"It's not true," Joe confirmed.
"Then why would they even think that? Why would anyone put something like that in your bag?"
Joe did not answer right away. She was watching over Paige's shoulder. A familiar figure crossing the quad at a distance. Grant Sterling walking beside Wade Holloway. Both of them laughing at something. Neither of them so much as glancing in her direction. That itself told her something. Guilty men rarely look away that easily. Only men who have already convinced themselves they will never be caught can afford not to look.
"I think I know why," Joe said quietly. "I just don't have proof yet."
"What do we do?"
"We wait," Joe said, echoing Coach Marsh, though the word tasted different in her own mouth. Heavier. "And we watch."
Paige nodded, though her eyes were still wet, still frightened in a way that had nothing to do with fitness evaluations or locker rooms. She had grown close to Joe faster than she had grown close to almost anyone else at Asheford. And watching her friend get dragged through campus gossip for something she clearly had not done left a helpless, angry feeling in her chest that she did not know what to do with. She would find out sooner than she wanted to exactly what that helplessness could turn into if left unchecked.
That night, back in the quiet of her own room, Joe took out the small dollar store notebook and sat cross-legged on her bed, the lamp casting a warm circle of light across the blank page. She wrote the date at the top, then the time, then a short factual account of everything Coach Marsh had told her that afternoon. She did not editorialize. She did not write down how frightened or angry she felt underneath it all. Her father had taught her that too a long time ago, watching over her shoulder as a much younger version of her practiced the same habit at their kitchen table. Facts hold up, he used to say. Feelings fade and twist with time. Write down the facts and let the feelings live somewhere else. She closed the notebook, set it back inside her bag beside that sealed envelope she still had not found the courage to open, and turned off the lamp. Though sleep did not come easily that night.
3 days later on a gray Thursday afternoon, Paige left the library later than usual alone. Cutting through a narrow breezeway between two academic buildings that most students used as a shortcut back toward the dorms. Wade Holloway was waiting there. Not by accident, he stepped into her path, blocking the narrow walkway. Cole Ashby a few steps behind him, hanging back the way he always hung back, letting Wade do the talking.
"You're friends with the new girl." Wade said. It was not a question.
Paige's heart began to pound, though she tried to keep her voice steady. "Joe. Her name is Joe."
"Whatever her name is," Wade said, stepping closer. "You might want to tell her to keep her mouth shut. About the evaluation thing, about whatever she thinks she knows."
"She didn't do anything," Paige said, her voice shaking now despite her best effort to hold it steady. "You know, she didn't."
Something shifted in Wade's face. a flicker of anger that had been simmering for days, looking for somewhere to land. "You don't want to be involved in this," he said, and he reached out. Not violently, not at first, just a hand closing around her upper arm, gripping harder than a warning needed to grip. "Understand?"
"Let go of me," Paige said, trying to pull back.
He did not let go right away. He held on a beat too long. hard enough that Paige gasped. Hard enough that when he finally released her, stepping back with a short, humorless laugh, red marks bloomed across her skin where his fingers had been, and a sharp, hot pain ran up through her wrist where she had twisted trying to pull free.
"Just relay the message," Wade said, and he and Cole walked off, laughing about something else already, already moving on to whatever came next in their afternoon, leaving Paige standing alone in the breezeway, cradling her wrist shaking.
She did not go to Joe right away. She was too frightened, too embarrassed, too unsure what would happen if she said anything out loud. She went instead to her own dorm room, wrapped her wrist in a bag of ice from the hall freezer, and sat on her bed crying quietly for a long while before she finally worked up the courage to text Joe three words. "Can you come?"
Joe was there in 11 minutes. She did not raise her voice when Paige told her what happened. She did not ask a dozen frantic questions. She sat down beside Paige on the bed, examined the bruising forming along her forearm with the careful practiced attention of someone who had been taught a long time ago exactly how to check for real injury under stress and asked only the questions that mattered.
"Does it hurt when you move your wrist like this a little?"
"Can you make a fist?"
Paige tried wincing. "Yeah, it just aches."