Whistleblower ✓

15 | suspended disbelief

The Garland Country Club was a splotch of green in an endless sea of drought-kissed hills. It boasted two Olympic regulation swimming pools, one water slide, three hot tubs, and a series of tennis, squash, badminton and basketball courts.

In the middle of it all stood the clubhouse, a mission-style monstrosity of faux-stone and white adobe under a terra-cotta tile roof.

It was an oasis playground for the athletically and socially inclined.

More importantly, it was a ten-minute drive from campus—just far away enough that I could pretend I didn't have a Writing 301 paper due on Wednesday, and that Ryan and Olivia weren't blowing up my Facebook notifications about finding time to discuss our group project, and that the entire football team didn't hate me.

It was my paradise.

And my own personal purgatory.

"Mr. Sherwood!" I called from the driver's seat of a golf cart. "Few feet to your left! No, your left—left—there! That's the ball. Go ahead and swing whenever you're ready."

The couple trudging their way through the eighteenth hole were regulars.

The Sherwoods had retired decades ago, because they were successful and childless, and sold their Beverly Hills estate to buy a house in the nice part of Garland for a modest five million dollars. Now they had absolutely no obligations in life other than to take their sweet time balling out.

And I respected that. I did.

But it was Saturday, and Garland's away game against the University of Washington had kicked off at eleven o'clock in the morning. It was almost four in the afternoon, now, and I was still stuck shuttling the Sherwoods around in a golf cart that maxed out at ten miles an hour.

I'd missed the whole damn game.

My phone buzzed in the back pocket of my unflatteringly boxy khaki uniform shorts.

It was probably Hanna celebrating that we'd won (because that seemed like a given against Washington). I wanted to check her texts and see if Andre had gotten any playing time, but I was too close to the clubhouse.

If I whipped out my phone now, Rebecca would probably see it.

My boss, Rebecca, sort of hated me.

The first two weeks after I started working at the Garland Country Club my freshman year, she'd been a delight. She'd smile patiently when I came into her office to ask the same questions four times a day, and she'd let me leave early on Sundays so I'd have plenty of time to get my homework done.

I could pinpoint the moment our relationship had shifted.

It'd been the afternoon she heard me speaking Spanish to a pair of maintenance men.

Rebecca had asked, later that day, how many years of Spanish class I'd taken. I'd laughed and explained that it was basically my first language, since my mom was from Mexico.

"Your name sounds so American, though," Rebecca had said.

I hadn't thought too much of that comment, at the time.

My dad had always maintained that he'd wanted to name me after my maternal grandmother, Guadalupe. He loved her name. But my mom had protested—she'd wanted Laurel, a name that, as far as we could tell, was just something she'd found in a parenting book listed along with names like Samantha and Jessica.

Since she'd been eight months pregnant, she'd won that argument pretty easily. My parents had tucked Guadalupe between Laurel and Cates, two names that were entirely palatable to the English-speaking crowd.