Page 39 of One on One
Focus.To get the leverage I need to push off, I lean intohis hand instead of away from it. Until his other hand catches my other hip, and then he’s turning me around, his hand closing around mine on the phone. He’s going to wrestle it from me.
I drop it.
The phone hits the floor. The element of surprise is on my side, so I react faster. I pick it up and shove it down my shirt, into the left cup of my bra, and give him a triumphant look that saysI dare you.
He does not accept the challenge. My pulse skitters uneasily around my chest like a handful of party poppers thrown on the sidewalk. He gives me a long, dark look and exhales a frustrated breath.
“Listen,” I say. “You know how it’ll be if the press finds out. Bullshit. Racist bullshit. They’ll say he’s not smart, that it’s a sign of his character. That he can’t be trusted with his own talent. If he were white, they’d say he has some maturing to do. Don’t you agree with that?”
He exhales again and his shoulders drop. “Yes, of course I do, and it’s not fair at all—”
“Then why subject him to it? He may be seriously injured, don’t you think that’s bad enough? Don’t you think he’ll learn his lesson from that?”
“Yeah, but there’s an entire injury protocol we’re supposed to follow that I don’t even fully understand, and I doubt you do either—insurance hoops to jump through, reporting requirements. Lying about it could make this worse in the end if people find out.”
Ben sits down in his chair and hunches forward, eyes closed, probably envisioning the fifty-seventh page of somehandbook I never read. We’re on two different existential planes, shouting into two different voids. “Why the hell are we talking about insurance?” I cry.
“Are we supposed to keep it from Coach Thomas? You think he wouldn’t want to know?”
I roll my eyes. “He has to say he wants to know about things like this, but I bet he’d rather not.” This is starting to slip out of my control. I sit in the chair across from him and lean forward with my elbows on the desk, mimicking his posture. My eyes are level with his. “Look, you don’t have to be a part of this. I’m not asking you to lie, I’m just asking you to pretend you weren’t here.”
He buries his hands in his hair and squeezes like he’s going to rip it out. “Is there a difference? What’s going to happen if he finds out? We could both get fired. That would help with the budget. Maybe Kyle will get a raise.”
I should care about my job security. It’s what we’ve been fighting over for months, and I’m screwed if we get caught. But I can’t sit back and watch Quincy suffer.
“I don’t care if I get fired,” I say.
A bitter look crosses his face. “That’s great for you, but I can’t afford to be unemployed.”
“Neither can I! But it’s not the most important consideration right now.”
“Family money, then?” he asks knowingly. “Must be nice.”
“Ha. No. My dad didn’t exactly rake it in coaching and teaching,” I say. “You’re one to talk, anyway. Isn’t your family loaded?”
He laughs at that. “I came here on an academic scholarship. I grew up with nothing.”
I have nothing to say to this. It’s entirely at odds with everything I thought I knew about him. He went to an expensive private high school, and his girlfriend wore those big pearl stud earrings. He was Main Line wealthy. Wasn’t he? Everything in his life came easy to him, that’s what I always thought.
“What about the Range Rover?” I ask weakly.
“The what?”
“Didn’t you use to drive one, sometimes…?” My voice trails off.
“I can’t believe you remember that.” He shakes his head. “It was my ex-girlfriend’s.”
Processing this information is like watching a familiar scene from a new camera angle. He must’ve been on scholarship at his high school too, a place where anyone could meet a girl who wore expensive jewelry and had a fancy car.
And at college, so many differences flatten out into nothing temporarily. Everyone lives in the same dorm rooms and eats in the same dining halls and drinks the same cheap beer. Everyone on the basketball team is issued the same logoed sportswear. If you don’t look too hard, it’s easy not to notice who came from less.
Which maybe proves his point about my privilege.
My mouth opens and freezes that way, because I don’t know what to say. He presses further. “If your family isn’t well-off, how can you be so cavalier about keeping a good job? I’m guessing you have no student loans?”
Another blow to my sense of moral superiority. My face heats, throbbing with embarrassment at the depth of my ignorance. “I did have help with school,” I admit. “But it’s nothow it sounds.” My parents were middle-class. They put aside everything they could for our educations, driving modest cars and keeping their old ’80s kitchen long after most of their friends had renovated. Still, I was going to be stuck with a pile of student debt, but then multiple schools offered Kat basketball scholarships. Her half got reallocated to me, with a cheerfully morbid promise from my mother: “Kat gets a little extra in the will!”
Annoyingly, that means I have my sister to thank for my financial freedom.
