For about four seconds nobody said anything, and Joy used them to read him.
It had become so easy now, almost embarrassingly so. Cole stood the way he always stood, and his hands had gone somewhere, and there was a thing happening around his mouth that she'd seen exactly twice before: once when he'd been left off the relay for a meet, and once in a parking lot in Fresno when somebody had suggested, lightly, that he'd gone out too fast.
Underneath the anger there was something else. She got most of the way to it before he started talking.
“So, just carrying on like nothing happened! Like you didn’t just screw over your whole team.”
And there it was, the Cole she'd known for two years, and Joy felt something in her chest unclench about a quarter of an inch, because at least this part was familiar.
"Okay," she said. "You're mad."
"I'm not mad."
"You're a little mad."
"I don't get mad."
Joy looked at him.
"Mario Kart," she said.
"That's not..."
"Freshman year. Toad's Turnpike. You threw a controller into a beanbag chair so hard it went through the beanbag chair."
"The track was rigged!" Cole said.
"Steak night."
"Oh, come on."
"Marco finished his steak forty seconds before you did and you didn't speak to him until Tuesday."
"Mine was all gristle!" Cole's voice had gone up considerably.
"The lizards."
There was a pause.
"Don't."
"We caught two lizards behind the equipment shed and we raced them and yours came second."
"The other one cheated!" Cole said.
And that was the exact moment Joy should have stopped.
She was aware of it, faintly, somewhere underneath the warm and rising thing in her chest that had shown up the second he took the bait, the same thing she'd felt across a table from Vic the night before, with a room watching and every word landing where she wanted it. She had him. She had him completely. He was arguing about a lizard.
"And you're trying to tell me you're not mad now?"
"Don't do that."
Joy stopped.
"Don't do what?"
"That." He made a small motion at her face. "The thing you're doing with your... the thing."
"I'm talking to you."
"You're handling me." His voice came down half a step, which was worse. "You've been doing it since I walked up. One sentence in and you’re already trying to corner me.”
He paused, glaring at her.
"You really have changed. The Daniel I remember wouldn’t have done that. But the Daniel I knew wouldn’t have left his team mates high and dry as soon as it was convenient either."
That made Joy swallow hard.
"Cole, I'm sorry about the relay."
She got it out fast, and it was true, and she watched it land wrong before she'd finished saying it. Too smooth. Too ready. A thing that had been waiting in her mouth.
"Something happened," Cole said. Imitating her, "I'm not going to be on the roster. I'm okay. I'll explain when I can."
Joy stopped.
"That's it. That's the whole text. I've got it memorized, which is a thing I'd rather not be telling you." He wasn't gesturing anymore. "I called you eleven times that night. I was outside your building at one in the afternoon the next day, and your RA told me you'd gone to the registrar, and you never came back to me. Not once. Fourteen texts since, and every single one of them says read."
"I know."
"So say the thing. Whatever it was you were going to explain when you could. I've been standing here waiting for it since Thursday of the first week."
And Joy, who had put nine hundred dollars in her pocket on Tuesday by knowing what a man in a card room needed to hear, stood in a plaza and had nothing.
"I put it in the chat," she said.
"What?"
"Day three. As soon as I could get my head around what'd just happened to me." She heard her own voice come out flat and level, which was interesting, because she had not decided on flat and level. "All of you. The whole thread."
"I know. I was on it."
"Then you know what came back." She hadn't meant to keep going. She kept going. "Absolutely nothing." The plaza went past them on both sides. "I'm not on the roster, so there's no roster to be on with them. I figured out real quick what I meant to you guys after that."
"Yeah," Cole said. "That'd be me."
Joy looked at him, her mouth opening in surprise.
"After you went silent, I got a pretty good idea what happened, so I told them."
"Told them what?" Joy asked, a cold weight growing in the pit of her stomach.
And Cole, who had been building to this since the second Marco said her name, put his hands out like a man laying cards on a table.
"You know what I heard about? Kid at one of those schools back east. Four hundred guy. Middle of the pack, nothing, never going to be anything." He was trying for conversational, which he was bad at. "Finds himself a genie. One wish, and he wishes to be the fastest runner on his team."
The fountain went on doing what fountains do.
"Genie made him a her," Cole said. "Conference title that spring. Full ride. And everybody agreed it was a real shame, what happened to that guy."
"Oh my God…” Joy said, not believing what she was hearing. She knew Cole was high strung but this was new.
"You've heard it. Don't stand there and tell me you haven't heard it."
Joy had heard it. Everybody had heard it, the same way everybody had heard about the guy who sold seven years to a crossroads to pass the bar, and about the sorority and the black dog. Weird stuff happened, that was hardly news.
She stood there and watched the rest of it arrive. He wasn't going to say it out loud, not in a plaza with Marco standing there. He didn't have to. He'd put it on the table and now he was looking at her across the top of it.
There was nothing to correct. That was the problem. A story like that had no pieces in it to take apart, and it fit everything he knew as well as the truth did, and it was far better company than a friend who wouldn't pick up a phone.
"I waited two days," Cole said. "Two days, and all I had was I'm okay. So yeah. I told them what I figured out."
"An hour after the roster went out," Marco said, to the concrete.
"Forty minutes after the roster went out. Say it right."
Marco shifted the bag on his shoulder and looked at Joy, and when he spoke it was in the voice he used for splits, flat and without any pity in it at all.
"They'd have come around, Joy. If you'd said anything. They're not..." He stopped and started again. "It's not what you think it is."
"And so you just let this asshole turn the whole team against me?”
Marco opened his mouth and then didn't use it.
"And I didn't see yours for three days," he said instead. "Mine. The one you sent me. I was in Bakersfield with my phone in a glovebox, and by the time I got it you'd stopped answering everybody, so I figured I'd just come find you."
"It took you eleven days to come find me."
"Keiko told me where you'd be," Marco said, miserably, "Yeah. It took me eleven days. Sorry."
It was the first time anybody had apologized to her for anything since the registrar, and it wasn't even an apology, and Joy discovered that she had no idea what to do with it, so she put it somewhere and turned back to Cole.
"You should know what it cost," Cole said. "Since none of it seems to have cost you anything. Bergen pulled the four-by-one off the spring plan. Wednesday. He says he'll revisit it in January."
Joy knew exactly what Bergen meant when he said he'd revisit something in January. Everybody on the team knew.
"Fine for Marco, he's got the open four. Fine for Tyler, he's got three years. I've got the open two, and if I'm not under twenty-one flat by Stanford I'm having a conversation about my money."
"That's not what Bergen said," Marco said quietly.
"You know damn well it's what he meant!"
"It's really not what he..."
"It's what he meant, Marco!"
Marco let it go. Joy watched him let it go, and could tell from the way he did it that he'd been letting it go for about a week.
"So what's this," Cole said. "Sprints. In the plaza."
"I'm training."
"For."
"Keiko thinks I should walk on with the women's team in the spring."
The silence had a different quality to it.
"Oh?" Cole said. His voice made the autumn chill sting a little harder.
"Cole..." Marco started.
"No, shut up Marco. I want to hear it again." He didn't even look at Marco. He was looking at her the way a man looks at a card that came off the deck exactly the way he'd called it. "Say it again."
"I'm going to try out in the spring."
"Huh," Cole said.
That was all. One syllable, and eleven days of a story he'd been telling eight guys got up and walked around in it, and she watched him decide he'd been right the whole time.
"Almost like you had this all figured out."
"That's not..."
"And you get all of it back." He laughed, once, with nothing in it. "New singlet, new coach, new everybody, and I stand at the fence in April and watch you go past me like the last two years were a phase you were going through."
And she could have explained.
The whole thing was right there: the registrar, the stack with the binder clip, the box she'd initialed, the hundred thousand dollars by June. Ninety seconds and he'd have had to sit down under it.
But ninety seconds would also have blown his story in half in front of Marco, and she would have had to say the other part out loud, which was that she'd read one thumbs up and closed a door on eight people and put him behind it with the rest of them. Every tool she had left had made it worse. What she had instead was a hot thing arriving under her sternum that she hadn't felt since the river card at Ray's.
The smile got there first.
"Cole," she said. "I'm faster now."
Behind her, the bike rack made a small sound as Marco put a hand on it.
Cole's face went completely still.
"What?"
That one had gotten out on its own. She knew it had. There was a version of the next five seconds where she said sorry, that came out wrong and meant it, and she could see that version very clearly, and she could see that it was the right one.
She said it again anyway. Slower, this time, and on purpose, so she could hear it land.
"I said I'm faster now. So it's not taking somebody's money." She shrugged. "It's earning it."
Later she'd try to work out where it went from a conversation to a thing with terms, and she wouldn't be able to, because there hadn't been a moment. It proceeded the way water proceeds downhill, and everyone involved helped.
Cole put his bag on the ground, which for Cole was the equivalent of rolling up sleeves.
"Okay," he said. "I can't do anything about what you did."
"Cole, that's not what..."
"I can't." He said it again, and it came out lower than the first time, and he was looking somewhere past her shoulder. "That's... it's done. I can't do anything about that."
Marco looked at the ground.
"But I can prove I'm the better runner," Cole said. "So let's go. Right here. Forty meters."
"No," Joy said.
"No?"
"Not forty meters."
"Because you'd lose."
"Because forty meters is a coin flip and you know it." Which was true, and which was not the reason. "You want a real race, we do a real race."
That one, she'd known she was going to say. She'd known since the lizards.
"Fine." Cole spread his hands. "Hundred. Track. Sunday."
"Not the track."
"Why not the track..."
"Because I pick the course."
The plaza went quiet in a small radius. Marco, who had been about to say something for the third time, closed his mouth.
"You pick the course," Cole repeated.
"You picked the distance. Forty meters, right now, no warm-up, on your terms." She shrugged, which was a lie; there was nothing casual anywhere in her. "So I pick the course. You can say no. It's fine. We can leave it as a thing you said in a plaza."
She watched it land. She watched him look at Marco and get nothing back, and she watched him do the arithmetic on what saying no cost and how many people would have heard about it by Monday, and she felt slightly sick and enormously awake.
"What course," he said.
"I'll have it tomorrow."
"On campus."
"Yup."
"Nothing stupid. Nothing where you've got... I don't know. Trapdoors."
"No trapdoors."
"And it's a real race. Start line, finish line, somebody says go."
"Somebody says go," Joy agreed.
Cole nodded, slowly, twice.
"And when I win," he said, "you stay off the women's team."
Daniel would have backed off.
Joy could feel exactly where that instinct should have been, the way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue. It wasn't there. What was there was the hum, and it had gotten louder the second the number went up.
"Oh, want to make it interesting huh?” She said, grinning,
“Jesus Cole, you’re talking about losing her another scholarship.” Marco protested.
"Exactly." Cole didn't take his eyes off her. "She knows what it is too. That's what makes it a bet."
Which was, Joy thought, a genuinely good line. She wished she'd had it.
She stood in the plaza with a hundred thousand dollars on one side of it and something she couldn't name on the other, and there was a version of this where she said that's insane, let's play for a hundred bucks and everybody went home, and she could see that version very clearly, and it was gray and flat and about as appealing as a form.
He couldn't enforce it. Obviously. Nobody at Renner's tryouts was going to check a list of footraces, and if she lost she could walk on in April anyway, and Cole could do nothing about it but stand at the fence.
And she would be exactly the girl in his story. Somebody who took the part she liked and walked off from the rest.
A bet you'd welsh on wasn't a bet. It was a lie with a start time.
She was, she noticed, already deciding what to ask for.
"Then it goes both ways," she said.
"Sure. Name it."
"When I win, you tell the team you lied."
Cole blinked. "I what?"
"The genie. The kid back east. Whatever else you've put on it in eleven days." She kept her voice level, which took something. "When I win, you go back to them, in a room, all of them, out loud, and you tell them there was no wish. There was no deal. Nobody chose anything, it happened to me, and I'd give it back tomorrow. And then you never tell it again."
There was a pause of about the right length.
"That's it?" Cole said. "That's what you want?"
"That's what I want."
"You could've asked for money."
"I don’t want your money."
Marco made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
Cole stood there a second longer, and something moved behind his face that Joy didn't get all the way to. It went too fast, and it didn't look like anger, and it wasn't until she was halfway up the Hill that she got near a word for it. The word she got to was relief, which made no sense at all.
"Sunday," he said. "Four o'clock."
"I’ll be looking forward to it."
He picked up his bag and went. He didn't shake on it, because they were not people who shook on things, and also because his hands were still doing something.
Marco stayed.
He waited until Cole had crossed the plaza and gone down the steps, then came over and stood beside her, looking at the bike rack she'd been using as a start line, bag still on his shoulder.
"So," he said.
"Yeah."
"You know he ran ten-four in June."
"Yeah, I was there."
"And you're what, now."
She thought about it honestly. "I don't know. Forty-meter reps off a bike rack. It feels like eleven."
Marco stopped looking at the bike rack.
"Feels like eleven."
"Maybe a hair under."
"Nobody runs eleven off a feeling, Joy." He turned all the way around to face her. "You understand what that is, if it's real? That's not a walk-on. That's Renner picking up a phone."
"Okay."
"No, I'm serious, there are maybe four girls in this conference who..." He stopped himself. "I'm timing you. Properly. Blocks and a laser, not a bike rack."
"Okay."
"And even if it's real, it's nowhere near Cole." He said it without any change in tone, which somehow made it worse. "Over a hundred meters that's six, seven meters. That's from here to that planter. You could be the fastest woman in this building and he'd still be finished before you got there."
"I know."
He looked at her. Properly, the way he'd looked at the sprints, and she got the feeling, not for the first time with Marco, that he was several steps into something and had been for a while.
"So it's not a hundred," he said.
"No."
"You already know what it is."
"Oh my yes." Joy said with a grin.
Marco nodded and shifted the bag.
"You did twelve sprints," he said. "Full efforts. Then you stood here and had all that for ten minutes. You're still not breathing hard."
Joy opened her mouth and found she had nothing to put in it.
"Yeah," Marco said. "Okay."
He went. Halfway across the plaza he turned and walked backwards a few steps, which was a thing he did, and called out.
"Hey. Whatever course you pick..."
"Yeah?"
"Make sure I can watch."
She got back to the room at 7:15 and stopped in the doorway.
Nate was where he'd been. The lamp was on. He looked up, took in whatever was on her face, and closed the laptop halfway, which she had learned meant he was giving her the option.
"How was the run?"
"Good. Really good, actually."
"Great."
"I have to beat Cole in a footrace on Sunday or I can never try out for the women's team."
Nate closed the laptop the rest of the way.
"Okay," he said. "Sit down and start at the beginning."