Possessive Coach

“It’s definitely not okay. Who the hell would do that? It’s, like, harassment or something.”

“It’s okay,” I say again. “I’ll handle it, okay?” I give her a smile, even though I don’t feel like it.

“I’ll kick a bitch’s ass for you, you know that, right?”

“I know.”

She sighs and shakes her head as I leave the apartment and head down the rickety wooden steps. I push out through the door and find a black truck idling at the curb. The window rolls down and David leans over toward me. “Chloe?” he calls out.

“Hey,” I say, walking over to him.

He frowns and gestures. “Get in.”

I open the door and climb into his truck. When I close the door again, he pulls out into traffic. “You okay?” he asks. “What happened?”

“Let’s get to campus and I’ll show you.”

He looks at me for a second then nods. “I’m guessing it’s Erik.”

“Probably.”

His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I was afraid he’d do something, but I thought getting Hardy involved would scare him off.”

“I don’t think it did. Actually, I think it made it worse.”

David pulls onto a side street that skirts around campus. He parks near the athletics building in a designated spot and we get out. I lead him up over the curb and onto the sidewalk. He hurries to catch up as I walk fast, my strides matching the pace of my hammering, anxious heart.

I’m afraid of what I’m about to find. I keep picturing the pages flowing around like an ocean, and everyone just laughing at them like they’re the funniest thing in the world. It’s a windy afternoon, so the papers have probably been blowing all over the place by now. If I’m lucky, they’ve been scattered all across LA.

We come around a pair of large shade trees and head onto the wide central walkway. David catches up and walks silently beside me. I spot the first cluster of pages, just plain white with the black photocopied picture right in the middle. I hurry over to them and manage to snag one before it blows away. More of the papers are spread out all over the place, and I spot a couple other students picking them up, frowning at them, then throwing them back on the ground.

I wish they’d throw them in the trash.

“What the fuck?” he says, staring at the thing.

“My roommate told me about it,” I say. “She brought it over right before I called you. I was off this morning, so I didn’t see it until now.”

“Motherfucker.” He crumples the paper and is about to throw it but restrains himself. He shoves it into his pocket instead. “Come on.”

“Wait,” I say, but he’s already moving. He starts collecting the pages as fast as he can. When they begin to blow, he chases them down, stomps on them, and grabs them.

I join in. At first, it’s horrible. But soon it’s almost fun. We chase papers across the sidewalk, across the walkway, into bushes and into clusters of students. I grab one from a young kid’s hand and he almost says something to me, but a look from David silences him.

“Right there!” David says, pointing as one of the papers floats in the air. I jump up and snag it with a laugh. He grins and rips it into pieces before shoving it into his pocket.

We find more papers rolling around in strange corners of the campus. I laugh as David bowls into a group of girls talking on their phones and tears the papers from their hands, telling them it’s university business. He makes a face at a professor who frowns at him, and keeps going, grabbing more papers from the ground.

By the time we have a pretty thick stack of papers, I’m laughing. I know it’s stupid, I should be upset, but I’m laughing. The way he goes after the paper like it’s the only thing in the world seems so funny to me. He shoves a bundle of them into a nearby trashcan then grabs a bunch more that got stuck in a bush.

“What about those?” I ask him, pointing. Three of them are stuck up in the branches of a tree.

“I’ll get them,” he says.

“Wait, I was kidding.”

But he climbs the tree without hesitating. I laugh as he shakes a branch to get them loose, and jumps to snatch them as they fall like leaves.

Soon, there are no more left, or at least not any we can find on campus. There might be some cluster of them inside a building, or maybe hidden under a bush, but they’re no longer blowing around like tumbleweeds at least.

“Well,” David says as we stroll along together, the crowds of student thinned out as a new class block starts. “That was fun.”

“Fun for you,” I say, grinning at him. “You’re not the one on the paper.”