Chapter 12 : The Reveal

Chapter 12: Chapter 12 : The Reveal

Dana Whitfield’s office was on the third floor of Carrington Hall, right on top of Sterling’s. The door was open. Her desk was buried in brochure proofs, page after page of students smiling under palm trees.

She read Hendricks’s log, then the one-page statement Ethan had typed up, and sat back.

"It’s all accurate. I’ll sign it." She picked up a pen, then stopped. "But let’s be clear, Mr. Cole. Discipline belongs to Student Affairs, not to me. My name on this won’t stop Richard from sending you to the Conduct Board."

"I know," Ethan said. "I’m not asking it to make this go away. I just need it to make this wait."

Dana’s pen hovered over the page. Then she signed and dated it.

"Wait until when?"

"Until the President sees it."

"President Whitman’s in Washington. He flies back Monday." She handed it back, and the corner of her mouth twitched. "And Monday’s Labor Day. That’s three days you didn’t have to fight for. You picked your timing well."

Ethan let that one pass. She knew about the November vote. He knew she knew. Neither of them brought it up.

He tucked the statement into his folder, got as far as the door, and turned around. "There’s a new video going up on the site tomorrow at nine. You might want to catch the last thirty seconds."

"Is it going to get me in trouble?"

"It might get you a better brochure."

Dana glanced at the pile of proofs on her desk and laughed out loud.

The rest took one afternoon.

Page sixty-one of the Code of Conduct, Section 11.4. While an appeal was pending, interim measures and administrative directives were stayed, and only the Vice President for Student Affairs could lift the stay, in writing. That office had been empty since June. With the seat vacant, appeals went to the Office of the President.

When Ethan handed his appeal across the front desk of the President’s office, Sterling’s deadline was half an hour away. The assistant behind the desk was somewhere around sixty. She flipped to the last page, a photocopy of page sixty-one with one line highlighted in yellow, studied it for a moment, and stamped the top corner of the appeal. RECEIVED. 4:31 PM.

"Fourteen years at this desk," she said. "You’re the second student I’ve seen make it to page sixty-one."

"Who was the first?"

"She types on the second floor now."

At 5:01, the video was still up. No phone call. No email. Nobody at the door.

Bingo night drew over a hundred people, three times Student Government’s usual crowd. Ten large pizzas were gone in eleven minutes. Kevin had the mic, and every time someone yelled bingo, he yelled "Pelican Pizza!" By the end the whole room was yelling it with him. His suspension notice was still in the manila envelope. As of 4:31 that afternoon, it was just a piece of paper.

Ethan barely slept that night, and as soon as it was light, Noah dragged the laptop onto the floor between their beds.

The AIM window lit up at nine on the dot.

Maya: It’s up.

The video ran ninety seconds, and it didn’t give anybody room to breathe.

Black screen. A record scratch. Freeze-frame on Hendricks, Sunday afternoon, hat pulled low, thumbs hooked in his belt, not one muscle moving in his face. White text popped up underneath.

This is Officer Dale Hendricks. SCU Campus Police, 19 years. Parking tickets written: approx. 40,000. Games refereed: 1.

Noah had watched Ethan build every frame of it, and he laughed anyway.

The frame unfroze right as Hendricks spoke. "One hand. Flat. It comes off, you’re out." Every word punched the camera in tighter, boom, boom, boom, until his mustache filled the whole screen.

Title card. Free to enter. Refereed by SCU Campus Police. Brought to you by Pelican Pizza. Underneath, in smaller type: (Yes. An actual cop.)

Then, dead center, in huge letters: 2 HOURS 15 MINUTES LATER. One deep drum hit underneath.

There was Mac, drenched in sweat, legs twisted around each other. A little box popped up in the top right corner with a heart monitor in it, labeled MAC’S BLADDER. Every spike came with a beep, and the beeps kept getting faster.

The frat guy in the front row tipped his water bottle over the grass. The clip stuttered, rewound, and played again, three times in a row, the last one in slow motion with a church choir holding one long Ahhhhhh.

When Mac squeezed his eyes shut and started chanting about the Sahara, a subtitle bar slid in under him. [TRANSLATION: GOD, PLEASE.]

The second Maya said forty yards, the picture went black-and-white. The camera whipped from Maya to Mac and back again while a spaghetti-western whistle played, and two big letters slammed onto the screen. K.O.

Noah punched the carpet.

Then the jump. Mac let go and launched, two hundred-plus pounds hanging in the air, and the picture stopped right there. White text: MALCOLM "MAC" HAYES. DIGNITY: INTACT.

The frame unfroze, and five hundred people split to let him through. A yellow line drew itself across the screen, the kind they paint on the field in football broadcasts, all the way to the blue porta-potty forty yards out, with play-by-play popping up beside it. THE 20! THE 10! TOUCHDOWN!!!

Then every sound effect cut out at once. The camera drifted back to the stage. Just Maya, one hand still flat on the pelican’s belly. Hendricks’s arm went up. Maya took her hand away, shook it out, and grinned. No music. Only five hundred people roaring. White text: WINNER: MAYA BENNETT. 2 HOURS 15 MINUTES. SHE NEVER MOVED HER HAND AN INCH.

The screen went black. White text came up one line at a time.

One year ago this week, Hurricane Katrina flooded Gentilly Heights High School in New Orleans. Its library still hasn’t reopened.

Starting today, every time someone says WHOWON at Pelican Pizza, owner Sal Moretti gives $1 to help rebuild it.

Every dollar goes straight to the school. We never touch a cent. Receipts posted every Monday.

The last card was the address. WhoWonTheGrand.com.

The description box next to the player held two lines. Donated so far: $0. Details at WhoWonTheGrand.com.

The last card hadn’t even faded out before Noah had a finger parked on F5. Every time he hit it, the number jumped. Ethan leaned back against the bed frame and left the laptop alone. He just watched the back of Noah’s head, and watched the number go from three digits to four, and then to five. A hundred and twenty thousand in the first hour.

Noah sat cross-legged on the floor and read out the number every time he hit refresh. By the time his voice gave out, he just turned the screen toward Ethan and lay down flat on the carpet.

Number one on Digg. Number one on YouTube’s Most Viewed Today, with the first video still hanging on at number three.

Four thousand comments in an hour. Somebody turned Mac’s bladder monitor into a GIF captioned me during finals.

Somebody cut the yellow-line touchdown out on its own, laid a football broadcast theme over it, and reuploaded it. That one passed a hundred thousand too.

An account with no profile picture left a single line. I graduated from Gentilly Heights. Thank you. Three hundred replies piled up underneath.

On a student message board at a school across town, a thread titled WHY DOES OUR CAMPUS COP ONLY WRITE TICKETS ran to eleven pages.

Mac called from the line at In-N-Out. "Bro. Dude just made me sign his burger wrapper. Made me write TOUCHDOWN on it. I’m an athlete now, feel me?"

Every hour or so, Noah updated the number in the description by hand, going off whatever count Sal’s store called in. $37. $112. $486. Past fifteen hundred by evening. The little fundraising page for the Gentilly Heights library had said $113 that morning. Before dark it was over nine thousand.

The line outside Pelican Pizza ran to the corner. Two blocks down, half the tables in the Domino’s sat empty.

When Sal called, the background was wall-to-wall voices. "Notebook’s full! Two pages!" he shouted. "I gotta go find another one!"

He paused, and his voice dropped. "Old lady came in a little while ago. Didn’t order a thing. Walked up to the counter, said WHOWON, and stuck a twenty in the jar. Said her daughter used to live in New Orleans."

Neither of them said anything for a second.

"That thousand bucks." Sal cleared his throat. "Come get it today. You passed five hundred thousand before lunch. I was watching."

The next call was a number Ethan didn’t recognize.

"Kid." It was Vince. Behind him, a dozen ringtones were going off at once, probably the demo phones on the wall. "That thing you were pitching. The first five seconds. Still open?"

"It is. Five hundred."

"Five hundred?! Tuesday you said a hundred!"

Ethan didn’t explain, and he didn’t come down. He just held the phone and waited.

Five seconds.

"...Fine. Five hundred," Vince said. "I’ll come to you. Which dorm?"

Before the afternoon was out, the Subway manager and the sports bar owner had called too. Ethan wrote both of them down in his notebook and told them he’d get back to them next week.

Kevin’s call came last. His voice had climbed half an octave and was shaking on top of it. "Dude. KTLA. Channel 5. They called the university’s communications office. They want to come shoot on Monday. The cop who refereed, the pizza guy." He stopped. "And the organizer. Dude, that’s me. My name’s on the sheet."

?

Carrington Hall was empty on a Saturday. One office on the second floor had its lights on.

Sterling watched the ninety seconds twice. The copy of the appeal sat on his desk, sent down from the President’s office just before five on Friday, the stamp plain as day in the corner. On the last page, the yellow highlighter. Section 11.4. He had revised that clause himself, five years ago.

The message light on his phone was blinking. The head of university communications, very polite. KTLA wanted to shoot Monday morning. They were thinking of it as a feel-good piece. Did Student Affairs have anything it wanted to flag?

Sterling picked up the receiver. Then he put it back down.

Touching that video now meant pulling a Katrina fundraiser off the internet during the anniversary week. And under a clause he’d written himself, he no longer had the authority to do it.

He unscrewed the cap of a fountain pen, screwed it back on, and set it down beside the other two, cap pointing the same way.

"A feel-good piece," he said to the empty office.

?

That same night, four hundred miles north, on Sand Hill Road.

In a glass-walled investment firm, one man was still at his desk on the whole floor. Twenty-four, junior investment manager, youngest on the floor and the last to leave. He was finishing a model due Monday when a forwarded email popped up from a coworker. The subject line was four words. watch the ending lol

He only meant to give it a few seconds.

He watched it three times. The first time for the show. The second time he paused on the sponsor card. The third time he read the description box top to bottom. A donation total. A web address. He opened the site and clicked through to the guessing page, and found the box that asked for an email address.

One sponsor. A conversion you could actually count. A mailing list of ten thousand people. And an ending the school couldn’t say a word against.

He picked up the desk phone and dialed his assistant at home.

"First thing Monday, look up a YouTube channel for me. Who’s behind it, where he goes to school, what he eats for breakfast. All of it."

His assistant was still half asleep and asked why.

He glanced back at the line frozen on his screen. Donated so far.

"Because nobody gets lucky three times in ninety seconds," said Julian Vance.