Whistleblower ✓

21 | the baseball house

"I love you," Hanna said, "but if you don't stop moving your pinky, I'm going to snap it in half."

Being a hand model was difficult.

I hadn't realized this when I'd volunteered. I'd just wanted to shut Hanna up about how she was going to fail this figure drawing class, lose her scholarship, and get another lecture from her father about how she should've been pre-med instead of a fine arts major.

Five minutes into me holding still while Hanna ripped out pages of her sketchbook and brushed eraser dustings all over our bedroom carpet, Andre had shown up (still bleary-eyed and yawning from a post-dinner nap) and asked if he could join in. Hanna lent him a pack of charcoal sticks and one of her giant pads of newsprint paper, then scooted over so all three of us could fit on the floor between the beds.

"I'm fine if you wanna take a break soon," Andre told me, using the back of his hand to push his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. "Just gotta do some shading."

"Good for you," Hanna muttered, reaching for her eraser again.

She was about to start attempt number seven on my left pinky finger when Andre's phone buzzed where it lay on the carpet. He looked down at his charcoal-stained hands, then at me. I looked down at my carefully posed hands, then at Hanna. She groaned, smacked down her sketchbook, and reached across Andre's lap to check his phone for him.

"There's a party at the Baseball House tonight," she said, summarizing a text message. "Somebody named Cinder Block says you should come. He sent you the password, too."

"Cinder Block?" I repeated, snorting in disbelief.

"He's on the hockey team," Andre explained, sitting up straighter and twisting side to side to stretch his lower back. "Nice guy. I can't go to the party, though. We got the game tomorrow. Gordon said anybody who even looks like they got a hangover is getting benched."

Hanna hummed with disappointment.

"Is there gonna be a party tomorrow, at least?"

"Oh, the after party's still happening," Andre said. "Me and the boys are hosting at The Palazzo. We got, like, twenty-five handles of Svedka. So if we win, we gon' celebrate. And if we lose... we got twenty-five handles of Svedka."

I had to give Andre credit. It sounded like a foolproof plan. And I was pretty sure that after covering the game from the field with Joey Aldridge, I was going to need hard alcohol. A lot of it.

"But nobody on the football team will be at the Baseball House tonight, right?" Hanna mused.

Andre shook his head.

"Unless they wanna get benched," he said.

Hanna turned to me, mouth stretched in a wide-open grin.

"Laurel, we should—"

"No."

Her face fell.

"But don't you wanna see the Baseball House?" she whined.

I did. I'd still never been, and the fact that Hanna and Andre had gone without me the night I'd learned about Josefina Rodriguez had been eating at me. Despite how scary going to a party overflowing with friends of the football team sounded, I still got starry-eyed thinking about that house.

"I should lay low," I said, a firm reminder directed more to myself than to my friends.

"With all due respect," Hanna told me, "I know it feels like you're public enemy number one because some of the guys on the football team are mad at you, but you aren't your article. Just because everybody on campus knows about Vaughn doesn't mean they're gonna recognize you. Especially not in shitty lighting. Just put on a hat, or something. You'll be fine."