sneer and twisting back around in seat. I glared at the back of his stupid green faux hawk, hating that my eyes prickled. Nobody had ever sneered at me unironically before.
Bodie shifted beside me. I felt the heat of his stare on me—on the hole in my leggings on my right knee, on my oversized T-shirt, on my unbrushed hair—and felt small.
But I tipped my chin up and faced him anyway. His hand clenched into a tight fist on his desk, then went slack again as he stretched out his fingers.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Doing what?”
“Why are you trying to drag up Vaughn’s addiction? He’s clean now. You have no right to ridicule him for something he battled almost a decade ago.”
“It’s not about his addiction. We—” I pressed my lips shut and tried to think of a way to tell him everything and nothing simultaneously. “If the Daily has cause to believe an investigation is needed into some . . . concerning behavior, we investigate. If we don’t find anything, there won’t be an article.”
Bodie examined me carefully. “Is this about money?”
“No,” I snapped. “It’s about doing the right thing. ”
He reared back like I’d slapped him.
“You—” he began, then exhaled a harsh breath that was almost a scoff. “Dragging a man’s name through the mud so yours can be on the front page is the right thing?”
It shouldn’t have cut me like it did, but there was a part of me that worried he was right. I’d always been curious about the spotlight, hadn’t I? And I’d sat back and basked in the glory of it all when Ellison had invited me to join a top-secret investigatory team. I’d called my parents to brag. I’d wanted to be heard.
The surge of self-doubt was like a punch to the stomach.
And so my response was, perhaps, a bit rash.
“Eat shit, St. James.”
Whatever Bodie had been expecting me to say, it definitely wasn’t that. To be fair, I also hadn’t anticipated my outburst. It was like I’d been spontaneously possessed by the spirit of the spitfire, whiskey-chugging family matriarch in a telenovela—there didn’t seem to be any other logical explanation for how I’d suddenly acquired the courage to tell a Division I football player to, and I quote, eat shit.
Bodie flushed red from his hairline to the collar of his shirt.
“Really? That’s how this is going?”
I had two friends, the upper body strength of a stale Cheeto, and was dressed like my next class was an intermediate seminar on dumpster diving. I was in no position to start a fight with anybody, least of all a quarterback. But I was determined not to apologize, despite the fact that confrontation made me feel a tiny bit like I might burst into tears, because I wasn’t about to let Bodie St. James accuse me of taking a shot at Vaughn just so people would know my name. I hadn’t realized this was a metaphorical bruise of mine until he’d prodded it.
“Have you ever read the Daily?” I demanded.
“Yeah, I’ve read it,” he said, so indignantly you’d think I’d accused him of being illiterate.
“Okay, then you realize we take our work really seriously.
When we release an article, everything in it has been fact-checked a hundred times over. Right now, we’re investigating.
We have a handful of tips and an anonymous source on the football team who’s made some serious allegations about sexism in the locker room. If you have a concern, you can email the editor in chief, but I’m not—”
“Bullshit,” he snapped. “You took what I said out of context.”
I opened my mouth to make a counterargument, then caught the hint of someone’s conversation behind us—something about gonorrhea—and remembered that we were sitting in the middle of a lecture hall.
“I’m not doing this right now,” I told Bodie.
He leaned over his desk so his eyes were level with mine.
“Laurel, please. I just want to talk.”
The twinge of desperation in his voice made me hesitate.
It would’ve been so easy to pretend that Bodie St. James was just some Neanderthal with his privileged head wedged too far up his ass to see the world for what it was. But he looked up to his coach. He’d told me so during our interview.
Bodie had trusted Vaughn to be a good leader and a good man. Of course he’d choose to believe him in the face of accusations.
The alternative was too horrifying.
“Look,” I said, reaching out just far enough that my fingertips brushed the sleeve of his jacket over his forearm.
His eyes dropped to my hand. “We are researching because we have to, okay? Not because we want to.”
Bodie’s eyes searched mine. And then, all at once, his face went soft with concern.
“Did Notre Dame put you up to it?” he asked, voice lowered. “If they’re blackmailing you guys to try and knock us out of the playoffs or something, you can tell me, Laurel. I can help you.”
Bodie was looking for an antagonist. Someone who cackled malevolently as they plotted his team’s demise, and who’d have a clear motive to lie about Vaughn. He needed me to tell him that person existed—a cardboard cutout villain for him to hate. But I couldn’t do that.
“Nobody’s forcing us to write this,” I said. “And I know because I’m the one who pushed for this story. I’m the one who pitched it, and I’m the one who wrote it. Bodie, we—” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “We think you might be right.
About what you said off the record, about the funds. And we think it might be way, way worse than any of us expected.”
Bodie tugged his arm out of my reach, the color draining from his face. He turned to the front of the auditorium, the muscle in his jaw ticking again, and clenched his hands into tight fists in his lap. His chest rose and fell in quick, sharp heaves. I thought I saw him squeeze his eyes shut a little too quickly, but then Nick dimmed the lights to play a video clip from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it was too dark for me to be sure.
“I have to do the right thing,” I whispered, trying to get his attention before the video started. “We don’t know if it’s true or not yet, but we have to investigate. Which is why I’d really appreciate it if you spoke with me again.”
He didn’t even flinch. It was like he hadn’t heard me. And he didn’t look at me again for the rest of the lecture. I folded my arms over my chest and returned the favor, feeling a lot like I had after the Art House’s Pollock party freshman year, when I’d woken up in my dorm room covered in black light paint and then spent three consecutive hours clutching a toilet in the communal bathroom. It’d been the most disastrous hangover of my young life. I’d been feverish and weak for three whole days.
