Chapter 39 The High Expectation

Chapter 39 The High Expectation
Liam
The party ended at midnight.
I drove home with the windows down and the radio low, and the specific empty feeling that came after a big win had fully metabolized. The crowd noise faded, the adrenaline subsided, leaving only the road, the silence, and whatever remained after the performance ended.
I got home at twelve forty. The house was dark, showing that everyone, including the maids, was asleep. I walked up the stairs to my room. and went to sleep.


Saturday breakfast at the Martinez house was the one meal where everyone was expected to be present.
My father had instituted this policy when I was eleven. It was non-negotiable in the way most of his policies were non-negotiable, not through explicit punishment but through the specific quality of his disappointment, whose weight surpassed that of physical consequences.
I came downstairs at eight fifteen in sweatpants and a practice shirt and found my parents already at the table.
My mother with her coffee and her phone. My father, with the newspaper and the expression he wore on Saturday mornings after thinking for two hours and forming opinions, was a familiar sight.
Chloe was still asleep. She had earned it.
I sat down. Poured orange juice. Reached for the toast.
"Your completion percentage dropped in the fourth quarter," my father said, without looking up from the newspaper.
I put the toast on my plate. "We won by fourteen."
"You threw two incompletions in the final drive when the game was already decided." He turned a page. "Scouts watch the full game, Liam. Not just the score."
"The game was won," I said. "I was managing the clock."
"You were being sloppy." He set the newspaper down and looked at me with the focused attention he usually reserved for halftime film reviews. "Sloppy in a win becomes sloppy in a loss. You know better."
My mother looked at her coffee.
"Richard," she said quietly.
"Elena." He said her name the way he said it when he wanted her to understand that the conversation was not hers. She went back to her phone.
I ate my toast. I drank my orange juice. I looked at the table, ran through the fourth quarter in my head, and found the two incompletions, looking at them honestly; one had been a bad read, and one had been a slightly early release, confirming that my father was technically correct about both.
Which made it worse, not better.
"The Berkeley scout is coming to the championship," my father said. He picked up his coffee. "Six weeks. Every snap between now and then matters."
"I know."
"Do you?" He looked at me over the cup. "Because from where I'm sitting, you've been distracted lately. Your focus at practice is inconsistent. Your grades improved, which is something, but improvement from failing is not the same as excellence."
"My grades are fine."
"Your grades are acceptable," he said. "Acceptable doesn't get you to Berkeley."
Something tightened in my chest. The specific tightening I had been feeling since I was fourteen years old, sitting at this same table eating toast while my father explained in careful, reasonable language all the ways I was not yet enough.
"I have practice,"
"It's Saturday morning."
"Extra session." I stood up, picked up my plate, and carried it to the sink. "I'll be back for dinner."
"Liam—"
"I'll be back for dinner," I said again, and walked out.


The school gym was empty on Saturday mornings.
That was why I used it.
I worked through drills for forty minutes on release mechanics, footwork, and the specific repetitive motion of throwing a spiral until the motion stopped being something I thought about and became something my body just did.
Then weights. Then I was filming on my phone, sitting on the bench with earbuds in, watching the fourth quarter incompletions my father had identified and finding the moment where each one went wrong.
He wasn't wrong about either of them.
I locked the phone and sat in the empty gym and let the silence do its thing.
The problem with my father was not that he was mistaken. He was frequently right. The problem was the way being right felt in his hands, like a verdict rather than a correction. It seemed as though the goal was not to correct the issue, but to prove that it was incorrect from the start.
Everyone around me had a version of the truth. Coach had his expectations. The team had the championship.
My father had Berkeley. Marcus had the bet. Even Tiffany had her own particular pressure that she applied with precision.
I thought about Daisy in the library saying, "I decide what I can control, and I put all my energy there."
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I grabbed my bag and went to class.

The school day passed like Saturdays at Oakwood for those who had optional academic sessions: half-populated, quieter than a weekday, and the building operating at about sixty percent of its usual energy.
By four o'clock I was at my car in the parking lot.
I had told myself I was leaving. I had my bag over my shoulder and my keys in my hand, and the car was right there.
But the session was tonight. And Daisy usually stayed in the school library on Saturday afternoons to get ahead of the week, which I knew because I had observed her schedule with the same attention I gave to game film.
I leaned against the car and waited.
By four twenty, the parking lot had mostly emptied. I pushed off the car and walked back toward the building and checked the library on the second floor.
The lights were on. Ms. Reyes was at the desk. Three students at various tables.
Daisy was not one of them.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, running a quick check of the visible tables, then went back into the hallway.
Maya and Sarah were coming around the corner from the direction of the main stairs, bags on, going home.
Sarah saw me first. Her expression did the thing it always did, a flicker of something between excitement and suspicion that she managed approximately one second after it appeared.
"Hey," I said. "Have you seen Daisy?"