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Piper
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Practice at Marrs was a lot different than Kennedy Young. For one, back at KYU, the top dogs on the football team ran parts of the practice themselves and it ended up being more of separate groups trying to outdo each other instead of the unit at Marrs. The assistant coaches kept everyone in check. And there weren’t as many bystanders milling around the field down below. I’d been told that I was supposed to stay on the bleachers with the football girlfriends and that was our designated zone.
I didn’t know many of the girls, and Kassie had to grab something from Cleo’s office, so I was all by myself on the seats.
I missed June.
She was nowhere to be seen. Gone. Biting my lip, I slipped out my phone.
Piper Fontaine: Are you okay?
I’d have to drop cookies off for her later or something. She missed our RA recap meeting for the conference when we arrived back on campus and now this.
Kassie hurried down from the door and took the seat next to me. "Welcome to the club, Piper."
I couldn’t help but smile back. Her social media accounts really had nothing on her, Kassie was everything I wanted to be, bursting with confidence but none of the cockiness that Adam had. She stretched out over the empty seat, propping up her legs on the bar.
I snuck a look back to the field and there Adam was, sprinting across the field with his gear on. Number forty-five. I would’ve recognized that body anywhere.
Kassie took out her sketchbook. "We were all real impressed by how you roped him for the conference."
"Um…" I hesitated. "I don’t know. He kind of roped himself in at the end."
"I adore him but you might be giving him an awful lot of credit there."
Slowly, I shook my head. "The last day, he actually helped me out with…a lot of things." I thought about the Clemenza, totaled. "Adam didn’t need to but he was still ready when the time came."
"For real?"
Why am I defending him?
If anything, did the good outweigh the bad? I could list a handful of things that Adam did that ticked me off during the weekend and each of those things could legitimately get us in trouble. But I couldn’t help how my thoughts wandered back to demolishing the car together. And him, waking up super early to outshine Xavier with the rental car. Or the two of us…in the shower…
"I think he gets…excited," I said carefully, "but I think he just needs to be told when he goes too far."
She flipped to another page in her sketchbook. "Can I draw you?"
"What?"
"Draw you? Sketch you?" She held up her notebook. "I use this time for practice."
"Um…yeah, no problem."
With that, Kassie leaned back in her seat and started getting to work. Her eyes flickered back up and back down to the paper as she sketched out things on her paper. I wasn’t the artistic type. Numbers were my best friends since I’d started taking the coding classes in middle school and I watched her pencil fly across the paper in fascination.
"Are you ready for the rodeo?" she asked, distracted.
"I don’t know what to expect," I admitted and glanced back at Adam, jogging across the field with a football in his hands. Was Adam going to the rodeo?
"The guys have to go, it’s a requirement," she explained like she’d read my mind. "But Zariah told me it’s a big volunteer thing for the RAs. You have to do like…six hours or something?"
I nodded. "I’ll get Adam in on it."
"On what?"
"The volunteering."
