Chapter 6 Strategy Session

Alex

I told Cam about the panel pairing on the drive to practice, and he laughed so hard he nearly missed the turn into the lot.

“You got partnered with Star Davis. For a class. Officially. By a professor.”

“It’s not luck. Chen does it alphabetically by some system nobody’s ever explained.”

“I don’t care how it happened. It happened.” He pulled into a parking space and killed the engine but didn’t get out, turning to look at me with the particular grin he saved for moments he considered genuinely good news. “This is the access we needed. Legitimate reason to be around her. Built right in.”

“It’s a literature panel, Cam. Not a strategy session.”

“Everything’s a strategy session if you’re paying attention.”

“You weren’t there. We argued about a narrator for forty minutes. There wasn’t a single strategic thing about it.”

“You argued with her for forty minutes and you’re telling me that like it’s a problem.” He shook his head, already reaching for the door handle. “Bro, that’s the whole game. She doesn’t argue with people she doesn’t care about. She gives them three words and walks away. You got forty minutes.”

I didn’t answer that, mostly because something about the way he said it sat wrong in a place I hadn’t fully mapped yet. I’d spent the last hour in the library arguing with Star about a narrator’s silences, and somewhere in the middle of it I’d stopped thinking about the bet entirely. I’d just been arguing. Actually arguing, the kind where you forget to perform because you’re too busy being right or trying to be.

That hadn’t happened to me in a long time. Maybe ever.

We got out of the car and walked toward the locker room, and Cam kept talking, something about how the team would want updates now that there was a structured reason for me to be near her on a schedule. I made the right sounds in the right places. Inside, I was still back in the library, replaying the exact moment she’d said his framing missed the entire point of the structural irony and looked genuinely annoyed that I’d made her think that hard.

I liked making her think that hard.

The locker room was already half full when we walked in, and Marcus caught the tail end of whatever Cam was saying because of course he did.

“Wait, you got paired with Davis? For real?”

“For a class project,” I said. “Calm down.”

“That’s not nothing. That’s basically a hall pass.” Marcus dropped onto the bench across from his locker, grinning the grin that always made me want to put distance between us. “Two weeks of nothing and now the universe just hands you a built-in excuse.”

“It’s an assignment.”

“Sure it is.”

Dre was at his locker a few feet down, quieter than usual, the particular quiet of someone who still hadn’t fully recovered from being publicly turned down in three words months ago. He glanced over but didn’t say anything, which from Dre was its own kind of statement.

“How’s the deadline looking,” Marcus said. “December fifteenth, right? You got, what, two months left.”

“I’m aware of the deadline.”

“You don’t sound that confident for a guy who never loses.”

“I’m confident. I just don’t think it’s worth performing about in a locker room before practice.”

“That’s a very mature way of saying you don’t have an update.”

“I have an update. I’m just not giving it to you.”

Cam laughed at that, and even Marcus cracked something close to a smile, and the conversation moved on the way locker room conversations always did, sliding from one subject to the next without anyone actually deciding to change it. Someone brought up the upcoming scrimmage. Someone else complained about a coach’s new conditioning drill. I let myself disappear into the noise of it, which was easier than answering questions I didn’t have honest answers for yet.

I didn’t answer Marcus directly again, because the truthful answer was complicated in a way I wasn’t ready to hand to a locker room full of people treating this like a sports bet instead of whatever it had actually started to feel like. I changed the subject, asked about practice, let the conversation move somewhere else, and spent the rest of the session running drills with my body while my head stayed two hours back in a library, replaying an argument about silence that I hadn’t wanted to end.

That night I sat at my apartment with the assigned text open on the counter and read through the passage she’d defended, the one I’d argued against without fully reading it first. I read it twice. Then a third time, slower.

She was right.

Not in the obvious way, not in a way that made her sound smarter just because she’d said it with more confidence. She was right because she’d actually seen something in the text that I’d skimmed past, a detail in the narrator’s pauses that changed the entire shape of the argument once you noticed it. I sat with that for longer than I expected to, longer than the actual reading required, turning the realization over like it mattered more than it should.

I picked up my phone and typed a message to her, deleted it, typed something shorter, deleted that too. Eventually I settled on something simple.

You were right about the silences. I reread the passage.

Her response took almost twenty minutes, long enough that I’d started to think she wasn’t going to answer at all.

I know I was right.

I laughed out loud in my empty apartment, which felt like a strange thing to be doing alone at eleven at night over a text message from a girl who’d told me twice in one week that she wasn’t interested in anything I was offering.

Cam texted separately around midnight, a single line with no context required. How’s the bet going.

I looked at the message for a long time before I answered. Long enough that the screen dimmed twice and I had to tap it awake again.

On track, I wrote back, because it was the easiest true thing to say and the rest of the truth wasn’t fully formed yet, not even to myself. I put the phone down on the counter, screen dark, and thought about the careful way she’d argued with me in the library, fully present, fully sharp, completely unconcerned with whether I liked what she had to say.

I’d spent two weeks calculating exactly how to get her attention.

I hadn’t expected the bet to stop being the most interesting thing about her.

I lay in bed afterward going over the conversation again, every part of it, the way she’d leaned forward when she thought she had the better point and the way her voice had gotten lower and more certain instead of louder when she was actually sure of something. Most people raised their voice when they were sure. She did the opposite. I filed that away without deciding why it mattered, only that it did.

I told myself this was still the same play I’d called in that locker room three weeks ago. I was still going to win. I still wanted Ryder’s tab covered by seven other guys instead of me. I just didn’t know anymore what winning was supposed to feel like once I actually got there, and I fell asleep before I let myself sit with that for too long.

My phone buzzed again before I fell asleep. Marcus this time, not Cam.

People are talking, the message read. Some of the guys mentioned the bet at Ryder’s last night. Might want to keep it quiet if you actually want this to work.

I read it twice in the dark, feeling something cold settle under the satisfaction that had been sitting in my chest all evening. If word got back to her before I was ready for it to, there wouldn’t be a version of this where she ever spoke to me again.