Not Brice at MPA. Johnny Manziel got arrested there. Brice would 100% be a guest of the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office at their fancy new prison complex.
Also, can I just say that a dude from fucking Indiana attempting to shit on any state in the Union is ironic? But we know why Brice is so critical of the second Blackest state in the country.
Tom need to divorce Liz before the stories drop that she and Brice fucking.
Someone need to beat Brice’s ass.
Connie going find herself a Latino in Bolivia on a mission?
Season 8, Episode 2
The house was too quiet for six in the morning, which meant James was about to fix that.
Brice stood in the middle of the living room, bouncing the baby against his chest. James wasn’t crying yet. He was doing that thing he did right before crying, that slow build, the bottom lip going, the eyes getting glassy and accusatory, like he was personally offended by the existence of morning as if every single fucking day of his life thus far hadn’t began with a morning.
“Hey,” Brice said quietly. “Hey, we’re good. We’re good, buddy.”
James considered this. Then he scrunched his face.
“No, no, no—“ Brice shifted him to the other shoulder, patting his back in slow, even circles. James settled into a low, grinding whimper against his shoulder.
“Yeah,” Brice exhaled. “I know.”
Through the kitchen doorway, he could hear the soft clink of bottles, the hiss of the faucet. The measured, unhurried sound of someone who had done this a thousand times and would do it a thousand more and felt no particular way about it.
The house itself still didn’t entirely feel like his. That was the honest truth of it. The old house off campus had felt like his. This place felt like a movie set. Four bedrooms on a cul-de-sac in West Lafayette, the kind of street where people put American flags on their porches and waved at each other from their driveways. But there was a yard. And a room for Miss Lafitte. And another room that was James’s, done up in a soft blue that Liz had insisted on.
At least it wasn’t navy.
James lifted his head off Brice’s shoulder, looked at him with unfocused eyes and then dropped his head back down.
“There it is,” Brice murmured. He kept the circles going on his back. "I sometimes don’t feel like getting up either, my guy."
He walked the length of the living room, turned at the window, walked back. Outside was still gray and empty. A neighbor’s sprinklers were already running. The world was doing its quiet suburban thing.
“He take the pacifier?”
Miss Lafitte appeared in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel, looking at him the way she always looked at him when she was assessing the situation without making it obvious she was assessing the situation.
Brice reached for the pacifier on the side table without breaking his rhythm and eased it toward James. James took it immediately, his whole body softening.
“Bottles are ready,” she said. “Let him rest a little more if he’ll take it. Don’t force the bottle if he’s not asking.”
Brice nodded.
She looked at him another beat. “You get some sleep?”
“A little."
She went back to the kitchen without another word. James was going slack against him, the pacifier working its slow magic. Brice stood still now, one hand flat on the baby’s back, feeling the rise and fall. He was getting heavier.
The doorbell rang.
James twitched. Brice tensed.
Miss Lafitte appeared again before he could even turn around, already reaching for the baby.
“Go,” she said simply.
Brice transferred James carefully, and she took him without ceremony, the pacifier still in, the baby barely registering the swap. Brice watched for one second longer than he needed to, then turned for the door.
He pulled it open.
Ilyssa stood on his front porch, a tablet tucked under one arm and a coffee in her free hand that she had clearly already made significant progress on. Behind her, out on the driveway and spilling onto the street, the camera crew was unloading gear from an SUV.
“Morning,” she said, looking him over once.
“I wasn’t expecting you this early.”
“It’s called being on time,” she walked past him into the house without waiting to be invited.
"It’s called being on time," Brice playfully mocked her.
She ignored it and set her coffee on the kitchen counter, nodded a greeting toward Miss Lafitte, who nodded back without looking up from James. Ilyssa pulled up something on her tablet. “How’s he doing?”
“Tough night.”
“The baby or you?”
“Both.”
She almost smiled. “Okay. Here’s where we are.”
She turned the tablet so he could see the day’s itinerary, color-coded and time-blocked in a way that made Brice feel briefly tired. “Crew sets up in the living room. We do an hour, maybe ninety. Primary focus is the Manning Academy. Your experience, what it meant to you to be there, what you hope to pass on to younger quarterbacks, you know the drill. We want it to feel organic, not like a press junket.”
“It won’t feel organic if you tell me what to say.”
“I’m not telling you what to say. I’m telling you what the theme is,” she scrolled down. "Speaking of which, I think we should put something on the schedule for next month in South Bend. Do something similar to MPA but local. A camp, a clinic, a 7-on-7 tournament. Something where you’re giving back to your hometown."
"You want me to be around more kids?" Brice scoffed, "I think I’ve had my fill."
"It reads well. We’ll even do it without filming."
Brice let out a short laugh. “Ilyssa, come on. South Bend already loves me."
“They do,” she agreed. “That’s not who I’m worried about.”
“I’m just saying we should be putting energy into changing the national perception. That’s where the problem is. South Bend’s already in my corner. I’m their guy.”
“You are,” she picked up her coffee. “And that’s exactly why it matters. Because when the scouts come through. When the GMs start making their calls. They don’t start national. They start local. They talk to your high school coaches, they talk to your teachers, they talk to people at the church you went to as a kid.”
She paused a beat. “They talk to the guy who sells you weed.”
The kitchen was quiet. Miss Lafitte kept her eyes on James.
Brice held Ilyssa’s gaze for a moment. Then one corner of his mouth moved.
“So what you’re saying,” he said, “is you want me to go home and remind everyone why they love me. Sounds easy enough.”
“I want you to go home and make sure that every single person who has ever known your name has nothing but good things to say when someone comes asking.” She picked up her tablet again. “The national perception is downstream of the local one. Always has been.”
Brice looked at the ceiling for a second, then back at her. He nodded, slow and deliberate.
“Alright,” he said. “You’re the expert."
…
The room was small in the way that made you aware of every inch of it.
Nia sat on one side of a rectangular table that was bolted to the floor. She knew it was bolted to the floor because she had tested it her first minute in the room, pressing her palms flat against the edge and pushing slightly, just to have something to do with her hands. It didn’t move. Nothing in here moved. That was sort of the point.
The chair across from her scraped back and the woman sat down, setting a clipboard on the table between them with a quiet, deliberate sound. She looked like someone’s aunt. Her hair was pulled back, mostly gray at the temples, and she had reading glasses pushed up on her head that she hadn’t used yet.
“Nia,” she said, not like a question. Just saying it. Getting comfortable with it.
Nia looked at the table.
“My name is Dr. Ellison. I’m a forensic psychologist. Do you know what that means?”
Nia thought about it. “You figure out if I’m crazy.”
“I assess your mental state,” Dr. Ellison didn’t bite. “Whether you understand the charges against you, whether you can participate meaningfully in your own defense. Things like that.”
She clicked her pen once. “Has anyone explained this process to you? Your attorney?”
“She explained some of it.”
“Okay. Good.” Dr. Ellison wrote something. Nia watched the pen move without being able to read it upside down. “I want you to know that this isn’t a deposition. I’m not here to build a case for or against you. What you say to me stays between us, with some exceptions that I’ll explain if they come up. The goal today is just to talk. Get a sense of where you are.”
She looked up. “Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“How are you sleeping?”
The question landed flat and simple and Nia almost laughed at it.
“Not great,” she said.
“Tell me about that.”
She picked at the edge of her thumbnail. The jumpsuit was stiff at the collar and she had rolled the sleeves up because the alternative was sitting there looking like a kid in her father’s shirt, which felt worse somehow. “I wake up a lot. Early. Like four, five in the morning. And then I can’t go back to sleep so I just lay there.”
“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”
“Read, I guess.”
She had the book back in her cell. A worn paperback she’d picked up from the library just because that’s what the other girls were doing and because following words across a page was the one thing she could do at four in the morning that required just enough of her brain to keep the rest of it quiet.
“What are you reading?”
Nia told her. Dr. Ellison nodded like it was useful information and wrote something else.
“You turned eighteen last month,” Dr. Ellison said.
“Yeah.”
“How was that?”
Nia looked at the wall. There was a small window near the ceiling, the kind that existed to prove a window could exist there and nothing more. The light through it was flat and white.
“It wasn’t really anything,” she said. “It was just a day.”
Dr. Ellison let the silence sit for a moment. “You’ve been sober for about a month now. Is that right?”
Nia nodded.
“That’s significant. How has that been for you?”
The honest answer to that question was something she didn’t have the right words for yet. She had tried, in the quiet of four in the morning with the thriller face-down on her chest, to find the right words for it. The closest she had gotten was this: it was like being handed a pair of glasses you didn’t know you needed and the first thing you saw clearly was a car wreck.
“Hard,” she said.
“Can you say more about that?”
She looked at her hands. “When I was using, things were—“
She stopped. Started again. “I wasn’t thinking about things the same way. I wasn’t really thinking at all, I guess. And now I’m just.”
She exhaled slowly through her nose. “Here. And everything is very—“
She pressed her lips together. “It’s very clear.”
“Is that a bad thing? The clarity?”
“I don’t know,” she said, which was honest. She genuinely did not know. Some mornings the clarity felt like the first real breath she had taken in years. Most mornings it felt like standing in a room with all the lights on and nowhere to look that didn’t hurt.
Dr. Ellison wrote something. “Do you understand the charges that have been filed against you?”
The question shifted the air in the room. It brought her back to that courtroom. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me, in your own words, what you understand them to be?”
She had rehearsed this with her attorney. She knew the words. She said them now, flat and careful, like she was reading off a card. Murder in the first degree. Felony kidnapping.
Dr. Ellison listened without interrupting. When Nia finished, she nodded. “Do you understand what it means that the state is pursuing this as an adult case?”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean to you?”
Nia was quiet for a moment.
“It means they think I knew what I was doing,” she said.
Dr. Ellison looked at her steadily. “And what do you think?”
It was the kind of question that had no safe answer and they both probably knew it. Nia looked at the table.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that I don’t know how to answer that.”
“That’s okay,” Dr. Ellison said, and she didn’t write anything that time. “You don’t have to answer everything today. That’s not what today is for.”
Nia looked up.
“Can I ask you something?” Nia said.
“Of course.”
“How many of these do we do? Sessions, I mean.”
“That depends on a few factors. Typically several, over the course of a few weeks. We’ll determine a schedule with your attorney.”
Nia nodded. She looked down at her hands again.
“Okay,” she said.
Dr. Ellison glanced at the clock on the wall behind Nia. “We have a few more minutes today if you want to keep talking. Or we can wrap up here. There’s no pressure either way.”
There was no pressure either way.
“We can keep talking,” Nia said.
Dr. Ellison settled back slightly in her chair, the clipboard resting easy in her lap. “Tell me about before all of this,” she said. “What did a normal day look like for you?”
Nia opened her mouth and then closed it. She tried to locate a normal day in her memory and found that the edges of things had gotten soft and unreliable, whole months blurred together. But she tried. She picked a day. She started talking.
Season 8, Episode 3
The hardest thing about LaPenna’s office was that there was nothing to look at. No television, no window worth anything, just a bookshelf and a small succulent on the corner of the desk that had somehow survived. Brice had thought about that plant more than once.
“So,” LaPenna said. He had his notepad but he wasn’t writing in it. He rarely wrote anything down these days. “Manning Academy. You’re getting quite acquainted with the state of Louisiana."
"Unfortunately," Brice scoffed, "Thankfully, the Saints got that kid from Louisville so I don’t have to worry about that next year."
“How was it?”
"It was cool," Brice shrugged.
LaPenna nodded. “And the documentary crew? How was that?”
"Ilyssa keeps them on a tight leash so it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be,” he shifted slightly in the chair. "But when they’re there, they’re there, you know? It’s a lot of cameras. A lot of having to be on, you know?"
“What does that feel like? Being on?”
“Normal by now,” he shrugged, “I mean, I’ve been doing it for a while."
LaPenna nodded, slow, the way he did when he was filing something away for later. “And James? How’s he adjusting to the new house?”
“He’s a baby, Doc. He doesn’t know what a house is.”
“I don’t know about that,” LaPenna allowed. “How are you adjusting to the new house?”
Brice uncrossed his ankle and set both feet flat on the floor. “It’s good. Miss Lafitte is there, which helps. With my schedule, you know, it’s pretty busy so having her around helps."
"Not really an off-season, is there?" LaPenna asked.
"No but busy is good. Keeps me focused."
LaPenna let that sit in the room for a moment. He had a way of doing that, of just letting things sit there. It was mildly infuriating for Brice.
“Being busy is good,” LaPenna repeated, not agreeing, not disagreeing. Just holding it up to the light.
“It is,” Brice offered. "Structure helps me, I’m sure you know that by now."
“I do.” LaPenna set the notepad down on the side table. “I want to ask you something and I want you to actually think about it before you answer.”
“When do I not think about it?”
LaPenna looked at him.
“Okay,” Brice said. “Go ahead.”
“When, in the last several months, have you had time to actually grieve Skylar?”
The room was very still. Brice’s jaw shifted slightly. He looked at the floor, then back up. “I mean, we’ve talked about her.”
“We’ve talked about the investigation,” LaPenna said. “We’ve talked about the custody case. We’ve talked about the logistics of raising James. We’ve talked around Skylar quite a bit. But grieving her—“
He paused. “That’s different.”
Brice didn’t say anything.
“Think about the timeline,” LaPenna continued. “She passes. Immediately after, you’re under investigation. James is missing. You’re in crisis mode, survival mode, every resource you have is going toward clearing your name and finding your son. Then the custody fight with her parents. Then it’s over and suddenly you’re a full-time father and you’ve got the documentary and the brand deals and the Manning Academy and fall camp is six weeks out.”
He let that land. “When has there been a single moment in there where you’ve actually stopped and felt what happened to her?”
Brice’s hand found his knee. He pressed his palm against it.
“I feel it,” he said quietly.
“When?”
He didn’t answer right away. He was thinking about four in the morning. Standing in the living room with James against his shoulder, the house dark and quiet and too big, and sometimes in those moments something would move through him that he couldn’t name and didn’t want to, and he would just keep doing the circles on James’s back until it passed.
“At night,” he said. “Sometimes.”
LaPenna nodded. “What does it feel like?”
Brice exhaled through his nose. He looked at the wall.
“Unfinished,” he said finally. “Like there’s a conversation I didn’t get to have. Like…I wasn’t good to her. Towards the end. Shit, maybe the entire time. I wasn’t what she needed and I knew it and I did it anyway and then she was just…gone. And I didn’t get to fix any of it.”
“That’s grief,” LaPenna said. “That specific feeling. That’s exactly what we haven’t touched.”
“I know.”
“But?”
“But I can’t—“ he sat forward, elbows on his knees. “Doc, you know what happened to me after Jimmy. You know what that did. I was completely hollowed out for months. I can’t do that again. I literally cannot afford to do that again. I’ve got a shot at being the number one pick. If I fall apart right now—“
“I’m not asking you to fall apart.”
“That’s what happens, though. That’s what happens when I actually…when I go there. I go there and I lose myself in it. That’s what got us in this fucking mess in the first place with Skylar."
“That happened when you were nineteen and you were trying to do it alone,” LaPenna said. “That’s not what I’m proposing now.”
Brice looked at him.
“You don’t have to excavate everything at once,” LaPenna said. “That’s not what this has to be. But you do need a container for it. Somewhere it can exist without taking over. You told me the grief group was beneficial. When you went."
Brice was quiet.
“They still meet on Tuesdays?” he asked.
“They do.”
He was quiet for another moment.
“Alright,” Brice said.
LaPenna didn’t make a thing of it. He just nodded, once, and reached for his notepad.
…
The email had been sitting in her inbox since 7:42 that morning.
Sophie knew the exact time because she had been staring at her phone when the notification came through, sitting in second period with her backpack on her lap and Mrs. Pellegrino writing something on the board about the Missouri Compromise that Sophie had immediately stopped processing. She had looked at the subject line and then she had locked her phone and put it face-down on her desk and stared at the board for the remaining thirty-four minutes of class without absorbing a single word.
She sat at the kitchen island now with her phone in front of her, screen-down. It wasn’t that she was scared. She wasn’t scared. She just wanted—
She didn’t finish the thought. She flipped the phone over, looked at the lock screen, flipped it back.
The front door opened. She heard her mom’s heels first, that particular rhythm on the hardwood, and then the sound of her setting her bag on the bench by the door.
“Hey, bug,” Liz said, coming around the corner and reading the kitchen in one sweep the way she always did. “How was school?”
“Fine,” Sophie shrugged.
Tom came in from the garage. "How was work?"
"Good," Liz nodded as she perused the cabinet for an opened wine bottle, before settling on an unopened Malbec, "Busy but good."
Tom’s eyes eventually landed on Sophie whose body language gave it away immediately.
“What’d I miss?” he said.
“Nothing,” Sophie said, too quickly. Then she picked up her phone, took a breath, and looked at both of them. “The PSAT scores came out today.”
The kitchen got a little quieter.
“And?” Liz said.
“I haven’t opened it yet.”
Tom pulled out the stool on the other side of her and sat down. Liz came around to the island and stood close enough that Sophie could smell her perfume.
“Okay,” Sophie said, mostly to herself.
She opened the email. Found the link. The page loaded slowly enough that she had one full second of just staring at the loading screen before the number appeared.
She read it twice.
“What is it?” Tom asked.
She turned the phone around. Liz leaned in first, and Sophie watched her mother’s face do the thing where it went still and then opened up in a way she was clearly trying to keep measured.
“Sophie,” Liz said. “That’s a really good score.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s a very good score.” Liz took the phone gently from her hand, studying it.
Sophie held back a smile.
Tom was looking at her, not the phone. “Great job, hon."
"Thanks, Dad," she managed before letting out a deep breath.
“If you can hold in that range on your SATs, you know that puts Notre Dame in play," Liz reminded her.
Sophie nodded.
"You should start thinking about putting together a list of schools that you want to visit," Tom suggested, "We can start looking at them this summer. Make a trip out of it."
Sophie looked up at him. “Really?”
“Of course. It’s an important decision but doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun."
"Okay," Sophie was unable to hide her smile now, "I’ll think about it.
She was off the stool and took the stairs two at a time, rushing to her room, undoubtedly to tell her friends. The kitchen settled into the quiet she left behind. Liz refilled her wine glass and stood at the counter, looking at the space where Sophie had been sitting.
“Empty nest,” she said, not turning around.
Tom had moved to the refrigerator and was pulling out a plate to warm up for Liz. “What?”
"You really can’t wait to get her out the house, huh?"
"I just want her to make her own decision," Tom set the plate down on the counter.
Liz was quiet for a moment. "Notre Dame is a good school.”
“I know it is.”
“It’s a great school. And she could thrive there."
"And she could thrive somewhere else, too. We thought Brice not going was the end of the world and look how that turned out."
"You’re really taking a victory lap on that one?" Liz raised an eyebrow.
"It could have been worse," Tom shrugged, "I just think Sophie should keep an open mind and not just go to Notre Dame because we went there or some sort of legacy she needs to carry on."
"She does have a legacy to carry on," Liz crossed her arms. "There’s nothing wrong with that. I went to Notre Dame. My parents went. Their parents. That’s not some sort of legacy. That is a legacy."
"I’m not shitting on the legacy," Tom held his hands up, “I just don’t want that to be the reason she ends up somewhere because it was easier than figuring out who she is. She’s got a mind. Let her use it.”
“She already has a mind of her own. Going to Notre Dame wouldn’t change that. A legacy doesn’t have to come at the expense of being independent. It didn’t for me."
"If you say so," Tom lightly offered, "I just want her to be happy."
"And I don’t?"
Tom paused for a moment. "I’m sure you do, hon."
The quiet once again settled over the kitchen. Upstairs, faintly, they could hear Sophie’s voice talking to her friends on the phone.
"You want me to heat this up?" Tom held the plate he had taken out of the refrigerator up.
…
Connie had noticed her the first week, the way you notice something that doesn’t quite fit the pattern of everything else. Most of the kids came in clusters, trailing behind parents or older siblings, filling the plastic chairs with noise and elbowing. This one came alone. Slipped in through the side entrance right before they started, took the same chair in the back row, the one closest to the wall, like she might need to leave quickly.
She couldn’t have been older than nine. Maybe eight.
Connie had watched her through the whole session from the front of the room, trying not to make it obvious. The girl didn’t participate in the call-and-response portions. She didn’t look up when Pastor Herrera asked for volunteers. She just sat there, very still, watching with those dark, serious eyes that seemed to be taking everything in and giving nothing back.
After the session broke, the other kids pushed toward the food tables. The girl stayed in her chair until the crowd thinned, then got up and got in line at the back of it, patient and quiet.
Connie had started helping with the serving line. She spooned rice, smiled, said the same few words in her broken Spanish that she’d been practicing.
Buen provecho.
Hay más si quieres.
The kids didn’t care much either way. They took their plates and found spots at the tables and the noise in the courtyard swelled into something warm and chaotic. The girl took her plate and went to the far end of the last table and sat alone.
Connie watched her for a moment, then handed the serving spoon to another one of the missionaries. "Can you cover for me?"
She grabbed her phone and walked over, stopping a few feet away so she wasn’t looming.
“¿Puedo sentarme?” she asked, gesturing to the bench across from her.
The girl looked up. She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She looked back at her plate.
Connie sat down.
For a moment she just sat there, which felt awkward, and then she smiled at the girl even though the girl wasn’t looking at her. The courtyard was loud around them. Someone knocked over a cup and there was a brief eruption of laughter from three tables over.
“¿Cómo te llamas?” Connie asked.
The girl was quiet for a beat. Then, without looking up from her food: “Valentina.”
“Valentina,” Connie repeated. She pointed to herself. “Connie.”
Valentina looked at her for exactly one second, then went back to eating.
Connie pulled up the translation app on her phone, typed quickly, and turned the screen toward her.
Do you live close by?
Valentina read it. She nodded once.
Do you come with your mom and dad?
She shook her head.
By yourself?
A small shrug.
Connie looked at the screen for a moment, then back at the girl. She typed one more thing.
Do you like coming here?
Valentina looked at the screen. She seemed to consider it the way a much older person would, like the question had layers she was sorting through. Then she made a small movement with her shoulders that wasn’t quite a shrug and wasn’t quite a nod. Something in between.
Connie nodded like that was a complete answer. To her, it was.
She tried a couple more things. Asked if she had a favorite part of the lesson, typed it out carefully and held the phone across the table. Valentina read it and blinked and looked at her plate. Connie asked if she had brothers or sisters, and Valentina said something quiet in Spanish that Connie only caught half of and when she tried to follow up the conversation slipped through the gap between her Spanish and Valentina’s patience for being asked things.
She put the phone down.
They sat there for a minute. Not uncomfortably, exactly. Just two people at the same table who didn’t share enough words to fill the space between them.
Valentina finished the last of her rice. She set her fork down and picked up her backpack from the bench beside her, settling it onto her shoulders.
Connie stood up when she did.
“Wait,” she said. She held up one finger and pointed toward the food tables. “Un momento.”
She went back to the serving table and found one of the foil to-go containers they kept stacked at the end for families who couldn’t stay, packing it tight with rice, beans, chicken and a piece of bread. When she came back, Valentina was still standing there, which she hadn’t entirely expected.
Connie held the container out to her with both hands.
Valentina looked at it. Then she looked at Connie. She took the container.
“Gracias,” she said quietly.
“De nada,” Connie said.
…
Brice found his shirt on the floor by the foot of the bed. He pulled it over his head and reached for his sweats.
“You don’t have to go right now,” Serena said from behind him. “Miss Aibileen can handle one night.”
Brice pulled his jeans up and looked back at her over his shoulder.
“Who?”
“Miss Aibileen.“ she stopped and looked at his face. “You’ve never read The Help?”
“Is that a book or something?”
“It’s a—“ she pressed her lips together. “It doesn’t matter. The point is that the nanny can watch him.”
"I don’t want him to get used to that,” Brice said, sitting on the edge of the bed to put his sneakers on. “She’s there to help, not to—"
“Not to what?"
He slipped into his Nike slides. “I still have to be there and shit."
Serena sat up fully as Brice stood up, finding his phone by the nightstand. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. She went still underneath it.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he said.
“You keep saying that.”
“That’s because I mean it,” he pulled back and looked at her. “I haven’t forgotten about the trip.”
She tried to flatten her smile but couldn’t quite get there. “I heard Bali is fucking amazing."
"I guess we’ll find out."
She rolled her eyes but she was already standing, slipping into some sweats herself as she walked him out.
The hallway of the dorm was quiet, that particular late-evening quiet of a building full of people pretending to study. Serena walked close to him, hands in her pockets.
They came through the door into the common area and Brice heard them before he fully saw them. He recognized the register of it immediately.
Four of them spread across the couches and a couple of chairs near the vending machines. Darius. Miles. The freshman tight end whose name Brice kept forgetting. And Jo’Ziah, leaned back in the corner chair with his arms spread wide across the back of it, laughing at something Darius had just said.
Brice gave them the nod.
There was a half-second of silence and then it erupted. The whistle came first, long and low, from Miles. Darius started clapping slowly. The freshman looked confused about whether he was allowed to participate and then decided he was.
“That’s my quarterback right there,” Darius said, grinning.
“You’re a fucking clown,” Brice tried to hide his laughter.
Serena wasn’t as successful. Until her gaze landed on Jo’Ziah. Jo’Ziah didn’t move at first. The laugh he’d been in the middle of tapered off, not abruptly, just unfinished.
“Y’all got too much time on your hands,” Brice shook his head, "That’s why half of you guys are on probation."
"We can’t all be like you, Prince Charming,” Darius shot back. “We see what’s going on.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Brice waved him off as they walked out of the building.
