Chapter 4 Rules

Dominic is already in my apartment when I get back.

This is not surprising.

Dominic has a key because I made the mistake of giving it to him sophomore year during a week when I thought I might need someone to check on me, and he has never once used it for emergencies and always used it for exactly this kind of thing.

He is sitting on my couch with his feet on my coffee table eating my food and looking at me like I just walked in from doing something that requires an explanation.

“Talk,” he says.

I drop my bag by the door.

“There is nothing to talk about.”

“Richard Hale called three people on the team before eight this morning. By ten everyone knew there was a meeting. By eleven someone had already found her Instagram.”

He points at me with the fork.

“So talk.”

I go to the kitchen.

Get water.

Drink half of it standing at the counter.

“It is a semester,” I say. “Maybe two depending on response metrics. I keep my draft position, I keep my season, I stay on the ice. That is all that matters.”

Dominic stares at me.

“You are fake dating someone.”

“It is an image partnership.”

“Trevor.”

“It is a contractual arrangement that creates a public narrative. It is not complicated.”

“It is insane is what it is.”

He sets the fork down.

“You are going to spend a semester pretending to date a girl you met this morning in a hotel conference room so that scouts do not pull back because of a video that was not even what it looked like.”

He pauses.

“That is insane.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

He picks the fork back up.

“As long as we agree.”

I sit down in the chair across from him.

This is what I needed, actually.

Not advice. Not a solution.

Just someone treating it like what it is, which is an insane thing that I am doing anyway because I do not have a better option and the alternative is watching everything I have built start to come apart over forty three seconds I had no control over.

“She negotiated three extra clauses into the contract before she even walked into the room,” I say.

Dominic raises his eyebrows.

“NDA covering her family. Final approval on her personal narrative. Full payment upfront.”

I lean back.

“Richard said she did it in the same conversation where she agreed to the meeting.”

“Smart.”

“Yes.”

Dominic looks at me for a moment.

“You looked at that photo for forty seconds, man. I counted.”

I look at him.

“You were not in that meeting.”

“Richard’s assistant told someone who told me. Forty seconds is a long time to look at a photo.”

“I was assessing who I was going to be working with.”

“For forty seconds.”

“Drop it.”

He drops it.

But the way he drops it, which is immediately and with a small smile he thinks I do not see, tells me he has filed it somewhere he intends to retrieve later.

I know Dominic.

That is exactly what he did.

I pull out my phone.

Not to text anyone.

I open Instagram and type her name into the search bar because Richard said she has fourteen thousand followers and a high trust rating and I need to understand what I am working with before Saturday.

That is the only reason.

Her account is public.

Of course it is.

The whole point of her is that she is visible and credible and exactly what her follower count says she is.

I scroll.

The posts are not what I expected, which is the performative kind of campus activism that is more about the person posting than the thing they are posting about.

These are precise.

A thread about an Integrity Board case she cannot name specifically but outlines in enough detail to make the institutional failure clear.

A share of a legal brief about student athlete protections.

A photo from a campus rally with no filter and no caption except the date.

I click on the video.

She is at a podium outside the administration building.

Maybe two hundred people in front of her.

She is not performing for the crowd.

She is not performing at all.

She is making an argument, step by step, about how institutions protect their own interests by controlling the information available to the people they are supposed to serve, and she is doing it with the specific precision of someone who has thought about this for a long time and is no longer interested in softening it for an audience that might not be ready.

Sharp. Completely unafraid.

I watch it twice.

My phone buzzes.

Richard.

First public appearance Saturday. She will meet you at the east gate of campus. 11AM. Do not be late.

I type back one word.

Fine.

Send it.

I go back to her Instagram.

Her most recent post is from this morning, which means she posted it after the meeting, which means she went back to her regular life and did whatever Zara Lennox does when she is not negotiating contracts in hotel conference rooms.

The post is a photo of her coffee cup and an open textbook.

No face. No caption. Just the image.

I keep scrolling back.

Three weeks ago she shared a quote.

No comment, no context, just the text on a plain background the way people post things when the words are the whole point.

The most dangerous thing you can do is trust someone who needs something from you.

I read it once.

I read it again.

I think about the way she looked at me across that conference table when she signed.

Not like she had won something.

Not like she was satisfied with the terms.

Like she had made a calculated decision with full awareness of every risk attached to it and had decided to proceed anyway, and the proceeding was entirely on her own terms.

I think about the way she defined the physical contact clause.

Not defensively.

Not like she was protecting herself from me specifically.

Like she was drawing a map she intended everyone in the room to memorize, because she had already decided where every line was and she was simply making sure no one pretended not to know.

I screenshot the quote.

I do not look at why I did it.

I just put my phone face-down on the coffee table and go back to my water.

Dominic is watching me from the couch with the expression he gets when he is about to say something I do not want to hear.

“Not a word,” I say.

He holds both hands up.

Says nothing.

I pick up my phone again.

Look at the screenshot sitting in my camera roll.

Three weeks ago she posted that quote, which means three weeks ago had nothing to do with me, which means it is just something she believes in general.

Which makes it worse, somehow, than if she had posted it today.