Page 100 of Final Drive

Reese

Ipick the boathouse, since it’s the only building on this campus where I know where everything is.

Beckett drives me. He doesn’t talk for the first ten minutes. When he finally does it’s to say, “You want me in the room?”

“No.”

“Okay.” He pulls into the gravel lot. “I’ll be on the dock. If you want me, put your hand on the back of your neck and I’ll come in and knock something over.”

“Beckett.”

“I’m being serious. I’ve got a whole thing planned. It involves a bucket.”

He’s still smiling when I get out, and he’s still smiling when I look back from the door, and I know exactly how much of that is real.

Jenna Kowalski is already inside, standing under the racked eights with her hands in her coat pockets, looking up at the hulls. She’s shorter than she seems when she’s ambushing you.

“I’ve never been in one of these when nobody’s shouting,” she says.

“That’s most of the day.”

“Hm.” She turns around. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“You gave me a choice for the first time. I took it.”

She has the decency not to pretend she doesn’t know what I mean. She sets a recorder on the bench between us, a real one, not a phone, and she puts my sheet of questions beside it, folded to the crease I made.

“Ground rules, since you set them and I want them on tape,” she says. “On the record. Your location. Questions in advance. Nothing about the other members of the crew. Am I missing anything?”

“You can’t record the boat bay after we’re done. There’s equipment in here that costs more than the building.”

“Fine.” She sits. “Then let’s do the easy part first, and I’ll warn you before I go off the sheet.”

“Then why send it to me at all?”

“So you’d know I wasn’t planning to ambush you twice.” She taps the sheet with two fingers. “Everything on there I’ll ask exactly as written. What comes after depends on how you answer. I can’t script that.”

We do twenty minutes of the easy part. How I ended up coxing. Why a hundred and twenty-five pounds of person gets to give orders to eight men who could bench me. What a coxswain actually does, which nobody outside the sport has ever understood, and which she asks about with more interest than I expect.

Then she turns the sheet face down on the bench and doesn’t look at it again.

“Off the sheet,” she says. “Late last week I received an envelope. Inside it was your state designation registration listing you as Undifferentiated, and a two-page unsigned summary explaining exactly what that document does to your eligibility.”

“Who sent it?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“Then we’re not going to have a productive afternoon.”

“I said I wouldn’t tell you who sent it.” Kowalski folds her hands. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t tell you anything about him. It came by courier. The return address is a law office in Atlanta that doesn’t represent whoever paid them. The registration isn’t a records-office printout, either. It’s a filing copy. Somebody kept it.”

I sit with that.

“You said him.”

“I did.” She lets me have that one on purpose.

“How long have you had it?”