Whistleblower ✓

17 | the interim coach

The cherry on top of my morning from hell came in the form of a broken air conditioning unit.

By the time I climbed the front steps of our building, the coffee stain on my shirt was almost dry from the long walk under the scorching sun. Between getting lukewarm coffee dumped on me by a pair of strangers (both of whom clearly cared more about the NCAA championships than justice for victims of harassment) and my verbal gunslinging with Bodie, I'd had—and I'm understating this—a fucking terrible day.

So when I unlocked our door only to be hit by a wall of hot air, it felt a little like fate had come back to kick me in the ribs when I was already sprawled on the floor waving my white flag.

I dropped my backpack and went right to the thermostat.

The dial was set to mid-sixties, as usual, which meant neither Hanna nor I had accidentally bumped into it and cranked up the heat. I stood on my tip-toes to put a hand in front of the vent over the bedroom door.

Nothing.

I yanked open the kitchen window, hoping to get some kind of ventilation, but the air outside was just as oppressive. There was a heat haze over the asphalt of the gas station outside—the same wobbly distortion I saw over the toaster every time I stuck a PopTart in there for a little bit too long.

I groaned and sunk to the kitchen floor.

Hanna got home ten minutes later, after I'd resigned myself to a life of sitting in front of the open refrigerator. I heard the clatter of her keys and the creak of our busted-up door, followed by, "What the fuck?"

I leaned back and poked my head around the fridge door.

"The AC's not working," I said.

Hanna, who was dressed in her usual workout attire (running shorts and a sweat-drenched tank top), tugged out her headphones and flattened back a few stray pin-straight black hairs that'd popped out of her tiny stump of a ponytail.

"Why are you here?" she asked, frowning at me. "I thought you had class."

I sighed.

Then I stood, closed the fridge, and put my hands on my hips.

Hanna snorted out a laugh.

"Laurel! You big goof," she teased. "Is that coffee?"

I wished I could shrug and say it'd been my fault. Then maybe I could've laughed the whole thing off. But instead I found myself making a show of rolling my eyes and scoffing as I recounted the story of the girls who'd waited outside my Writing 301 classroom to dump coffee on me.

If Hanna noticed I was feigning nonchalance, she didn't say anything.

She just flushed bright red with indignant outrage.

"What'd they look like?" she demanded. "I'm finding them on social media and reporting them to the university. Fuck it—I'm messaging their moms on Facebook. Who even does this shit? That's so—so—"

"Hanna," I said.

She folded her arms over her chest and exhaled sharply through her nose, her dark eyes going glassy with tears.

"I'm so mad," she whispered, shaking her head.

I held my arms out. Hanna stepped forward into my embrace and buried her sweaty little head in the crook of my neck.

"I'm okay," I told her. "It was just room-temperature coffee."

"It's not about the coffee," she mumbled.

She was right.

It wasn't about the coffee, and it wasn't about the stain on my shirt, which I could probably coax out with the right kind of detergent. It was about the fact that two strangers had been mad enough about the article that they'd tracked me down to serve up their own brand of misguided vigilante justice.