Chapter 37

Chapter Thirty Seven

COLE

Sacramento in September was flat and warm and nothing like home.

I'd known this intellectually. The valley was different from the coast, everybody knew that, it was a geographical fact with no opinion attached to it. But knowing it and waking up inside it were two different things. No fog. No marine layer softening the mornings. Just sun, early and direct, coming through the blinds of a dorm room I was still learning the geography of, and heat that sat on the day from the beginning rather than arriving in the afternoon.

Marcus was already up when I woke most mornings. He had an alarm at five-thirty that he'd negotiated down from five after I explained, once, with some precision, that five AM was not a reasonable hour for a human being on a non-practice day. He'd considered this argument and partially accepted it. Five-thirty was the compromise. I had learned to sleep through the alarm itself. I had not learned to sleep through Marcus making coffee, which he did with the enthusiasm of someone who believed the process was an event.

"You want some," he said Tuesday morning, not turning from the counter.

"Yes."

"I know. I already made you a cup." He set it on my desk. "We've been here three weeks. I know you want coffee."

I looked at the cup and thought about a girl who remembered one sugar at a kitchen table in October and felt the familiarity of being known by someone new as a thing that could happen here too.

"Thanks," I said.

"Film session at eight," Marcus said. "Coach wants the secondary in early."

"I know."

"You've been in there every night this week."

"The system is different from what I ran at Westbrook. I'm catching up."

Marcus sat on his bed and looked at me with the expression he had when he was about to say something he'd been thinking for a while. "You're already caught up. You've been caught up since week two. You're not studying film. You're just—" He searched for the word. "Focused on something."

I drank my coffee. "I'm always focused."

"This is different focused. This is the kind that means something else is going on."

I looked at him. Three weeks and this person already had opinions about my focus patterns. I thought about Jess, about the surveillance network, and had the specific feeling that I'd somehow replicated it in a different city.

"My girlfriend is in New York," I said.

Marcus looked at me for a moment. "Since when."

"Since September. She started at NYU."

"So you're — what. Watching film at eleven PM because she's three hours ahead and awake."

"No." I paused. "Sometimes."

He nodded slowly. "How long have you been together."

"Since October. Almost a year."

"Long distance since September."

"Yeah."

He was quiet for a moment, in the way I was learning meant he was actually thinking rather than just waiting to talk. "My parents did that for two years before my dad moved to Fresno. My mom says the key is not making the calls a performance."

I looked at him. "What does that mean."

"Like—" He turned his cup in his hands. "Not pretending everything's fine when it's not. But also not making every call a check-in where you're both monitoring the relationship. Just talk. Like you're in the same place."

I thought about the kitchen table and enzyme kinetics and the specific ease of just talking that we'd built before it was even about anything romantic. "We do that."

"Then you're fine."

"You sound certain."

"My parents have been married twenty-two years." He stood up. "Film at eight."

He left and I sat with my coffee and the flat Sacramento morning and thought about Mara in her New York room with the radiator she'd described and the photo on the windowsill she'd mentioned, the one from the overlook that I didn't know she'd taken.

I knew she'd taken it because she'd told me, two weeks in, on a night when we'd talked past midnight her time and she'd been tired enough to say things without the usual consideration first. She'd described the photo. City light and the bridge and both of us. She'd printed it for the windowsill.

I thought about that more than I should have during practice, which was not ideal, but Coach ran us hard enough that thinking about anything beyond the next play was mostly theoretical.

First game was Saturday. Home, under the lights, the stadium that was now my stadium in the specific terrifying way that things become yours once you have to perform in them. I ran the warm-up with Marcus and felt the size of the field, different from Westbrook's, not bigger exactly but more serious, the weight of the program behind it.

Coach gave his pre-game address in the locker room. Different from what I was used to — less about the emotion of it, more about the execution. He talked about systems and decisions and doing the work of the previous six weeks. He said: the preparation is already done. Now just be where you are.

I held onto that.

Mara texted at six-thirty: first game. how do you feel.

I looked at the phone in the locker room, cleats on, jersey on, an hour from the field. ready, I sent back. nervous. ready.

you've been ready since October, she sent. you just have better gear now.

I laughed in the locker room. Marcus looked at me. I showed him the text. He read it and nodded with the solemn respect of someone who had been given new information that confirmed a theory.

"She's right," he said, and handed the phone back.

I put it in my locker and walked out to the field and felt the lights come on overhead and the crowd finding its noise and the grass under my cleats and thought about a bleacher in September at Westbrook where I'd asked myself what was mine.

This was mine.

The game started.

I was ready.