by Cassie Cole
“It must all be a mistake,” I said. “Right?”
On the bench next to me, Feña shrugged.
Every time the door to the building opened behind us, I whirled to see if it was Lance. Each faculty member who came out and saw me stare them down flinched, but I didn’t care how annoying I was.
“Lance is innocent,” I said out loud. “He’s not a cheater.”
The other thing gnawing at my stomach was that this might somehow be my fault. Sure, we’d gone through every single bottle and can in their house and there wasn’t anything close to prohibited on the list, but I couldn’t help but wonder if something had slipped through the cracks. Maybe one of the supplements was imported from China, where they weren’t as careful with labeling. Like how certain kinds of food had to warn that they were processed in the same building as peanuts, even if there weren’t any peanuts in the product itself.
When the door opened and Lance came out, I immediately knew by the look on his face. I ran to him and wrapped my arms around him, because I knew words wouldn’t suffice.
“Furosemide,” Danny said. “Some masking agent.”
I frowned and searched my memory. “Furosemide… That doesn’t sound familiar at all. We can check when we get home, but I’m 99% sure it wasn’t in any of the stuff.”
“I’m done,” Lance said in shock. “Suspended for a full year. My season is over. Hell, my draft chances are probably shot.”
“Oh Lance, I’m so sorry.”
He stared off for a moment, totally not registering anything behind his eyes. Then he stepped past me. He grabbed a nearby trash bin, one of the big metal ones all over campus, and hurled it across the sidewalk with a roar of exertion and anger. The bin crunched into the pavement and then rolled across the grass, spilling trash in a trail behind it.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Lance immediately said, jogging after it. “I don’t know why I did that. It all just sort of hit me.”
“Shh, it’s okay,” I said as I followed him as fast as I could in my heels. “It’s alright.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not that kind of guy…”
“It is nothing,” Feña said.
The four of us helped pick up the trash bin and then collect all of the trash. It was a weird group activity after receiving devastating news. It was almost soothing for the minute it took us to finish.
After Lance sat on the bottom step leading into the administrative building and held his head in his hands. His black tie hung down beneath him.
“I think I just lost my career,” he said.
“Nobody would draft you?” I offered. “Even with that?”
When Lance didn’t answer, Danny spoke for him. “It’s happened before. But it’s rare. Most teams won’t want to take a chance.”
I sat next to him and rubbed his back through his dress shirt. I decided to give a joke a try. “Look on the bright side. The Cowboys are always picking up troubled players. You might be wearing silver and blue soon.”
To my immense relief, that pulled a ragged laugh out of him. Then he said, “I don’t want to be a troubled player. I’m just a player.”
The four of us sat there for a while, not saying anything.
*
This week sucked.
Everyone stuck with their routine, but nobody was really motivated. Lance was still allowed to do his conditioning with the team in the morning, but he wasn’t allowed with the official team practice in the afternoon. I texted him from the bleachers and asked if he wanted to hang out or something, but he said he just wanted to be alone. I left it at that.
The next day he set up a phone meeting with the local NCAA member representative, a cheery woman named Jamie. She listened to everything Lance had to say, then told him that NCAA drug enforcement appeals almost always needed to be initiated by the school athletic department, not the player himself. She advised him to get a lawyer to petition the Appleton Athletic Department to initiate such an appeal, but warned that it often took six to eight months to go through the process.
“By then, it won’t fucking matter,” Lance said when he got off the phone.
I did my best to console him. Giving him extra conditioning workouts to do instead of going to football practice, something to keep his mind off things. I massaged him in the evening, and made some suggestive jokes too, but he wasn’t in the mood for sex—and to be honest, neither was I. Seeing Lance so deflated had me borderline depressed too. It was like someone had taken a vibrant, colorful painting and changed it to monochrome. I just wanted to hug him and hold him close and tell him everything was going to be okay.
Without any other options, I began thinking about how such a false-positive could have happened. I double-checked all the supplements in the house for furosemide, and then researched their origination points and history of banned substances. I even went down the rabbit hole of possibly sending in a sample of each of our supplements to a third-party testing facility to verify they were perfectly clean, but it turns out that would cost $12,000 per sample.
Even if I had the money, it’s not like it would have mattered. Feña and Danny were on the same stuff, and they didn’t test positive.
Which brought me back to my original theory: someone had screwed with the samples themselves.
I decided to talk to Sophie, my old study partner who had given me the key to the gym. She was working the front desk in the athletic building when I met her on Friday afternoon. I spent ten minutes making small talk and catching up with her before finally getting to what mattered.
“Hey, random question. How many people have access to the athletic building?” I asked.
She got a funny look on her face. “Uh. I don’t know, maybe 50? Why?”
“I’m doing a presentation on the safety of female athletes at university athletic departments. I want to get a baseline of how many people have access to certain buildings at any given time.”
“Oh! That’s an interesting topic. Actually, let me check the database.” She typed on her keyboard. “Here we go. Oh. There are only 37 people with keycard access to this building. That’s not nearly as many as I thought!”
“Wow, yeah, 37 is pretty low,” I said, humoring her bubbly personality. “What detail of access can you see?”
“Oh, all sorts of details! I can see every door a badge was scanned at, and at what time.”
“No way,” I said in mock disbelief. “They don’t really keep such detailed records, do they?”
She leaned in like she was telling a secret. “Oh, they keep tons of records. It’s kind of creepy.”
“I don’t believe you!”
Sophie took the bait. She did that thing people do when they’re about to do something wrong or tell a racist joke: she looked both ways, and then lowered her voice.
“I can show you, if you want.”
I pretended to think about it. “Show me a random date. Like, I don’t know, October fifth.”
Her fingers flashed on the mouse and keyboard.
“Ta-da. Every keycard access from October fifth, listed in chronological order.”
I bent over the desk to search the screen. There were a lot of familiar names in the morning: Coach Mueller, Brett, various other athletic coaches. The entries dwindled in the afternoon and evening, since it was a Saturday and most people were watching the game. But nothing jumped out.
I’m not sure it mattered, anyways. People held the door open for each other all the time without making sure someone was authorized.
“What about cameras?” I asked. “There are cameras all over the building, right?”
“At all the entrances, and a few other hallways. But not everywhere. If a female athlete were to be attacked, there’s only about a 50/50 chance it gets caught on camera.”
“Attacked, right,” I said. “How long is tape stored?”
“I don’t know. A few weeks, I think? I’ve never had to go looking at old footage, which is good because it means bad things have never happened!”
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I chuckled along with her. “Have you ever seen anything suspicious on the cameras?”
Sophie frowned. “Suspicious how?”
“I don’t know.” I pretended to think of something. “Unusual people walking around like they don’t belong. Peering into office windows or testing to see if doorknobs are unlocked.”
“Hmm. I don’t remember seeing anything like that. What does that have to do with female athlete safety?”
“Oh, it’s just for background footage for my presentation,” I quickly said. “To show how even academic buildings can be dangerous, in general.”
“That makes sense,” Sophie said. “If you’d like, I can look for some footage like that.”
I started to ask her if she could check for anything on October fifth, but then Sophie whipped her head to the side.
“Oh shoot, Maxine is coming,” she said as a woman walked down the hall. “She’s my supervisor. Let’s talk about this another time, okay? It was good catching up with you, Roberta!”
I quickly left the building, no more satisfied than I had been before.
*
That night while eating dinner in my dorm, I wondered what kind of evidence would exonerate Lance. Footage of someone tampering with a drug test sample? Anything less than that would be circumstantial. I needed definitive proof. But if there were only cameras in half the building…
Somehow, I doubted Coach Mueller’s office would have cameras in it.
Then again, I didn’t necessarily need flawless proof. I just needed some sort of lead to track down. Even just someone acting strange on camera. If I could find someone like that, and then talk to them in person, I bet I could get the truth out of them.
I voiced my complaints out loud to Aly in our kitchen. Like a good friend, she listened quietly while I vented.
“I just wish there was some sort of smoking gun to prove his innocence,” I said while toying with my food.
“Okay, I’m going to suggest something,” Aly said. “And you can’t get mad.”
“Let’s hear it,” I replied.
Aly fixed me with a pointed stare. “Maybe Lance is guilty.”
“Aly!” I snapped.
“You promised not to get mad!”
“Because I didn’t think you would say something like that! I would notice if he was taking steroids or something. I’m around him all the time.”
“All the time?” she said carefully. “Literally 24 hours a day?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m being pragmatic,” she shot back. “If he wanted to, I’m sure he could find some time alone to shoot up.”
“Lance wouldn’t cheat,” I said stubbornly.
“You’ve only known him two months,” Aly said gently. “Are you sure he wouldn’t do it? Absolutely positive he wouldn’t, especially with an NFL draft spot on the line?”
I didn’t respond to her. I would have known if he was taking a banned substance. Hell, I’d seen him naked a dozen times now—if he was taking steroids, I would’ve seen the injection marks on his butt or thigh.
But as we cleaned up dinner and went to bed, her comment took hold in my brain. I wasn’t absolutely positive. Lance had lots of reasons to cheat. Fame and fortune on the horizon at the end of the season. There was a seed of doubt in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more it took root.
What was more likely: that an expensive and rigorous drug test had somehow been tampered with? Or a college athlete cheated to get ahead?
The thought tormented me as I tried to sleep.
42
Roberta
We played Lone Star Tech at home the next day. I hadn’t talked to the guys at all except to text them to wish them luck in the game. It felt weird sending a group text just to Danny and Feña, but including Lance would have felt like mockery.
As the teams lines up on the field, I wondered where Lance was. He should have been on the sidelines in street clothes, but I didn’t see his tall form. Maybe Coach had insisted he watch the game elsewhere, so the team wouldn’t be associated with a cheater. Or maybe Lance didn’t want the humiliation of being down there.
Lone Star Tech was a good team, but not great. We should have handled them easily, but our defense got into a hole early and we struggled to claw back into the game. Without Lance, Danny’s passing options were severely limited. He constantly struggled to connect with his other receivers, none of whom could get any sort of separation downfield. And since Lance usually received the kick-off returns, we never started any of our drives in good field position.
We were losing 20-28 late in the fourth quarter. We just needed a touchdown and a two-point conversion to tie it. Danny started the drive off with a deep pass to one of the other receivers, who caught it around the 50-yard line. For the first time all game, the crowd roared with excitement. Danny and the rest of the team sprinted to the line to set up the next play.
Come on, I thought. Just a few more like that.
They handed the ball off to the running back on the next play, then called a timeout to stop the clock. The next play was a screen pass to the right side, but Appleton couldn’t get enough blockers out in front of it to have it go anywhere.
The play after that, Danny targeted the wide receiver in a slant route over the middle of the field. But the free safety for Lone Star Tech anticipated it, cutting the route and intercepting the ball. With no timeouts left, the game was all but over.
The student section groaned and cursed, and my voice was right there with them. On the sidelines, Danny took off his helmet and smashed it into the Gatorade cooler.
I went to their house after the game to wait for them, but Lance was in the living room watching TV.
“There he is,” I said as I went inside. “You watch the game?”
“Fucking bullshit ending,” he said without moving from the recliner. “There was pass interference all over Johnson, but they didn’t throw the fucking flag.”
I came up behind him and rubbed his shoulders. The tension in his muscles was immense. “You want to get some food or something?”
“I’m not hungry.”
I glanced at the empty Doritos bag and guacamole container on the table. “I hope you logged that in your dietary tracker,” I said gently. “I bet you hit your daily carb macros already!”
“What’s the point?” he said, defeated. “I appreciate everything you’ve done, Babs, but it’s over. I’m fucked.”
“What about your appeals?”
“I don’t even know if I’m going to appeal. Even if I win the appeal, it won’t be for at least six months. By then the season will be over and nothing will matter.”
“But there’s still the NFL draft, right?”
“The draft is in April. I’d probably miss that too.”
“Then you can be a walk-on to one of the NFL training camps, like Feña. And you can still do that even if you lose your appeal. It’s not the end of the world.”
Lance got up from his chair and came around the side. He cupped my chin and smiled at me sadly.
“I appreciate the pep talk, but I’m really not in the mood right now. I just need to wallow in misery for a while, ya know?”
I hugged him, and he hugged me back fiercely. “If you want to wallow, I’ll let you. But I’m going to be here to wallow with you.”
“Thanks, Babs,” he whispered, voice thick with emotion.
The door opened and Danny and Feña came striding in.
“Did you see that bullshit missed call?” Danny demanded.
“They were practically molesting Johnson right off the line,” Lance replied. “Your ball never would’ve been intercepted if he was on his normal route.”
“Assholes,” Danny said bitterly while going to the kitchen for a beer.
“It did not matter,” Feña announced. “We were terrible all game. We deserved to lose.”
“We should have won,” Danny grumbled before popping the beer cap and drinking half the
bottle. He sighed when he came back up for air. “Lone Star Tech should have been an easy win. We blew our chance.”
“I should have been there,” Lance complained. “If it was me getting covered like that instead of Johnson, I would’ve been able to get separation. Y’all lost because of me.”
I expected Danny to shake him off, to give a speech about how they won as a team and lost as a team, and that no single player was ever responsible. But instead, Danny just scowled and finished the rest of his beer.
“Hey, let’s go get some food,” I suggested. “I could use one of those greasy blue cheese burgers and a pitcher of beer.”
“I don’t feel like going out.”
“Come on. We’ll call an Uber so you don’t have to worry about driving.” He looked like he was going to say no again, so I let a little bit of scorn slip into my voice. “The last thing you need to do is mope around here feeling sorry for yourself. Take the loss like a man and take your girlfriend out for dinner.”
That knocked him out of his funk. “Girlfriend?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what else to call this. You three are like my boyfriends.”
“I just didn’t realize we were using labels, is all. Alright, let’s get some burgers.”
“Feña?”
“I am going to take a nap,” he said. “You two have fun.”
We took an Uber across town to the little restaurant. There was a better crowd tonight, and the restaurant was half-full, although we still got Danny’s usual table. The pitcher of beer came out dripping with condensation.
Danny was still in a mood, but he began to loosen up when his first beer was half-finished.
“We needed Lance out there today,” he suddenly said. “I never realized how much our offensive plays rely on him. Without him, they double-teamed my other two receivers with impunity. I felt like I was trying to thread a needle the whole game.”
