Page 52 of The Longest Shot
A quiet snort escapes. Not a laugh, exactly, but more like defeat recognizing an old friend. It’s almost impressive how I’veperfected the art of academic mediocrity, and if disappointing GPAs were an Olympic sport, I’d have corporate sponsorships by now.
Beside me, Mason Nash shifts. His phone lights up with the same notification, and he tilts the screen toward me with zero subtlety, revealing a solidDin the same class. We exchange a look—that universal expression of shared academic inadequacy—and execute a silent, conspiratorial low-five under the desk.
Thank God for the hockey exception.
Everyone on the team knows about the university’s Academic Eligibility Policy. It’s this ancient rule buried somewhere in the student handbook that says any athlete with a GPA below 2.0 gets benched. The golf team actually worries about it. The tennis players stress. Cross-country runners study.
But the hockey team?
We're different.
We’re the golden geese who lay the championship eggs.
We fill the arena, we bring in the booster money, and we put PBU on the map.
The policy might as well be written in invisible ink for all the times it’s been enforced on us. Hell, in my rookie year, one guy turned in a philosophy paper that was just the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody” repeated for six pages and still stayed on the ice.
My phone buzzes again, and this time it's a message from Coach Pearson:
My office. NOW.
The all-caps lands hard, because Coach Pearson doesn’t do all-caps. Coach Pearson texts like he coaches, with minimal words and maximum impact. He's the surrogate father to halfthe team, and the most heat we get from him is a frown of disappointment if wereallyscrew up.
But this level of fury?
I’ve seen it once since he took over a year or so ago, when Maine got arrested for public urination on the university president’s lawn. Although, in Maine's defense, he thought it was just a really fancy frat house. In response, Pearson made the entire team do suicides until someone puked.
“Gotta go,” I mutter to Nash, who’s absorbed in scrolling through Instagram, and he just nods absentmindedly as I sneak out of class.
Once I'm back in the land of the free, the walk to the athletic complex feels longer than usual, each step weighted with dread. My brain catalogs every possible fuck-up from the last week that might have Pearson riled up, but I’ve been practically comatose since the coffee shop conversation with Morgan.
No parties, no pranks, no accidentally setting off fire alarms.
Whatever he's going to rip me apart for, it's a mystery to me.
I reach the athletic complex and head inside. The door to Pearson’s office is slightly ajar, which is somehow more ominous than if it were closed. It's like he’s so angry he couldn’t be bothered to shut it properly, or maybe he left it open so everyone could hear him tear me apart.
Public execution, athletic department style.
I knock once, the sound pathetically quiet, and push it open. Inside, Pearson stands by the window, his back to me, hands clenched into fists at his sides. His shoulders are rigid, pulled up toward his ears like he’s physically restraining himself from punching through the glass.
Whatever it is, this is bad.
Nuclear winter, asteroid hitting earth, season-ending bad.
“Coach?” I say, my voice cracking slightly.
When he turns, I’m bracing for the fury to be directed at me—for my shitty leadership, for the team’s recent string of sloppy losses—but his eyes, red-rimmed and exhausted, tell me there's something different in store and that he's not furious at me.
He’s furiousforme.
“Galloway has screwed us,” Pearson says, his voice low and controlled in that way that means he’s one wrong word from exploding. “I don't know why."
He shoves a printed email across the desk with enough force that it slides past the edge and flutters toward the floor. I catch it, and the header shows it’s from Galloway to someone named Dr. Marjorie Albright, with Pearson CC’d into the memo.
Dear Dr. Albright,
I write to you today with grave concerns regarding the academic standards within our athletic programs…
