The Snap, page 4
It was warm in the office, and it smelled like greens and spice. The desk held a little rubber football and a framed photo of Coach with what I assumed was his family. The carpet was nicer in here, thicker, and the window looked out at Onondaga Lake in the distance. I tucked a soaking-wet strand of hair behind my ear and bit my lip. “Thanks,” I said, meaning it. “Have a good da—”
“Where the fuck are the papers? Is the intern water-soluble, is that the problem here?”
At the sound of our general manager’s voice booming down the hallway, my throat tightened. I didn’t know whether to hurry out there and get him his papers or hide behind Coach Guillory’s desk, and before I could decide, the voice came again. “Has anyone considered hiring someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing? Instead of their friends’ kids?”
That snapped me out of it. I didn’t know anyone here, and neither did Hank and Nadine Benjamin of Arkana, Ohio, thank you very much. I’d earned my spot through four years in my college athletic communications department, unpaid summers working whatever events would take me in Toledo, and a lifetime of football following me home. I shot Coach an apologetic look and hurried from the office, but to my surprise, he followed directly after.
“Mr. Perez,” he said, clapping a hand on the GM’s shoulder. “I apologize—that’s my fault. Poppy delivered my papers fifteen minutes ago, and I held her up talking.”
More like two minutes ago. I willed my cheeks not to flush.
Asbel’s lips twitched, but some of the fire left his eyes. “She was…with you?”
“Just some welcome-to-the-Bobcats chat.” Coach Guillory grinned boyishly. “Since we’re both newbies.”
Asbel looked profoundly disappointed at being denied an ass to chew out. He took in my wet hair and hoodie, muttered, “I guess it’s casual fucking Friday around here,” and stalked off down the hallway.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said quickly.
“Neither did he.”
I pressed my lips into a thin smile, then nodded before hustling off with the remaining papers. It wasn’t until I was swiping my way out of the coaches’ wing before I thought to wonder how Coach Guillory knew my name.
* * *
*
The morning was a whirl of transcribing, copying, and mailing. Staff could use the dining hall downstairs, but only from eleven to twelve to ensure we didn’t overlap with the players. The clock on my desktop flashed eleven forty-five, so I double-checked that my lanyard was around my neck and booked it down the stairs.
As I approached the bottom, I heard voices near the elevator bank.
“No, it goes Abby, Intern, Casey, Jen, Julie,” said the first.
I froze. That was basically every woman who worked in the office. Did that make me “Intern”? I had to be. I held up and pressed myself against the wall.
“No, dude,” said a second voice, “Intern, Abby, the reporter with the tattoo, Casey, Jen, Julie.”
They were ranking us. I didn’t even recognize these voices. They didn’t even know my name.
“It’s employees only,” the first voice insisted. “And interns, because you can’t leave an ass like that off the list.”
“Oh, for sure.” There was the slapping sound of a high five, followed by laughter. “If we’re doing fronts, Abby’s first, backs, Intern’s first. Three-sixty cam, I’m going Abby.”
There was a soft ding, and then the voices cut off as the elevator closed, but I was still anchored to the stairwell. My cheeks were on fire. Was I supposed to be flattered? Insulted? I was mostly just shocked—and grateful that they hadn’t changed their minds and taken the stairs.
It was late by the time I got to the cafeteria, and so I threw whatever looked ready—a congealed slice of pizza and an apple—onto my tray and walked quickly toward the door. I would eat in the stairwell, where I wouldn’t bother anyone and no one could look at me.
“Hey.”
I jumped, sending the apple tumbling from my tray. It went rolling and spinning along the floor. When I turned, a Jeep Cherokee of a man—hulking, bearded, Celtic cross tattooed on his neck—was staring down at me.
He jabbed a meaty finger at the clock on the wall. “It’s 12:02. What the fuck are you doing in here?”
Everything went white. I looked wildly for the apple, but when I half turned to see if it was behind me, I remembered the comment about my ranking and whipped forward again. “Sorry—so sorry,” I managed. “I was just—I’ll—”
He held the terrifying expression a beat longer, then broke into a wheezing laugh. He clamped a hand the size of a child’s mitt on my shoulder, knocking me further off-balance and sending the pizza to the edge of the tray. “I’m just fucking with you—don’t worry about it.” He walked off toward the grill station, chuckling to himself while the rest of the players filed in.
I righted my tray and blinked furiously. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. This was fine. Be cool, it was a joke. Did I want to be some invisible little mouse who everyone just ignored? No. That was…cool of him to tease me. Nice. It was a nice thing. Gets the heart rate up.
“Hey.” The same word, but this time said through a smirk. I turned to see the guy from the lobby sitting with two other young people, who’d obviously just watched everything. “Oh, here.” The guy unclipped his ID badge from his belt loop and held it up jokingly for my inspection. “Or I can stand up if you want?”
“Very funny.” At least he knew what I’d been looking at and didn’t think I was a sexual predator.
“Come on, come sit.” I shuffled to their table and took the empty chair, trying to suck in great gulps of air to cool my cheeks without looking like a fish.
“I’m James,” he said. He had a square jaw and thick brown hair that swooped across his forehead in a way that made me wonder if his ears were magnetic. “Have you met everyone yet? This is Abby. She’s in marketing.” The name pinged—Abby ranked one ahead or behind me, depending on who you asked, and now that I’d seen her myself I could firmly conclude that yes, I should be flattered. I caught her looking me up and down, but with soft eyes that seemed more curious than judgmental.
“And this is Mohammad—Mo—with IT.”
“When,” said Mo, a big man with impressive sideburns, “not if—when you mess up your computer, please promise you’ll call me first before trying to fix it yourself. I’ve got a graveyard full of desktops that didn’t deserve what was done to them.”
“I will.”
“I’m Asbel’s assistant,” said James.
Working for our general manager would have scared the shit out of me, but James radiated a prep-school confidence. In fact, none of them were old enough to have been here very long, and they seemed so comfortable, so sure of their places. “Don’t worry about Chaser. He’s pranked everyone more than once—it’s his thing. And he’s the best nose tackle in the league, so we live with it.”
“He’s so dumb.” Abby rolled her eyes. “He’s gotten my ears so many times with the Freeze Spray I can only wear studs.” Trainers used Freeze Spray on in-game injuries to instantly ice and numb an area. In high school I was once holding out a water bottle to one of my dad’s players when my pinky got caught by the blast, and I could have snapped that finger off at the knuckle. The thought of someone sneaking up behind me and spraying it that close to my face made me shudder.
“He swapped my water bottle out for one full of smelling salts,” admitted Mo. “But I managed to vomit in private, so—who’s the winner there?”
I laughed—genuinely, for once—and settled into my chair. Sitting with the three of them, for the first time all day, I felt my shoulders release. “I thought his name was Chase.”
“Chaser’s his nickname,” James said. “Everybody with the team has one—you know, Lemon is Lemmer, Miller is Mills, Herrod is Roddy, Mackey is Mack.”
I remembered Brent’s introductions that first day. B-rad, meet Poppy B. Ugh. There was even more to learn. “What are yours?” I asked.
James hitched his thumb toward Mo. “Mo Money.”
Mo shrugged, looking supremely unbothered. “It’s better than Mo Problems.”
“My last name’s Worthington”—Of course it is, I thought—“so I got JWorth.”
“Right.”
“And you…what’s your full name?”
“Poppy Benjamin.”
“Pop-Tart,” James and Mo said in unison. Abby smiled and rolled her eyes, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard her nickname.
James spread his hands. “Take it as a compliment. You’re a real Bobcat now.”
* * *
*
Sunday dawned clear and cool. After a week spent typing and sorting, rushing from place to place and generally trying not to make a fool of myself, it was time to remember why I wanted this job so badly in the first place.
“Soak it in,” my dad had instructed me on the phone the night before. “Your first NFL game—I hope it’s the first of hundreds, kiddo. I’m so proud of you.”
I wished he could be with me as I pulled into the parking lot outside the stadium, because it wasn’t fair that I was here instead of him. He absolutely could have coached at this level—and he’d had the opportunity. His first job was as a college grad assistant, and he was offered a full-time position assisting with special teams after that. He was on his way up the ladder—but then he married my mom, and they had my older brother, Jeff, and my parents made choices. This job was all-encompassing. It was weekends and holidays, and my dad was school plays and dance recitals. He wasn’t willing to miss Jeff’s lacrosse games to watch film. He didn’t want someone else reading bedtime stories to my middle brother, Luke, while he hopped a team charter to Arizona. My dad had a choice, and he chose us. And now I was standing here, with this amazing opportunity, because of what he sacrificed to give it to me.
Later today these lots would be filled with tents, portable grills, cornhole, DJs, pop-up bars, face-painting stations, and bounce houses—not to mention eighty thousand rabid fans. It was the first Sunday of the NFL season, and I, Poppy Benjamin, got to be a part of it.
About an hour before kickoff, I saw James (I would not be trying to pull off JWorth) by the staff elevators. His arms were filled with snack bags of popcorn, and he nodded at them and said, “Asbel gets testy during the games—salt helps.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, just,” I backtracked, “it’s a big day, and since it’s the first game, but I’m sure—”
“I’m kidding.” James said. “He’s a nightmare.” The elevator dinged, but he ignored it and allowed the doors to close. “So—how did a nice girl like you end up in football?”
“Excuse me?” I balked. “Did you ask Brent that?”
“I know how Brent ended up here—lifetime supply of free gum.”
This time when the elevator opened, he stepped in and swiped his badge to access the suite level. “You ready for today?”
“I think so.”
“I hope so,” he said. And then, as the doors closed, “This is the fun part. Well, the other fun part.”
I smiled as I walked to my seat, because to me it was all the fun part, and it was really nice to feel like that wasn’t something to be embarrassed about. Every morning I drove to work in the dark. At night I drove home in it. If I wasn’t needed at practice, I could go the entire day without seeing the sun, and it was completely worth it for the view of the field at six thirty when the sky was navy and the lights were off but the stadium somehow still glowed.
The stadium pulsed with fans, cheerleaders, coaches, trainers, mascots, yellow-coated security guards, beer vendors, and of course, the players. When the team ran onto the field to the driving soundtrack of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” the roar of the crowd lifted my hair from my neck. The cheerleaders signed the anthem in ASL, and then a flyover swooped above our heads, a cannon fired, and the return team was on the field, hopping in place to get themselves hyped for kickoff. The crowd gave a collective “AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhAHH!” as foot connected with ball, and we were off.
Three hours later it was over, and the Bobcats had improved to 1–0 with a decisive victory.
That night I stood in my shower, eyes closed, with the water set as hot as it would go. My feet ached. My shoulders were sore. The hours were murderous, the pay was pathetic. And I fucking loved it.
I stayed in the shower so long that the water pooled around my feet. Grabbing the hair catcher and setting it on the side of the tub, I wrapped myself in a towel and lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Then I reached for my laptop and scrolled through Facebook. Most of my college friends had found entry-level jobs in New York, and they posted a constant stream of banal updates like “Amanda is…getting coffee for ten” and “Layla is…never taking the L train again.” It all sounded so boring compared to the things I was doing. I’d much rather be following up on a credential request from the Playboy Mansion than taking lunch orders from eight levels of middle managers. How could I imagine myself as one of millions when I could be this special instead?
CHAPTER FIVE
NOW
The rain continued on Saturday, setting the private runways at MillionAir glistening under the floodlights. It was only four o’clock, but the gloomy skies combined with the end of Daylight Saving Time made this feel like a night flight.
I inched through security, pecking away at my phone. If it seemed crazy that, less than forty-eight hours after our head coach’s body was discovered, we were flying to New York without so much as naming an interim replacement, that’s football. The games don’t stop when someone collapses right there on the field, so they certainly weren’t going to stop for this.
A text interrupted my typing.
Eight o’clock in the usual place. Tell no one.
I quickly closed it and looked over my shoulder, where I was met with nothing more than a puzzled smile from Rodney. “I thought I felt a fly,” I said.
“You think MillionAir lets flies in here? They shoot them at the gate.” Rodney spent more time in the weight room than most of special teams, and aside from the mandated suits for travel, it had been years since I’d seen him in anything other than a Bobcats polo. Today he’d snuck a dryfit shirt under his jacket, and I supposed he’d get away with it since we had no coach to enforce the dress code. “Birds, on the other hand…” he started, but I waved him off.
“Just—no. Not today.”
“They have to ‘let’ them in. A private airfield? This is the surveillance they want.”
“Rodney, you know that the only thing stronger than your love of conspiracy theories is my hatred of your love of them, right?” He’d never admit it, but I was sure he was the one who gave Raj those flat-earth shirts. That all birds were replaced with surveillance robots in the seventies was one of his favorite theories. I couldn’t count the number of times he’d solemnly recited that bird-watching goes both ways. He didn’t even believe this shit, he just liked riling people up, and given the events of the past two days, I was in no mood to be riled.
“You’ve never seen a baby pigeon. That’s all I’m saying.”
“We’re doing beverage service, right?” I asked our flight attendant, Clarissa, once I was seated. It was only forty minutes from Syracuse to the Meadowlands, but I badly needed a drink, even if I was technically at work. This didn’t count, I reasoned—sky rules.
The players shuffled toward the back of the plane to spend the flight napping or continuing the high-stakes poker game that had been going on since Week 1. Coaches sat in the middle, and staff was up front, although after takeoff I often headed back to catch someone I’d been chasing that week while they had nowhere to run. Not today. I would not turn around. I would not risk catching sight of the empty seat three rows behind me.
Alec held his fist out to bump as he passed. There would be no other acknowledgment of last night. We wouldn’t mention it again, until the next time.
I tucked my phone inside my purse, where it brushed up against the little envelope, still along for the ride.
I know what you did.
Tell the truth or pay the consequences.
You have five days.
The weather followed us through the atmosphere, and even above the clouds we bounced along through bad turbulence. After drinking my cocktail in two long sips, I laid my head back and listened to the soft tink of ice cubes jumping around in the glass. I allowed my feet to slip out of my heels and flexed them. That damn note. If it had come any other week, I would have just tossed it away, maybe without even opening it. Red’s death, and where I was while it happened, had unmoored me. My entire life felt as suspended in midair as the plane.
“Hey.”
I jumped at a pat on my elbow and twisted to see our quarterback, A.J. Caufield, glaring at me from beneath one of those stupid Baker boy hats.
“Hey there. How are you holding up? Feeling okay about tomorrow?”
“I keep getting these messages.”
I’d downed that vodka way too fast, and now it was smacking me around. Two consecutive late nights and the swooping of the plane weren’t helping either. Still shoeless, I struggled to my feet and clamped my hand on the seat back to steady myself. “Messages from who?”
“How about every reporter I’ve ever met wanting to know about Red? I haven’t talked to half of these guys since I was in college. I don’t even have the same cell number now. Did you give it out?”
“A.J., come on. Have I ever done that?”
He flexed his wrist to show off a diamond-encrusted Apple watch. “Look,” he said, scanning through. “Look at all this shit. What am I supposed to say?”
“Nothing. Ignore the ones you want to ignore. Tell the others you’re still processing everything. Given the circumstances, no one’s going to bother you beyond that.”
