Chapter 4 : The Pitch

Chapter 4: Chapter 4 : The Pitch

The first thing Ethan did was turn his head and say to Noah, "Kill it."

"What? Now?" Noah stared at him. "There’s a cop. Isn’t this exactly the—"

"Kill it. Trust me, footage of me getting chewed out isn’t worth the battery."

Noah muttered something, but he pressed the button. The red light went out.

A cop shutting down the game was, on tape, just the end of the game. That wasn’t the shot Ethan wanted. He wanted the one after it, and he couldn’t afford to spend the battery on a conversation that might not go his way.

He hopped down off the stage and stood in front of Hendricks, voice low enough that it stayed between the two of them.

"Officer, nobody here has paid a cent. No entry fee, no bets, nobody in the crowd has money on who wins. It’s a free contest with a prize. Same thing as the halftime half-court shot at a basketball game. Nobody ever arrests the guy who sinks it."

Hendricks’s eyebrow went up a fraction. The kid knew the difference between gambling and a prize contest in his first sentence. That was more than he’d expected.

"Student Affairs called me down here," Hendricks said. "Still needs a permit. This is university property."

"It has one." Ethan didn’t look back. "Kevin."

Kevin froze for half a second, then caught on. He grabbed his clipboard off the edge of the stage, jogged over, and flipped to the Welcome Week activity sheet. "It’s a Student Government welcome game, sir. It’s right—" His pen raced across a line. "—here. Sponsor’s covering the prize. I’m the one running it."

The ink was still wet. Hendricks looked at the line, then at the yellow orientation polo. He wasn’t stupid. But there was a name on the sheet and somebody responsible for it, and that made it more than just his problem.

Ethan was looking at the line too. The name on the sheet was Kevin Morales. From here on, the credit was Kevin’s. And if anything went wrong, so was the blame. All of this is yours had never been a free gift.

That was the second Ethan had been waiting for.

"One more thing, Officer," he said. "That whole fight before? It happened because nobody up there could call it fair. A thousand dollars needs somebody neutral to say whose hand came off. Would you be our official judge?"

Hendricks looked at him like a kid who’d put in one quarter and was trying to get two Cokes out of the machine.

Ethan didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and raised one hand toward the crowd. Just raised it. Didn’t say a word.

Three hundred people figured it out on their own.

"Of-fi-cer! Of-fi-cer! Of-fi-cer!"

Hendricks let out a long breath. Nineteen years at this school. He’d been booed by students more times than he could count. This was the first time they’d ever chanted for him.

"Hold on." He stepped off to the side, unclipped his phone from his belt, and dialed.

?

The Office of Student Affairs was on the second floor of Carrington Hall. It was move-in weekend, all hands on deck, so the lights were on even on a Sunday afternoon.

At the front desk, Brenda Miller picked up, listened for a few seconds, and hit speaker. "Dean, it’s Hendricks."

Associate Dean Richard Sterling came out of the inner office. Fifty, tie on, even on a Sunday, shirt pressed without a single wrinkle. An hour ago a parent had called to complain about gambling on the quad, and he was the one who’d sent Hendricks.

"Is it handled?"

Hendricks’s voice came through a little tinny. He laid it out. Free to enter, nobody betting. On the Welcome Week sheet, Kevin Morales responsible. A sponsor covering the prize. Four hundred-odd kids on the lawn, all behaving.

"Morales?" Sterling frowned.

"Kevin Morales. Sophomore, Student Government." Brenda pushed up her glasses. "The one who color-codes his event forms."

"Kevin Morales doesn’t sneeze without filing a form," Sterling said. "Who’s the sponsor?"

A pause on the line. "There’s a freshman up there. Name’s Cole. Honestly, the kid’s running the whole show. Morales just signed for it."

Sterling picked up a pen from the desk, wrote COLE on a yellow legal pad, and underlined it twice.

"Shut it down. Move-in day, half the parents in the state on campus, and there’s cash sitting on the lawn—"

"How many people did you say, Dale?"

A woman was standing in the doorway with a box of welcome folders on her hip. Early forties, blazer over running shoes. Dana Whitfield, Vice President for Enrollment, hired away from an ad agency in Atlanta two years ago. Behind her back, Sterling called her the saleswoman.

"Four hundred, ma’am. And growing."

"And what are they doing?"

Another pause. "Honestly, ma’am? Nineteen years here, I’ve never seen freshmen this happy on move-in day."

Dana set the box down on the desk and turned to Sterling. "Richard, you know what those parents are going to see in the rearview mirror when they drive off today? Their kid on the quad, screaming and laughing with four hundred new friends. That’s our brochure. I couldn’t buy that if I tried."

"It’s a cash game run by an eighteen-year-old."

"It’s a registered Student Government event with a campus police officer as referee." Dana leaned toward the phone. "Dale, stay with it. If anything gets out of hand, you shut it down. Otherwise, let them play."

"Copy that."

The line clicked off. Dana picked up her box and left, humming down the hallway.

Sterling stood at the desk a long time, tapping his pen on the two lines under the name.

"Brenda," he said. "Find out who this Cole is."

?

Hendricks clipped the phone back on his belt and walked back to the front of the stage. He looked at Ethan, then up at the grinning pelican.

"...Fine. I’ll call it."

Ethan was already turning around. "Noah. Roll."

The red light came on. Hendricks stepped up to the stage, faced the lens, and repeated the rules in the same voice he’d used to write parking tickets for nineteen years. One hand. Flat. It comes off, you’re out. I make the call. The crowd roared. Up on stage, all five of them stood a little straighter.

One minute. "Cut."

The red light went out. The cop who’d come to shut the game down was now the referee standing behind it. Cut right, that was going to be one of the best turns in the whole video.

Hendricks stepped back to the edge of the stage, hooked his thumbs in his belt, and planted himself there. The cheering settled into a low hum of talk. Up on stage, the five of them adjusted their hands, and the real waiting began.

Noah lasted about thirty seconds before he couldn’t stand it.

"Dude. We’re just standing here? What if somebody drops right now?"

"They won’t. Look at them. Nobody’s hurting yet."

"How do you know?"

Ethan took the Handycam from him and flipped the screen around so he could see the top-right corner. One bar. Still blinking.

"About nine minutes of battery," he said. "This thing could go another two hours."

Noah’s face fell. "So we’re screwed."

"We’re not screwed. We’re on a budget."

Ethan had once worked with an old documentary director who’d been shooting for thirty years. The man taught him the whole thing in four words: edit in the camera. Back when it was film, every second cost money, so the good directors had the movie cut in their heads before they ever started rolling.

You didn’t shoot everything and sort it out later. You only shot what was going in the final cut. Then hard drives got cheap, and everybody forgot.

He handed the camera back.

"From now on, it stays off. It goes on when I say, off when I say. Every second that red light’s on, we’re burning money."

"It takes like five seconds to boot. How are you supposed to know when something’s going to happen?"

Ethan looked at the four people on stage who were still talking, and the one who wasn’t.

"I’ll know."

Noah stared at him. "That is the single most annoying answer you could’ve given."

"I’ve got worse ones. Saving them for later."

?

For the next thirty minutes nothing happened, and everything did.

The sun slid west. A few people got bored and wandered off, but for every one who left, two more showed up. Word had made it around the dorms. Somebody hauled over folding chairs. A frat guy held up a bedsheet with TEAM MAC written on it in marker. Kevin brought a case of water and passed bottles up one at a time.

Tyler started shaking out his arm. Dylan and Sierra had another fight and made up again. Maya stood exactly the way she’d stood at the countdown. Mac finished his third bottle of water and started using the empty as a microphone, doing play-by-play of the contest for the crowd.

The arms were starting to send their bills. Dylan cracked first. His palm crept down the plywood an inch at a time, and somebody in the crowd yelled, "He moved!" Hendricks squinted at it. "Didn’t come off. Still in." After that, everybody got it. Sierra’s hand slid down next, then Mac’s, all the way to the belly, half his weight leaning into the pelican. Inside half an hour, four hands had ended up at the exact height Maya had picked at the countdown.

Only Tyler’s was still up on the chest. He was too proud to bring it down, which was why he kept shaking out his arm and rolling his shoulder.

Ethan wasn’t watching the camera. He was watching the people: whose shoulders were starting to sag, who was trading looks with somebody in the crowd, whose mouth kept running. An hour and ten minutes in, Mac, the one with the busiest mouth, made his move.

At first it just looked like another bit. He raised the empty bottle like a mic and cleared his throat at the crowd.

"Y’all, I gotta say somethin’. Y’all know we got a real athlete up here today?" He aimed the bottle at Tyler. "Six years of baseball! Pitcher! Got scouts and everything!"

Ethan’s head snapped around.

Six years. Pitcher. Scouts. Word for word, the notes from an hour ago.

"Noah. Roll. Now."

"Nothing’s happening."

"It’s about to. I’m psychic, remember?"

Noah grumbled and powered up. By the time the screen came on, Mac already had the crowd going.

"Ty-ler! Ty-ler! Ty-ler!"

Tyler looked confused at first. An hour ago he’d picked this guy to drop first. But three hundred people were chanting his name, and he hadn’t felt that since his last high school game. His chest got there before his brain did. He started grinning, raised his free hand to them.

"Who wants to see what a real pitcher’s arm looks like?!" Mac yelled.

The crowd went off. A guy with a buzz cut in the second row was screaming loudest. Ethan knew the face. He’d been at the baseball club recruiting table on the way in, glove clipped to his belt, pushing flyers on freshmen. Earlier he and Tyler had flipped each other off across the crowd like old friends.

Buzz Cut pulled the glove off his belt and put it on. His other hand came out of his backpack with a baseball.

"Brodie!" Tyler laughed. "Don’t you dare!"

Brodie absolutely dared. The ball floated up onto the stage in a lazy arc and Tyler snatched it with his free hand, clean. Another cheer.

"Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!"

Tyler glanced at his hand on the pelican, then at Hendricks. He wasn’t stupid. Free hand, do whatever you want. So: arm only. No hips, no stride. Flip it back one-handed and done.

That’s exactly what he did. A flick of the wrist, and the ball floated back in a soft little arc into Brodie’s glove.

The crowd was quiet for half a second. Then the boos started.

"That’s it?!" Brodie yelled. "Six years for that?!"

Mac shook his head, wounded on Tyler’s behalf. "Man, my grandma throws a slipper harder than that. Scouts drove all that way to see that?"

Laughter and boos tangled together. Brodie lobbed the ball back up. Tyler caught it. The tips of his ears had gone red.

He was a pitcher. A guy on the mound could lose. He could not be called soft.

"Fine," he said under his breath. "Watch this."

This time he meant it. His left hand stayed pressed flat on the pelican’s chest, and he had it all worked out. Turn the upper body, keep the hand planted, throw from the hips, don’t stride. Like warming up in the bullpen.

He coiled his hips back. Closed his shoulder. The crowd went silent.

Then he threw.

But when a pitcher really lets one go, it’s never just the arm. The hips drag the shoulder, and the shoulder drags the arm. And the instant the hips turn, the other shoulder pulls back on its own and yanks that elbow in tight to the body to whip the throwing arm through. He’d done it for six years. Tens of thousands of times. He’d never once had to think about it.

He didn’t think about it today, either.

The ball hissed over the crowd and slammed into Brodie’s glove with a crack they heard in the back row. A strike.

The lawn went berserk.

Tyler was still frozen in his follow-through, body turned halfway around, left elbow tucked hard against his ribs.

Left elbow.

The triumph froze on his face. Slowly, he looked down at the left hand pinned against his side, then at the grinning pelican two feet away. There was nothing between them but air.

Hendricks hooked his thumbs in his belt and nodded slowly. His mustache was twitching. "That’s off, son. You’re out."

The noise on the lawn doubled.

Tyler’s eyes went down the line. Mac had one hand planted flat on the pelican’s chest and the empty bottle in the other, wearing a very peaceful smile.

"Yeah, I can tell, man," Mac said. "You’ve got that athlete thing going on."

Somebody in the front row laughed so hard he went down on his knees in the grass.

Tyler opened his mouth, then shut it. His face went from triumph to blank, from blank to a slow, dawning understanding. Only now did he get what that fold an hour ago had actually been.

He shook his head all the way off the stage, swore once under his breath, and then cracked up at himself anyway. At the top of the steps he turned and pointed at Mac. "You wait."

Mac saluted him with the bottle.

"Cut," Ethan said.

The red light died. Noah lowered the camera slowly, still replaying it in his head. The fold an hour ago. Mac’s questions. Ethan telling him to roll out of nowhere. It all lined up. Ethan hadn’t guessed. He’d seen the ending an hour before it happened.

"How did you know?"

"He told us." Ethan tipped his head at the stage. "An hour ago. You were standing right there. You said he turned the stove off."

At the other end of the line, Maya hadn’t moved. But Ethan saw the corner of her mouth lift, just barely, and settle back. She’d seen it too.