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“Or is that part of the plan? To let someone else line everything up for you.”

“You have no idea who I am or what you’re talking about.”

“That’s because you insist on beating around the bush.”

I held my tongue, and that was all she needed. Dakota closed her notebook with a soft snap and lifted her nose oh so snobbishly.

“This isn’t your story, but you’re definitely a part of it.”

Her words felt like a punch to the gut, but she didn’t give me a chance to defend myself. She just turned on her heel and walked off, her pace quick and certain.

“I swear to God, Prescott!” Coach barked yet again.

But I couldn’t find the strength to move. Her words had raised my suspicion to a whole new level. What did she mean by "it’s not my story”? And how could I be a part of it then? My gaze shifted to the sideline, and I saw Frank Delaney standing there. I may have been a rookie, but I sure as hell knew donors didn’t attend practices for the hell of it. He watched me intently and wasn’t even trying to hide it.

An eeriness washed over me, but I tried to suppress it and jogged back to the field just as the whistle blew, and the play started up again. And for the first time all day, I completely missed the opening gap.

5

Dakota

I hadn’t expected this assignment to get any better. I thought I’d have to do nothing more than tolerate it to get a passing grade. To make my professor happy. Instead, I found myself actually leaning into it.

The patterns I had noticed were becoming more apparent the deeper I went. No amount of rationalizing and excusing helped it turn into just my imagination. If anything, they’d sharpened and refined themselves into something tangible. Different schools, different conferences, but they all had the same underlying threads. There were always whispers of money moving quietly and players being protected just enough to stay eligible. Then we had the stories that never quite reached the surface.

It wasn’t fluff anymore. It was something I could hold on to, and I intended on proving it.

I shifted in the passenger seat as the highway stretched ahead. The team bus was a few cars ahead of us, and the overcast sky became a never-ending flat gray visage as the traffic thinned now that we were further away from the campus. Tara kept the bus in steady view, but it was so big and bulky that it was impossible to miss.

I think the most annoying part was that she drove in the same way she did everything else. Calm, efficient, and completely unbothered by the chaos that surrounded us.

“Are you always this intense before a game?” Tara asked, drawing me from my thoughts.

I kept my eyes on the road. “I’m not tense.”

“You’ve been staring at that bus in such a way one would swear it was being driven by your archenemy.”

“It represents my assignment,” I said honestly. “So yeah, maybe I am feeling some pressure coming from it.”

Tara let out a soft laugh. “Most people who look at something like that just see a team.”

She wasn’t wrong. In the time we had been on the road, quite a few people honked or waved at the guys to show their support, but for me, it had an entirely different meaning.

“I’m not most people,” I muttered.

“Oh, don’t think we don’t know that, honey. Word of your unique approach has already spread far and wide.”

I shifted slightly to give myself enough leverage so that I could pull my notebook out of my backpack. The moment I had it in my hand, I flipped it open and stared at the contents. There were countless pages filled with notes listing names of schools and explaining half-formed connections. And of course, all the questions I hadn’t been able to answer yet.

“Have you ever noticed patterns?” I asked even though it was meant to be an internal question.

“In what?”

“In programs like this one? You know, like recruitment jumps, and academic performance that suddenly improves across the board.”

Tara raised an eyebrow. “You mean teams getting better?”

That was one way of putting it, but I didn’t think she really understood what kind of information I was trying to get out of her, so maybe it would be better if I changed my approach.