I've coached Callaway for three weeks. She's meticulous. She corrects her own mistakes before I even see them. She doesn't need to cheat on a fitness evaluation she'd pass without trying. The athletic director, a tired-looking man named Frank Delry, who had held the job for two decades and had learned in that time exactly which battles were worth fighting and which ones cost more than they were worth, rubbed his eyes.
Diane, I hear you, he said. But the pages were found in her bag. That's not nothing. And with the Sterling family's history with this program, I don't have the luxury of letting this slide without a formal review. You know how this works.
I know how it looks, Coach Marsh said. I don't know that it's true. Then let the hearing sort that out, Delry said not unkindly, but firmly. The way a man says something he has said too many times before to still feel good about it. That's what it's there for.
Coach Marsh left his office unsatisfied, the folder still tucked under her arm, and walked the long way back across the darkening quad, turning the whole conversation over in her mind. She had learned a long time ago that being right and being believed were not always the same thing, especially in a place where certain last names carried more weight than certain truths. She thought of the way Joe had looked at her in that first meeting. Steady, controlled, entirely without the panic a guilty person usually could not help but show. She thought of the way Joe had caught Paige out of the air weeks earlier, trained reflexes moving faster than fear.
Whatever was happening here, Coach Marsh was increasingly certain it had very little to do with a fitness evaluation, and everything to do with a boy who did not like being told no. She did not yet have proof of that either, but she was patient. She had been patient for 11 years, watching young athletes grow into themselves, and she understood in the particular way coaches understand timing that sometimes the right move was simply to wait for the moment when proof finally arrived. News of the suspension moved through the squad fast and predictably, it moved through campus faster. By the next morning, half the dining hall was repeating some version of the story.
Most of it wrong, most of it worse than the truth. Paige found Joe outside the library that afternoon, her face pale with worry. "They're saying you cheated," Paige said, breathless like she had run the whole way. "That's not true." "I know that's not true."
"It's not true," Joe confirmed. "Then why would they even think that?" "Why would anyone put something like that in your bag?" Joe did not answer right away. She was watching over Paige's shoulder.