7
At Trace’s request, Theo helped him get Chevalier upright. The offensive tackle was huge—easily a few inches taller than Theo, and probably close to three hundred pounds. Between the two of them, though, and with Chevalier still conscious enough to try to help, they got him upright. They each took an arm, draping him across their shoulders, and Trace grunted directions as they half-carried and half-walked him across the locker room and into the trainer’s suite. The lights in the front room, which looked like some kind of office, were off, but when they squeezed through another door, a few lamps were on, giving just enough light to show a room with treatment tables, taping tables, resistance machines, storage cabinets, a door marked ICE BATH, soaking tubs—all the equipment a trainer for a college football team might need. The air smelled like sex with a slightly astringent note that Theo couldn’t place.
One of the treatment tables had a wet spot at one end, glistening in the light. Trace led Theo toward that one, and when they reached it, he said, “Lay him face down, in case he pukes.” It took some maneuvering to do it without dropping Chevalier completely. When they’d finished, Theo’s shoulder and back were aching. He stepped over to Auggie. Auggie was staring at the prone player, his gaze intent. After a moment, Theo followed his line of sight. It was immediately obvious what Auggie was staring at: Chevalier had clearly been bottoming, and Trace had wrecked him.
“Get a good look?” Trace asked, and the intensity in his voice was strangely ambivalent to Theo; he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Auggie, however, nodded jerkily and looked away. Trace shifted his gaze to Theo, and Theo held it. Shaking his head, Trace broke first. He found a towel and draped it over Chevalier’s gaping, puffy hole.
“Want to tell us what’s going on?” Theo asked.
“You don’t know how fucking works?”
Theo folded his arms. When Auggie opened his mouth, Theo shook his head.
Rubbing his eyes again, Trace seemed to deflate, his shoulders coming down, his back curving. “Sorry.” He stopped and took a breath. “It’s, uh—God, this is so weird.” When he dropped his hands this time, he looked ready to cry. “It’s been this secret, this life-and-death secret for so long, and now I’m—I’m being defensive, I guess.”
“It’s ok,” Auggie said. “You can be defensive.” Then he smiled. “A little.”
Trace smiled back—a tiny, broken excuse for a smile that Theo knew Auggie would eat up. He wondered what people would think of a cornerback who was missing all his teeth.
“I thought maybe I read you wrong,” Trace said. His voice was tentative, and he rubbed the back of his neck, looking away from Auggie and then back. “At the party, I mean. I thought you were giving me vibes, but when I asked you if you wanted to hang out, you acted clueless.”
“In case nobody told you,” Theo said, “not everybody is going to be into you. It shouldn’t be that big of a surprise that Auggie’s got better taste.”
“I think he was a little bit into me.”
“And on top of that, there’s this weird thing called loyalty.”
Auggie shot Theo a look, but Theo ignored it; he kept his gaze on Trace.
Trace blinked. “Why are you looking—oh, you mean Imogen?”
“Sure, why not? You’ve got her pictures all over your locker.”
“Yeah, she’s my girlfriend. I mean, we’re practically engaged, but we’re still looking for a ring; my parents want me to—”
“I don’t give two fucks about the ring.”
“Cool it,” Auggie murmured.
“Oh,” Trace said slowly, realization drawing out the word. Then he laughed. “She doesn’t care about this. Promise. She gets it.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“No, for real. I mean, I love Imogen. We want the same things, and we love each other, and she understands that I…need certain things that she can’t give me. I mean, it’s like any relationship, you know? I mean—” He looked at Auggie. “You get it, right? Like, do you have friends who fill other parts of your life, you know, needs he doesn’t satisfy?”
Auggie didn’t answer. He didn’t look at Theo either.
“Here’s what I see,” Theo said. “I see a guy railing his teammate, which sounds to me like—how did you put it? A life-and-death secret?”
“What’s that mean?”
“How did Suemarie find out? Did she stop by the Pocket, looking for her dad, and walk in on you?”
“What the heck are you talking about?”
“Was she going to talk? Did she text Jenice and tell her? Are those the messages Andre told her to delete?”
“You’ve got some fucking nerve—”
“That sounds like a solid motive to kill somebody. She was going to ruin your life. Destroy everything you’d be working for.”
“I didn’t kill Sue!”
“Nobody’s going to draft a faggot cornerback. I bet the minute you saw her, you knew it was over. All of it. The career.”
“Shut up!”
“The endorsements.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“She was going to tear your life up by the roots.”
“I didn’t kill anyone!”
“All right,” Auggie said. When Theo opened his mouth, Auggie put a hand on his chest.
Trace was trembling, gasping for air. He wrapped his arms around himself. Then he uncrossed them, trying to stand up straight. A moment later, he was hugging himself again, shoulders hunched. Chevalier, in contrast, barely seemed to be breathing. His long locs, gathered into a ponytail, dangled over the side of the treatment table, hanging still because the rise and fall of his chest was so slight.
“Why don’t you tell us what’s been going on?” Auggie asked.
“I didn’t kill Sue!”
“How long has this been going on with Chev?”
Trace shook his head. “I don’t know. A while.”
“A few months?”
“Longer.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Theo asked.
Glancing over his shoulder, Trace answered in a cracked voice, “He has to get like this to, you know, let go. When he’s clean, he acts like he wouldn’t get within a mile of a dick. The drunker he gets, though…” He shrugged and looked back at them. “When he sobers up, he acts like he doesn’t remember. So, yeah. Another real healthy relationship, the Trace Campbell special.”
“But Imogen is ok with it.”
Trace shook his head and looked up. But then he padded across the room to a pile of clothes on the floor. When he squatted next to them, Theo said, “Be real careful about what you do next, Trace.” Trace gave him a wounded look, but he brought his hand slowly out of the pocket of his jeans and held up a phone. He placed a call, and a woman said, “What’s up, babe?”
When Theo glanced at Auggie for confirmation of the voice, the younger man nodded.
“Hey, Im, I’m in a weird situation. Could you tell these guys you knew about me and…me and Chev?”
The silence made Theo’s skin prickle. But then Imogen said, “That you’re fucking him?”
Trace let out a weird, strangled laugh that kind of sounded like a yes.
“I know,” Imogen said.
“And you’re ok with it?” Theo asked.
“It is what it is,” Imogen said. Her breathing filled the next few seconds, and she said, “What Trace and I have is too important to give up over something like this.”
Tension melted out of Trace’s body, and he rubbed his nape, his hand scrubbing up into the dark, spiky hair. “Thanks, babe. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Can you pick me up a little earlier than we talked about?”
The silence lasted a beat too long, like maybe Imogen was going to say no—maybe whatever she had with Trace was important enough to overlook the occasional side piece, but she clearly didn’t appreciate being his fuck Uber. All she said, though, was, “Of course,” and then the call disconnected.
“All right,” Auggie said, but it sounded more like a question when he looked at Theo.
Theo nodded, although none of it felt all right to him. It felt fucked up was how it felt. And a lot more fucked up than what he was seeing on the surface.
“Im just wants a family,” Trace said. “Hers is all kinds of screwy, and even though I tell her mine is almost as bad, at least my family has the crazy locked down and kept in private. I know I’m not perfect, and I’ve been honest with her about my…my situation. We love each other, and we both are willing to make some sacrifices to have what we want, and it works.” His voice stiffened, and he said, “And I don’t care what you think.”
“And I don’t believe you,” Theo said. “Not entirely, anyway. The night of that Varsity Club party, I heard Andre threatening Jenice. She’d been getting messages that scared her. Andre told her to delete them. He told her she’d be in serious trouble if she didn’t stop talking about them. I’m only going to ask you one time, Trace: were those messages about you and Chev?”
“No.” Trace said it automatically, distinctly, his eyes skating away from Theo’s. Then he tried to look at Auggie before shaking his head. “No way.”
“You’re sure?” Auggie asked.
“Positive. There is no way Andre knew about me and Chev. Or Sue. Nobody ever walked in on us, like you said. And Chev wouldn’t have told them. He wouldn’t have. He just wouldn’t.” He opened his mouth to say something else, then stopped.
“What?” Theo asked.
“Nothing.”
“That’s awfully convincing. Save us some time and tell us anyway.”
Trace shook his head.
“Right,” Theo said. “So, I’ve got a closeted team captain. A pair of them, actually. And they’ve got this big secret. And I’ve got a dead girl—”
“We already talked about this. I didn’t kill Sue.”
“We haven’t talked about that little room at the Varsity Club house, and we haven’t talked about the drugs, and we haven’t talked about the videos. Somebody slipped something into Auggie’s drink at that party. He wasn’t the first; you and your buddies have been using that little room for a long time, I bet. And you were at that party, Trace, and you gave Auggie a drink, and you wanted to take him up to your special room. And now here you are, and Chev is so doped he can’t even move. That seems like a lot of big coincidences.”
“I didn’t give him that drink,” Trace said. “Andre did.”
Theo looked at Auggie, and Auggie grimaced. “That’s true, kind of. Andre was holding the drink. Trace offered me one. At first, Andre said no. Then he gave it to me.”
“How was I supposed to know that creep put something in it? And I already told you about Chev. This is the only way he—” With a shake of his head, Trace crouched next to his clothes again to sort them. He drew the cross out of the pile and fastened it around his neck, the gold gleaming under the fluorescents.
“Trace,” Auggie said, “Theo’s right. You haven’t told us everything.”
“I’m getting dressed. Is that all right, if I get dressed so I don’t have my dick hanging out while we talk?”
“That depends,” Theo said. “Are you going to try something stupid?”
Trace laughed and shook his head. “You know what was stupid? Trying to have it both ways. I thought I could do it, you know? I’m not an amazing cornerback. I’m not going to play professionally—I mean, come on, I’m playing for Wroxall. But I thought I could have this, and I thought I could have Im, and I thought I could have—” He stepped into his jeans, the sentence cutting off as he yanked them up and buttoned them. “Who the fuck am I kidding, right?”
“You’ve been under a lot of pressure,” Auggie said. “That’s what you told me, right? About your family, about playing football, and now this, the part of yourself you feel like you have to keep secret. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Nobody will blame you for trying to figure things out before you decide what you’re going to do. But Theo’s right: there are a lot of coincidences that you need to explain.”
Trace’s head popped through the opening of a Wildcats sweatshirt. He smoothed his hair back from his forehead. Then, barefoot, he started back the way they’d come.
“It’s pretty cold out there,” Theo said. “You might want these expensive sneakers.”
“I’m showing you something,” Trace called back. “You don’t need to be a jerk.”
They followed him to the locker room. The door of Trace’s safe still hung ajar, and now Trace opened it the rest of the way. Inside, just as Bobby Beers had claimed, was row after row of prescription vials.
“You want to know about the Varsity Club and that room? You want to know about the drugs, about the videos? Here you go, man. Oxy.” He tossed one of the vials to Theo, but Auggie caught it, his hand snapping out to snag it before Theo could. Theo didn’t look at Auggie, and Auggie didn’t look at Theo, but the younger man hunched his shoulder as he transferred the pills to the hand farthest from Theo. If Trace noticed, he gave no sign of it. He was already reading out more labels and tossing the vials, his movements an athlete’s: fluid, but hard and fast. “Xanax. Andro. HGH.” That one was a clear liquid in a glass vial. “Let’s see, we’ve got our ‘roids, of course. And then, when you need to soften things up a little, diazepam, propranolol, carisoprodol. You want something else? I’ve got ephedrine. I’ve got Adderall. What do you want from the pharmacy, guys?”
Theo studied the collection of vials, glass and plastic, that he held. He adjusted them until he could carry them with one arm pressed to his chest, and he began to replace them in the safe. Trace stepped aside while Theo examined the remaining vials. The athlete hadn’t been lying; he had a little bit of everything. The names on the prescriptions varied—both the names of the person prescribed to and the names of the physician prescribing. Theo motioned Auggie over, and Auggie documented everything with his camera, taking pictures of each vial. When they’d finished, Theo turned to Trace.
“Do you want to explain this?”
“Perks of being an athlete,” Trace said. A razor-edged smile opened and closed.
“You use all this shit, why? So you can play better? You just told me you don’t care about going pro.”
“No, man. I’m not into this shit. But a lot of players are. They think if they’re just a little better, if they can just get a tiny edge, they’ll make the cut next year, play D1.”
“Right, you’re just their dealer. It’s never the dealer’s fault. You’re providing a service. If it weren’t you, it’d be somebody else.”
“Yeah.” Trace laughed. “It’d definitely be somebody else. Before Harley disappeared, he made this happen. You’d be at some event, shaking hands with these guys twenty and thirty years older than you, listening to their stories about when they played, or trying not to roll your eyes while they told you what you did wrong in the last game, and then, right in the middle of it, they’d hand you one of these vials, and nobody even blinked. Harley too; I saw him take them sometimes. I don’t use, but a lot of these guys, they can’t get enough. So, what? I’m supposed to throw this stuff in the trash? A lot of these guys have money, ok? If they hear a scout is coming, if they want to even themselves out so they know they’ll be clutch, they’ll drop a lot of cash. So, that’s part one: you wanted to know about the parties, about the shit some of these guys put in the drinks. Here you go.”
“What’s part two?”
“Part two is those videos. Those were Harley’s idea too, you know. Because these guys are stupid. They’d assume that the girls weren’t going to remember. Or that they weren’t going to say anything. Of course, that’s not how it works. Girls were filing complaints. Things were getting official. So, Harley told the captains: here’s what you do. And you know what? The next time a girl wanted to file a report about how she’d been drugged and about—about what those guys had done to her? Harley stopped by her sorority house, and he showed her the video, and after that, she changed her mind.”
“Holy shit,” Auggie muttered. Then his head came up, and he said, “It happened to Jenice.”
Trace nodded. “Yeah. Everybody knew Sue was off limits; I mean, Coach wouldn’t have stood for that. But Jenice was fair game. And after, she told Sue. If I had to guess, those messages to Sue, the ones that he was telling Jenice to delete? I’d bet they were about that, about what happened to Jenice.”
“Chev said she was in danger,” Theo said. “From whom?”
“No clue. I mean, somebody killed Harley, and somebody killed Sue. From whoever did that, I guess.”
“Why would someone want to kill Harley and Sue?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“So, what? Why are you telling us this? So we’ll know you were a good little boy, and you never did drugs, and you never took a girl up to that room and fucked around and got it all on camera? You knew about it, sure, but you never did it, so that means you’re off the hook?”
Trace shook his head. “I’m off the hook because I needed Harley alive.”
“What does that mean?” Auggie asked.
“It means exactly what it sounds like: I needed him. Look, it’s like I told you. I’m not actually that good. As a player, I mean. I definitely shouldn’t be getting the play time I do. Shouldn’t be a team captain. Harley was a good coach, and he knew how to compensate, but he was playing me way more than he should have.”
“Why?” Theo asked.
“Because I let him fuck me.” Trace’s shoulders curved under their gazes, and he shrugged. “What? It’s not a big deal. I liked it. He liked it. You know what struggle fucks are?”
“Yeah, it’s a fancy name for rape.”
“Nah. It’s—it’s like pretend. But you push it all the way to the limit. He liked that I made him work for it. It made him feel like top dog, you know? And in exchange, I got out on the field more. When the college needed players for publicity photos, he gave them to me. When the Courier wanted an interview, Harley let me talk to them. When some of the old guys at the Varsity Club paid enough for a meet-and-greet, I was the one who got invited. See, that was the whole point. I knew I wasn’t ever going pro. I didn’t care about that stuff. But being a face and name for Wroxall football, meeting these guys, getting time with them, getting my name in the paper—hell, that’ll pay off for at least ten years after I graduate. And all I had to do was wrestle around with Harley and say, ‘No,’ really loud, and he was happy to let me have it.”
Theo glanced at Auggie; Auggie’s eyes were blank, and he was hugging himself. Big surprise, Theo thought; how would anybody react when they learned their personal nightmare was somebody else’s kink? He turned his attention back to Trace. “Did Harley seem different to you over the summer?”
Trace touched the phone in his pocket. Then he looked Theo in the eyes. “Different how?”
“However you want to take it.”
Trace thought about it for a moment and shook his head. “He was just Coach. He was always weird.”
“Did you know him before you came here?” Auggie asked. “Did you want to play for him?”
“I did my research when I got scouted. I knew he was, you know, different. But he won. And he took care of his players. Everybody you asked, they’d tell you those two things: Coach Harley won, and Coach Harley always took care of his players.” He shook his head, and the expression on his face was like the photo negative of a smile. “He sure did. A professor complained about a player failing? Shit happened, and you know what? That professor stopped complaining. One of the athletic admins said a player had to be suspended because of a college disciplinary hearing? Guess what? Shit happened, and that admin never came back.” He was silent for a moment, and then he bit off two words: “Fucking Harley.”
After that, nothing they asked yielded anything helpful—Trace couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell them more, and eventually, Theo and Auggie left him to take care of Chev. They crossed the campus in silence, heading away from the athletics facilities and toward the cluster of neo-Gothic buildings on the South Quad. The closer they got to the quad, the more people they saw, campus coming alive even in winter because it was a Friday night, because it was the first week of the semester, and because people were happy and excited to be back. They passed the usual campus craziness. In the cloister of the campus chapel, someone had set up a perfectly made queen-sized bed with a sign that said $1 = 15 MINUTES, and a calico-cat cookie jar, presumably where you were supposed to leave your dollar. On the walk in front of Moriah Court, the dorm where Auggie had lived his first year, a boy was wearing a fish bowl as a helmet, swinging a bat and trying to hit the bottles and cans that kids were throwing down from the windows. They passed two boys in togas and nothing else—definitely no underwear, not even shoes—wheeling an upright piano through the slush.
Theo watched it all. Then he put his arm around Auggie’s shoulders and pulled him tight.
Auggie breathed out a cloud of white laughter. He put his head on Theo’s shoulder. “God, it feels unreal that this was me a couple of years ago.”
In spite of himself, Theo grinned.
“What?” Auggie said.
“What do you mean, what?”
“That smile, that’s what.”
“Oh, that. I was just thinking about a couple of weeks before break when you and Orlando and Ethan were trying on different sizes of superhero costumes.”
“They weren’t superhero costumes. They were authentic, fully licensed-by-Marvel—and extremely expensive by the way—character accessories for a video we were making. And I killed it with that video, for your information. Mid six figure views, Theo.”
“It was very cute.”
Auggie poked him. “And don’t think I missed the fact that you asked me to try on the Spider-Man one again, quote, ‘to make sure it fits.’”
“I had to be sure.”
“Uh huh.”
“Busted,” Theo said with a shrug.
“Uh huh,” Auggie said again. Then he stretched up to kiss his cheek. They reached the edge of campus and followed the street toward the crosswalk. Taillights humped over the snow piled along the curb, turning it red. Traffic was steady, even at this hour—people coming and going from parties, people coming and going from bars. Everyone living these normal lives that, in that moment, felt to Auggie like they were on the other side of a window. That was a familiar feeling. He’d spent a lot of his life looking out at the world from behind a screen.
“Do you think Trace was telling the truth?” Auggie asked.
“About what?”
“Any of it, I guess. All that stuff about…about his deal with Harley.”
“It actually would explain a lot. People complain about how much play time he gets, especially considering how many mistakes he makes. And he’s just not as fast as some of the other guys. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Harley might have believed he could play better if he had the experience. Or it might be true; it wouldn’t be the first time somebody bartered sex for favors. I’ll have to double check, but I’m pretty sure he’s played less since the interim coach took over, so that does suggest he’s telling some of the truth.”
“And the rest of it?”
The rush of tires filled the quiet between them. “I don’t know. Some of it, I guess. I still don’t like him—I don’t care how much Chev tells him he wants it; when he’s wasted like that, there’s no such thing as consent—but he did give us some useful information, if it’s true. The fact that Harley had boosters providing his players with drugs, both the performance-enhancing kind and the recreational stuff, well that’s important. And what the players did to Jenice, the fact that she told Sue. I don’t know. There are a lot of reasons different people might have wanted Harley and Suemarie dead, but only one or the other. I’m having a hard time with why someone would have wanted to kill both of them.”
“Unless it was an accident,” Auggie said. “Or it was a necessity. Kind of like what you said to Trace: maybe Sue walked in on the killer, so he decided to take her out too.”
“Or she.” When Auggie cocked his head, Theo said, “Jenice.”
Auggie made a soft noise and nodded. “Do you think—”
Then everything happened fast.
Movement at the corner of his vision made Theo turn, which was his first mistake. The turn caused him to step slightly away from Auggie, increasing the distance between them as his arm slid down from Auggie’s shoulders. Theo’s brain was still catching up, processing the movement, his brain decoding: a figure dressed all in black. Then the figure had reached them. Auggie was closer to the street. He had noticed Theo’s movement, and he was turning too now. It put him off balance. When the figure planted a hand between Auggie’s shoulder blades and shoved, Auggie never had a chance. He stumbled. Then he hit one of the snowbanks, catching it with his shin. It sent him pitching forward. His arms windmilled.
And then, by some miracle, Auggie caught his balance—one foot coming over the snowbank to land on the street. The asphalt must have been slick, but Auggie stayed upright. He was still moving, his momentum carrying him into the street. He stayed up on his second step. By his third, he was already slowing down, standing up straighter, hands coming down like he was going to dust himself off.
It was like a nightmare. Theo couldn’t move.
The figure was still sprinting, already vanishing into the night.
Headlights glowed like a river.
It was a memory, but Theo heard glass and the crunch of steel.
A horn blared. A girl screamed. Then Theo was moving, darting forward.
Too late. He was always too late.
The Prius hit Auggie and threw him past the crosswalk. He did a weird skip-bounce-slide thing, tumbling across the asphalt, until he smacked into the hump of black-crusted snow. Then he lay there, unmoving.
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