Chapter 38 Two Hundred Things Wrong
JAKE POV
The hallway is empty.
That's the first thing he notices when the gym door closes behind him the absolute contrast of it, the silence after three hundred people, the ordinary fluorescent hum of a hallway that does not know what just happened twenty feet away.
He keeps walking.
His footsteps are the only sound.
He doesn't feel triumphant.
He has been in enough big games to know what triumph feels like the specific electricity of it, the way it moves through a team like current, the noise and the heat and the sense of something earned. This is not that. This is quieter. This is the feeling of a person who has been carrying something wrong in both hands for a long time and has finally set it down and is now looking at the dent it left.
He pushes through the front doors.
The afternoon air hits him cold and clean.
He walks to his truck.
He sits on the hood.
His dad is parked three spaces over.
Jake sees the rental car always a rental, always something practical and forgettable, the car of a man permanently in transit and his dad sitting in the driver's seat looking at his phone. He hasn't gotten out yet. Waiting, Jake understands, for Jake to come to him. His dad has always done that. Given space first, waited to be approached. Jake used to think it was respect. He understands now that it is also a way of not having to go first.
He looks at the rental car.
He looks at the school doors.
He stays on the hood of his truck.
After a minute his dad gets out.
Robert Mercer is tall the same way Jake is tall same build, same way of moving, the specific unhurried stride of someone who has learned that arriving slowly is its own kind of authority. He is forty-four and looks it now in a way he didn't two years ago. Grief does that. Jake noticed it at the funeral and has been noticing it ever since, the way his dad aged from one year to the next like someone turned a dial too fast.
He stops in front of Jake.
They look at each other.
"You look good," his dad says.
"You're late," Jake says.
His dad absorbs this. He puts his hands in his jacket pockets. He looks at the school building. "I got here as fast as I could."
"It's been six weeks."
"I know."
"Lily asked me last Tuesday why you never call at dinner anymore." Jake keeps his voice level. "I told her your time zone was different. She said, and I'm quoting exactly, he could call in a different time zone, Jake, phones work everywhere." He pauses. "She's six. She figured that out."
His dad looks at the ground.
"I know," he says again. Quieter this time.
Jake looks at the parking lot. A teacher walks past the far end of it without looking at them. The school feels very far away already, like it belongs to a different version of today.
"Someone filed a complaint against Penny," Jake says.
His dad looks up.
"She's the girl who "
"I know who she is. You told me on the phone."
"The complaint says she's an inappropriate influence on Lily. It's connected to her scholarship renewal. If it goes through, she loses the funding and she has to leave the arrangement." Jake looks at his dad directly. "Someone built this over months. The video, the article, the academic dishonesty accusation on my essay it was all pointing toward this. Toward getting her out of the house."
His dad is quiet for a moment. Reading him the way fathers read sons not always accurately, but with the specific attention of someone who knew you before you knew yourself.
"You care about this girl," his dad says.
Jake doesn't answer.
"Jake."
"I care about what's right," Jake says. "And what happened to her in that school all year, with me standing right there and saying nothing that's not right. And the complaint is not right. And if we don't go into that Monday meeting with something real "
"I'll call the family attorney tonight," his dad says. No hesitation. No let me think about it. Just yes, immediately, the way his dad functions best not in the daily management but in the crisis, in the moment that requires resources and decisiveness. Jake has always known this about him. It has always been both his best quality and the reason the house fell apart quietly while he was somewhere else solving other people's problems.
Jake nods.
"There's more," his dad says.
Jake looks at him.
His dad reaches into the rental car through the open window and picks up a folder. He holds it out.
Jake takes it.
He opens it.
The first page is a legal document. He reads the header twice to make sure he understands it.
It is a formal cease and desist.
Filed this morning.
Against Brianna Cole, her parents, and three named student accounts.
"How," Jake says.
"You called me at midnight," his dad says. "I called the attorney at seven AM. She had this drafted by eleven." A pause. "I may not always be here on time. But when you tell me something is wrong, I act."
Jake stares at the document.
He thinks about Penny in the gym twenty minutes ago walking through that door with her hair out. He thinks about the complaint filed four days before the video, the move behind the move, the real play while everyone was watching the distraction.
He thinks about Penny sitting on the floor at home tonight reading this document.
"She doesn't know about this yet," Jake says.
"No."
"She needs to be the one to decide what to do with it. It's her case."
His dad looks at him for a moment. Something in his expression shifts something that looks, unexpectedly, like respect.
"Okay," his dad says.
Jake closes the folder.
The school doors open.
Marcus comes through them at speed, still in his jersey, slightly out of breath, scanning the parking lot until he finds Jake.
He jogs over.
He looks at Jake's dad. Looks at Jake. Looks at the folder.
"Okay," Marcus says. "Three things. One Coach wants you back inside. Something about scouts and professionalism and he used the word consequences three times but I think he's actually fine." He holds up two fingers. "Two Brianna walked out of the gym after you left and she looked like a person whose plan just went sideways. Like actually scared. I've never seen her actually scared before."
"And three?" Jake says.
Marcus pauses.
Something crosses his face that Jake cannot immediately name.
"Penny didn't leave," Marcus says. "After you walked out. The whole gym was just suspended. Nobody doing anything. And she just stood there at the back for a minute and then she walked to the front."
Jake goes still.
"She took the microphone," Marcus says.
Jake stares at him.
"She said " Marcus stops. Exhales. "She said my name is Penny Cruz and I'm not going anywhere. And then she put the microphone down and walked out." He shakes his head slowly. "Three hundred people, man. Scouts, Coach, everyone. Not one single sound."
Jake looks at the school doors.
He looks at the folder in his hands.
He looks at Marcus.
"Where did she go?" Jake says.
Marcus shakes his head. "I don't know. She just walked out. Different door."
Jake gets off the hood of his truck.
He looks at his dad. "Tonight after the game. We need to talk through all of this."
His dad nods.
Jake looks at the school.
He has a championship game in four hours.
He has a girl somewhere in this building or walking away from it who just stood in front of three hundred people and said her own name out loud like it was a declaration.
He starts walking toward the school doors.
His phone buzzes.
One message.
Unknown number but not the same unknown number as before. Different. New.
This is Simone. I'm with Penny. She's okay. She asked me to tell you not to be dramatic about it.
Jake reads it twice.
A sound comes out of him that is almost a laugh.
He texts back: Tell her I said okay.
He puts the phone in his pocket.
He looks at the sky for one second grey and flat and completely indifferent and thinks about a girl who spent a year making herself invisible and just said her name into a microphone in front of everyone.
He thinks he has never in his life wanted to win a football game more than he wants to win one tonight.
Not for the scouts.
Not for the scholarship.
For her.
He walks back inside.