The Garland Country Club was a splotch of green in an endless sea of drought-kissed hills. It boasted two Olympic regulation swimming pools, one water slide, three hot tubs, and a series of tennis, squash, badminton and basketball courts.

In the middle of it all stood the clubhouse, a mission-style monstrosity of faux-stone and white adobe under a terra-cotta tile roof.

It was an oasis playground for the athletically and socially inclined.

More importantly, it was a ten-minute drive from campus—just far away enough that I could pretend I didn't have a Writing 301 paper due on Wednesday, and that Ryan and Olivia weren't blowing up my Facebook notifications about finding time to discuss our group project, and that the entire football team didn't hate me.

It was my paradise.

And my own personal purgatory.

"Mr. Sherwood!" I called from the driver's seat of a golf cart. "Few feet to your left! No, your left—left—there! That's the ball. Go ahead and swing whenever you're ready."

The couple trudging their way through the eighteenth hole were regulars.

The Sherwoods had retired decades ago, because they were successful and childless, and sold their Beverly Hills estate to buy a house in the nice part of Garland for a modest five million dollars. Now they had absolutely no obligations in life other than to take their sweet time balling out.

And I respected that. I did.

But it was Saturday, and Garland's away game against the University of Washington had kicked off at eleven o'clock in the morning. It was almost four in the afternoon, now, and I was still stuck shuttling the Sherwoods around in a golf cart that maxed out at ten miles an hour.

I'd missed the whole damn game.

My phone buzzed in the back pocket of my unflatteringly boxy khaki uniform shorts.

It was probably Hanna celebrating that we'd won (because that seemed like a given against Washington). I wanted to check her texts and see if Andre had gotten any playing time, but I was too close to the clubhouse.

If I whipped out my phone now, Rebecca would probably see it.

My boss, Rebecca, sort of hated me.

The first two weeks after I started working at the Garland Country Club my freshman year, she'd been a delight. She'd smile patiently when I came into her office to ask the same questions four times a day, and she'd let me leave early on Sundays so I'd have plenty of time to get my homework done.

I could pinpoint the moment our relationship had shifted.

It'd been the afternoon she heard me speaking Spanish to a pair of maintenance men.

Rebecca had asked, later that day, how many years of Spanish class I'd taken. I'd laughed and explained that it was basically my first language, since my mom was from Mexico.

"Your name sounds so American, though," Rebecca had said.

I hadn't thought too much of that comment, at the time.

My dad had always maintained that he'd wanted to name me after my maternal grandmother, Guadalupe. He loved her name. But my mom had protested—she'd wanted Laurel, a name that, as far as we could tell, was just something she'd found in a parenting book listed along with names like Samantha and Jessica.

Since she'd been eight months pregnant, she'd won that argument pretty easily. My parents had tucked Guadalupe between Laurel and Cates, two names that were entirely palatable to the English-speaking crowd.

It was only later, after Rebecca started berating me for every slip-up and sent a staff-wide email reminding us that we were to speak English during operating hours, that I realized my mother had known something my dad didn't.

"Four!" Mr. Sherwood bellowed as he whomped the ball a staggering twelve yards into the rough.

Mrs. Sherwood, who was sitting in the passenger's seat of the golf cart, clapped demurely.

I smiled, tightened my grip on the steering wheel, and reminded myself that I needed this month's paycheck to fuel my Pepito's addiction.

❖ ❖ ❖

For a moment, when Mrs. Sherwood chipped her ball into a terraced patch of trimmed hedges and artfully arranged succulents beneath one of the windows of the clubhouse ballroom, I thought the afternoon might never end. But eventually the Sherwoods managed to sink two of numerous putting attempts, and I was free.

I dropped off the golf cart and made my way into the air-conditioned clubhouse.

It was chaos.

Garland University's water polo teams were holding a joint fundraising gala that evening, and the event called for an enormous amount of decorating. There were boxes of fake candles and massive floral arrangements sitting in the main lobby, and people in club uniforms jogging up and down the hallways and speaking quickly into Walkie Talkies.

From the depths of the ballroom, I could hear Rebecca shouting at someone to tear off all the tablecloths, iron out every crease visible to the human eye, and then burn them in the dumpster outside because they had clearly been selected by someone who wouldn't know refined semi-formal elegance if they caught it sleeping with their wife.

I darted past the ballroom doors and slipped into the real heart of the clubhouse—the bar.

It was empty, save for a trio of older men in khaki pants and assorted sweaters who'd each ordered an Old Fashioned. They were watching college basketball on one of the TVs mounted high over shelves of bottles of liquor that probably cost more than I made in a week of work.

Behind the bar stood a tiny redhead—my favorite coworker.

PJ (short for Parker Jane, a name only her mother was allowed to call her) was a few years older than me. She was a former pageant queen, which meant she was good at applying false eyelashes and even better at smiling cordially while people asked her idiotic questions.

She could also determine, by smell alone, whether a glass of wine was a pinot or a cabernet.

She was the older sister I'd never had.

I climbed up onto one of the barstools and propped my elbows on the dark wood counter. PJ slid a crystal glass of Sprite across the counter and popped one of the miniature technically-a-stir-stick straws I liked into it.

Then she asked, "How were the Sherwoods?"

"They both shot two-hundreds."

PJ sucked in a breath through her teeth.

"Yikes. Well, on the bright side, at least you got to miss that shitshow of a game—" she joked, then promptly went wide-eyed with mortification. "Shoot. Were you going to watch it? Shoot. I'm so sorry, it's been such a long day with all the set-up for tonight and—"

I waved her off.

"Hanna would've spoiled it for me, anyway," I said. Then I stooped down awkwardly to sip from the tiny straw in my Sprite and asked, "Why was it a shitshow?"

Everyone who knew anything about collegiate football knew that Garland would win against Washington. We were simply the better team. Our defense was top five in the country, and our offense was the athletic equivalent of a Justin Bieber song—denounced as overrated and annoying by many, but celebrated by those of us who could appreciate true genius.

Plus, Washington's quarterback was a freshman with weak ankles and poor depth perception.

We had Bodie freaking St. James.

But even the best teams had their off days, and given how upset some of our players probably were about the whole Vaughn mess, it wouldn't have come as too much of a shock to hear that we'd struggled.

But surely we'd won.

A loss would've been the upset of the year.

Which is why I nearly choked on my Sprite when PJ said, "Oh, honey, we got crushed."

I pressed a fist to my mouth and coughed, eyes watering and carbonation in places where it had no business being.

"I'd watch out for Rebecca," PJ stage-whispered behind one hand. "She is not taking the L too great."

Rebecca had graduated from Garland University eleven or twelve years ago, and made a point of reminding everyone that she'd been good friends with at least four guys on the football team who'd gone on to play in the NFL (like this somehow meant that she had more of a right to root for the school than I, an enrolled student, had).

PJ hadn't gone to college at all, thanks to a failed attempt at an acting career after she'd come in fifth place at Miss Teen Iowa back in high school, but she'd adopted Garland as her honorary team despite not knowing much about football.

"How did we lose?" I asked, still in disbelief. "Did someone get injured?"

I had the sudden thought that my anger-fueled daydreams about Bodie St. James taking a cleat to the crotch might've become realized, which was simultaneously a thrilling and guilt-inducing prospect.

"No, thank god," PJ said, extinguishing my hopes. "No one was hurt. We just sucked. I mean, I figured we might have trouble when I heard Vaughn wasn't in the stadium, but shit. It was a hot mess to watch. I really wish I followed the news more. Do you know what all this talk is about some article? Someone was saying they suspended Vaughn because—"

For the second time in under a minute, I came uncomfortably close to inhaling a mouthful of soda.

"Sus—suspended?" I spluttered.

PJ blinked in startled shock at the interruption.

"You didn't hear?" she asked, eyes blowing wide.

I twisted around on the barstool and retrieved my phone from my back pocket. Sure enough, there was a string of texts from Hanna that'd started fifteen minutes before kick-off—most of them entirely in capital letters.

YOU DID IT

HOLY SHIT LAUREL

DING DONG THE DICK IS LEGALLY BARRED FROM COMING WITHIN 500 FEET OF THE STADIUM

I'm opening the Fireball come get drunk with me after ur shift u journalistic powerhouse we r popping bottles tonight!!!

"Oh my god," I said. Then, again, for good measure, "Oh my god."

I read the first message again and felt my eyes prickle.

"Here!" PJ said, fumbling for the remote to one of the TVs mounted behind the bar. "Let me check if—there we go! ESPN's doing post-game stuff. Looks like the highlight reel. Maybe they'll say something about Vaughn?"

She turned up the volume.

It was less of a highlight reel and more of a montage of misfortune.

Each clip was worse than the last. Twice, two members of our offensive line managed to crash into each other because they were so lost. Kyle Fogarty had to dive to make a catch that he should've been able to run with. It was a little hand-off pass, nothing too fancy, but it's failure indicated two things—one, that Fogarty was out of position, and two, that Bodie St. James hadn't had enough time after the snap to see that the play wasn't going to plan.

And then there were the sacks.

These were broken down in slow-motion replays, so viewers could watch the exact moment that Washington's defensive line broke through and tackled Bodie to the ground.

I wanted to laugh, like this was all some kind of slapstick comedy routine, but each hit was more brutal than the last—helmet-rattling, bone-bruising brutal.

Each time he went down, Bodie took a little bit longer to climb back to his feet.

"Garland's quarterback, St. James," came the voiceover of one of the analysts, "issued a statement this week in defense of head coach Truman Vaughn, who was suspended from his post this morning by the university while they investigate claims of sexual misconduct."

Then, before I was really ready for it, Bodie appeared on the screen, fresh-faced and arrestingly handsome against a black backdrop patterned with the ESPN logo. It took me a moment to realize he was dressed in the same navy suit he'd worn to class on Thursday.

"As a team," Bodie said into the camera, his voice steady and practiced, "we believe these accusations are false and were made with malevolent intent. We hope any investigation is carried out quickly and thoroughly, and that the NCAA doesn't allow this to derail our season."

He must've filmed the statement on Thursday morning—before class, and before the season was very much derailed by Vaughn's suspension.

The screen shifted, then, to footage from earlier that afternoon, when Washington fans started to rush the field in celebration of the win they hadn't even thought to hope for. The cameras caught Bodie as he walked against the crush of people and towards the sidelines. He tipped his head up to the scoreboards, the sunlight catching his eyes through the face mask of his helmet for a brief moment before he hung his head.

His white jersey was streaked in grass stains and mud smears. He was limping, too, from the sack that'd pinned his right ankle under the knee of a three-hundred pound defensive lineman.

I looked down at my phone and typed out a text to Ellison Michaels, my hands shaking.

Did you hear???

She replied, almost immediately, President Sterling reached out this morning. They're trying to track down the IP addresses that sent us tips.

After that came another text. Great work Laurel. Don't celebrate too hard tonight.

And then Ellison Michaels sent me a winky emoji.

It was, perhaps, the happiest moment of my young life.

But later, as I drove back to my apartment with the windows of my Corolla down and music blasting from her janky speakers, I thought about Bodie. I thought about the way he'd looked on the field, his shoulders hunched against the roar of a crowd celebrating his failure. I thought about the long flight he'd have back to Garland, and the unknown he'd be stepping into when he returned.

I thought about how his head coach's suspension—which was a step towards (but in no way in and of itself) justice—had brought him so much trouble.

And I couldn't help but hate Truman Vaughn a little bit more than I already did.

❖ ❖ ❖

So I got a full-time job. My NaNoWriMo is a dumpster fire (as usual tbh) but I'm REALLY happy with my new situation and, after two weeks of struggle, I'm finally figuring out how to make the time to write this story while I also get this bread.

I know there've been a lot of new characters recently (Ryan and Olivia, now Rebecca and PJ). I planned my characters out so I wouldn't be throwing around names that never really came back into play, and I also tried to cut down the number of them, but these guys are all very necessary. If you happen to be the type of person who forgets side characters easily, do NOT stress! I'm going to be pretty obnoxious about reminding you who secondary characters are. I want to keep this story super easy to come back to each week.

Your friendly author,

Kate