Forty thousand

POV: Jaxon

The tweet was still at forty thousand when I woke up.

By six it was forty three.

I knew because I had checked it at five fifty eight, which meant I had been awake before six, which meant I had slept approximately four hours total and spent the rest of the night in the particular restless half consciousness of someone whose brain refused to finish a thought and refused to stop having it.

My publicist had texted three times.

His name was Derek Paulson and he was twenty six years old and my father had hired him sophomore year without consulting me and presented it as a practical decision, which it probably was, and as a gift, which it was not. Derek was good at his job. He was professional and efficient and he genuinely seemed to understand the landscape he was navigating on my behalf. I did not hold any of this against him. I held it against my father, where it belonged.

The three texts were timestamped at eleven forty seven pm, two fourteen am, and five thirty am respectively, which told me Derek had also not slept, which I felt briefly bad about before I opened them.

The first said: *Saw the tweet. Do not respond to anything yet. I am monitoring.*

The second said: *It is gaining traction. Sports blogs are picking it up. Still do not respond. I am drafting something.*

The third said: *We need to talk this morning. Your father has already called me.*

Of course he had.

My phone rang at six oh seven. I looked at the screen. I answered because not answering at six oh seven after a night like this one created a conversation I had even less patience for than the actual call.

"I saw the tweet," my father said.

"Good morning."

"This is the kind of thing that gets ahead of you if you do not address it immediately."

"It is a tweet about a football play."

"It is a tweet with forty thousand engagements that has been picked up by three sports blogs overnight and is framing a moment between you and a receiver in a way that invites a specific kind of speculation." A pause that did its usual work. "Derek is handling the response. I want you to approve it before noon."

"Okay."

"And Jaxon." His voice adjusted by one degree, the particular shift that meant he was about to say something he had decided mattered more than the rest of it. "We should talk about how you use the next few weeks to redirect the narrative. Visibility. The right visibility."

The girl. He meant the girl from the lunch. The one with the family connected to the Harmon University board. The one he wanted me to be seen with at public events for coverage purposes.

I said: "I have practice."

"After practice."

"I will call you after practice."

I hung up. I lay on my back and looked at my ceiling for thirty seconds. Then I got up, put on my running shoes, and went outside.

I ran alone.

I had a route I used for thinking runs, which was different from my training route and different again from the route I used when I just needed my body occupied. The thinking run went north from my apartment building, through the east side of campus where the buildings were older and quieter, past the library that did not open until eight and the small courtyard behind the music building where I had sat by myself more times than I had told anyone.

I ran.

I thought about six oh seven am and the conversation made entirely of things not directly said. I thought about Derek's three texts and the draft he was preparing, the careful language of a statement designed to say nothing while appearing to address something.

I thought about the end zone.

That was the thing I kept arriving back at no matter where the thinking started. The moment the ball was in Callum's hands and I was already moving. I had not decided to move. My body had made the choice before my brain had finished processing that the play was over, that the touchdown had happened, that the appropriate response was to celebrate with the nearest teammate in whatever way felt natural.

I had run through forty thousand people to get to him first.

My body knew something I had not finished figuring out.

I ran three miles and arrived at the edge of the east campus athletic fields and stopped with my hands on my knees and my breathing working to level out and my brain no closer to comfortable than it had been when I left my apartment.

The stadium was visible from here. Empty now. The particular quality of a stadium without a crowd in it, all that space designed to hold something and not holding it yet.

I stood there for a minute.

Then I ran back.

---

The locker room had a texture to it.

I walked in at seven thirty and felt it immediately, the particular quality of a room full of people who had all seen the same thing and were performing not having seen it, which was a significantly louder performance than simply not having seen it.

The legacy bloc was doing the loudest version of normal I had observed in three years of reading this room. Briggs, who had been carefully avoiding Callum's general direction since our conversation earlier in the week, was holding court about the game with the specific energy of someone filling a space that would otherwise be occupied by something he did not want to talk about. Corrado was laughing too easily at things that did not quite merit it.

The other players were doing the carefully unbothered version, which was its own kind of performance but a quieter one. Ortega, the junior safety who said almost nothing in any context, was taping his wrists and watching the room with the particular attention of someone who noticed things and filed them without announcing the filing.

Callum had not arrived yet.

I went to my locker. I changed. I kept my peripheral vision on the door without making it obvious I was keeping my peripheral vision on the door.

He came in at seven forty two.

I watched him walk through the door and take in the room in the space of about two seconds, the micro calibration of someone reading temperature before they committed to anything. His hood was up. He clocked the legacy bloc first, then the rest of the room, then made some internal decision I could not see the specifics of and pulled his hood down.

He moved to his locker.

He did not look at me.

I crossed the locker room.

I stopped at his locker and kept my voice low enough that it was between us and not the room. He was pulling his practice jersey over his head and he finished doing that before he looked at me, which was its own kind of statement about his current position on giving me his immediate attention.

He looked at me.

I said: "It is not going to be a problem."

Something moved through his expression that was quick and not entirely readable. Then he said: "I know it is not. Because it is nothing."

The word landed in a specific way.

Nothing.

I said: "Right."

I walked back to my locker.

I did not know why right had come out sounding the way it came out sounding. I was aware that it had not sounded the way I intended it to sound, which was neutral and agreeable and closing the conversation cleanly. It had sounded like something else. Something with an edge on it that I had not put there deliberately and could not take back.

Nothing.

I finished getting dressed. I went through my pre practice routine with the kind of focused mechanical attention I brought to it when my brain needed to be doing something with its hands.

Practice ran. We were good. We were, if anything, better than yesterday because yesterday had shaken something loose in the second half that the team could feel even if they could not articulate it. Callum and I moved the way we had moved in the second half of the game, which was with the particular fluency of two people who had stopped thinking about the space between them and started using it.

It was, objectively, not nothing.

I did not say that.

---

After practice I showered and checked my phone and found the email from Derek waiting for me with the particular subject line of a man who had been up since before five dealing with a situation he had not created.

The email contained the drafted statement. It was good. It was professionally constructed, warm without being effusive, addressing the tweet without amplifying it, the kind of language that redirected without denying. I read it twice.

At the bottom of the email was a forwarded message from my father.

'Also consider whether Reyes is the receiver you want featured prominently going forward. Optics.'

I read it once.

I put my phone face down on the bench.

I sat in the locker room with the email open on my phone face down on the bench beside me and I thought about a lot of things. I thought about the second half of yesterday's game and what it had produced and what it would have looked like without Callum on that field. I thought about six oh seven am and the word optics delivered by a man who had opinions about my grandfather's watch. I thought about nothing, the specific way it had come out of Callum's mouth and landed in a specific place in my chest.

I thought about forty three thousand people who had looked at a photograph and seen something.

I picked my phone back up.

I looked at the statement Derek had drafted.

I looked at my father's forwarded note below it.

I put the phone back down.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, in the particular long history of doing what my father said because not doing it required more than I had previously been willing to spend, I did not immediately reach for the reply button.

I sat there.

I let the draft sit unapproved.

I did not know yet what I was going to do instead.

I knew I was not going to do that.