To Be Honest

by Maggie Ann Martin

  “I’ll take it,” he said, pulling the papers in front of him. He stared down at them for a few seconds, and then his eyes slid back to mine.

  “I promise I won’t be watching you! I have stuff to read for the story Grace and I are working on.”

  He cracked each of his knuckles and twirled the pencil around in his fingers for a few moments before he started working. I watched him briefly before keeping my promise and pulling out my laptop.

  The public records that I’d requested for the history of the athletic department’s salaries had come in, and they’d been sitting hot in my in-box until I had a chance to look at them. It was the first time that this story really felt real and like it could potentially have a big impact on my community. The exhilaration from that realization made me a little giddy, if I was being honest with myself.

  First, I pulled up the information for the head baseball coach, Coach Triad, since he seemed to be the sketchiest of the bunch. For the most part, his salary made a gradual upturn year over year (considering he was one of the oldest teachers at Springdale High School) until the year 2000. That year, there was a $10,000 bonus attached to his salary, and that was then added to his base salary moving forward.

  I quickly went to the Spartan Spotlight’s archives online, which someone had thankfully converted to online files in the last few years. I scrolled through 2000’s newspapers, looking for something that would indicate a spike.

  All I could find in the sports section was that there was a whole slew of kids who were going to play for Indiana Tech on scholarship. No one stood out; there was no scandal that would have pushed him to ask for a pay raise to stay—nothing.

  I was about to comb through the opinions sections from the 2000s for any insight into what the school’s climate might have been like during that time, but George had finished his quiz in tandem with our pizza showing up.

  “I vote we both take a break and enjoy this blasphemous pizza together,” I said.

  “Deal,” he said, already grabbing a slice.

  The pepperoni tasted glorious, and I couldn’t even tell that it had been cross-contaminated by pineapple. I don’t think either of us realized how hungry we were until we both dug in.

  “Do you have any fun plans for the weekend?” he asked, popping a single pineapple piece into his mouth.

  “Ashley’s finally coming home,” I said. “It’s been three weeks. I’m excited for the house to feel back to normal again.”

  “I’m glad I’m the oldest,” he said. “I don’t know if I could handle my parents’ undivided attention. I guess my sister, Hannah, will have to deal with that when the time comes.”

  “Hannah can join my left-behind-siblings support group. Thankfully, she has another year to prepare herself,” I said. “How about you? Anything exciting going on?”

  “We have some extra practice for a jazz band competition coming up. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said.

  A single pepperoni slid off the top of my pizza and fell onto my lap, leaving a greasy stain on my new white dress. I was playing pizza roulette by opting to keep my napkin on the table rather than in my lap, so I should have known better.

  “I’m officially oh for one with stains. How are you fairing?” I asked.

  “I’m golden.” He smiled. “Just more proof that pineapple is the superior topping.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, smirking.

  I could eat pizza and chat with George for forever and a day and never get tired of it.

  * * *

  Finally, Saturday rolled around and I got text confirmation that Ashley was ten minutes away from our house. She was hitching a ride with one of her classmates that she was on-again, off-again friends with, and she was live-texting me the entire conversation they were having about Indiana State’s frat party scene. AKA, Ashley wanted to jump out of the car fifteen minutes into the conversation.

  Ashley: If she tells me one more time about how her boyfriend is reigning boom cup champion I swear …

  Me: Tuck and roll out the door when you see the house, just tuck and roll.

  I passed the next few minutes very impatiently from the comfort of my room, scrolling absentmindedly through Twitter without really taking anything in. The occasional cute puppy GIF might hold my attention, but it was a very rare occurrence. The power of the puppy GIF is strong.

  “Family!” I heard yelled from a singsongy voice downstairs that only belonged to one person. I raced down the stairs, opening my arms to her immediately.

  A hug from my big sister was arguably one of the best in the world. She made me feel safe and important all at once, in the most genuine way that anyone in the world could. I sighed with relief.

  “It’s so great to see you,” I said. “We have so much to catch up on! I want to know all about your friends at school. How’s that one girl, Yael? Are you two a thing yet? Still working on it?”

  “Definitely not a thing yet,” she started. “But I’ve made the best friends. They drag me out on adventures every weekend so that I don’t stay cooped up in my dorm. I think I’ve found my group, you know? I never really had a group of people I could depend on in high school, but now I think I’ve found them.”

  “That makes me super happy,” I said. “You deserve to have a group.”

  “Thanks, Sissy,” she said, wrapping her arm around my neck. “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s out on a run with Fiyero,” I said. At the mention of Fiyero, Ashley’s eyes widened. Like she had almost forgot how glorious her reunion with the poodle monster would be.

  “How’s my puppy baby doing?” she asked.

  “As cuddly as ever,” I said. “Don’t worry, though, he still sleeps on your bed even when you’re not here.”

  “Aw! That is the sweetest and saddest thing I’ve ever heard!” she said.

  The front door jiggled, and we both snapped our heads in that direction. The blur of white fur was the first thing that flew through the front door, and Ashley squealed in a very un-Ashley-like manner. Fiyero promptly tackled Ashley to the ground and covered her face in a million slobbery kisses. It was truly the reunion of a century.

  “My baby’s home!” Mom said, rushing over to Ashley and Fiyero. Once he had his fair share of kisses, Mom pulled Ashley up from the ground and planted ten of her own kisses on Ashley’s head.

  “I missed you, Mama,” Ashley said, wrapping her in a full hug. “So much that I don’t care that you’re sweating all over me.”

  They both giggled as Mom instructed her to twirl around, to make sure that she didn’t miss anything that had changed about her over the three weeks since we saw her. Mom held a hand up to the top of Ashley’s head and compared it to her height.

  “Have you been growing? Things were not supposed to change so much in just three weeks,” she said.

  “I’m growing, but I don’t think by height,” Ashley said.

  “Of course you are, sweet girl,” Mom said, pulling her into another hug. “Savvy, will you help Ashley carry her laundry upstairs? Holy smokes, kid, have you not done any since you left?”

  “I can’t do it like you do,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “You’re lucky I missed you!”

  Ashley and I each tugged a bag of laundry up the stairs, trying our best to keep it from dragging us back downstairs in the opposite direction. From the weight of my bag, you would have believed that there was a body inside.

  “How does one produce so much dirty laundry?” I asked.

  She huffed out a tired laugh. “I wear multiple outfits in a day, Sav! There’s a comfortable outfit that you wear to class, a going-out outfit for the later part of the day, and then cute pajamas because your whole dorm floor will see you in them on the walk from your room to the bathroom. It’s a very high-stakes fashion competition at all times.”

  “That sounds stressful,” I said.

  We dumped the bags in front of the washer and dryer before she led me into her room. She ceremoniously jump
ed face-first onto the pink tie-dyed comforter she’d picked out when she was twelve and let out a big sigh.

  “Savor your favorite places in this house while you still can, Savvy,” she said. “Coming back home after moving out feels … disorienting. Almost like these spots were never really mine in the first place.”

  “Don’t say that! This is your bed, the bed that you’ve slept in for the last six years of your life, in the room that you’ve stayed in for the last twelve years of your life. You’ve been away for three weeks!” I said.

  She sighed again, wrapping the comforter around her. “But it feels so final, you know? Like, I’ll never move back in here as the kid who would pick out this god-awful comforter. When I come back here from now on, I’ll be a guest.”

  I joined her on the bed, and she opened up one side of the comforter to wrap me in with her. We were a sister burrito. We stayed this way for a few minutes, neither one of us feeling like we had anything else to add. I just wanted to bask in this moment, this feeling of being whole again in a house that had made me feel so empty for the last few weeks.

  chapter NINE

  I have to say, when my fantasies took place in the boys’ locker room, I did not envision holding an interview with the seventy-year-old baseball coach first thing on a Monday. We sat in the middle of the ungodly smelly room with a tiny recorder in between us and a notebook in my hand. He looked less than enthusiastic to be speaking with me, but part of Springdale High’s new “transparency initiative” involved leaders needing to be more available for press interviews. And, in this case, I’m press.

  Mrs. Brandt had prepped me, warning me that Coach Triad would be less than forthcoming and would probably have some prepared answers that he’d consulted on with the school’s PR team. But she’d helped me come up with a few questions to catch him off guard and make him a bit more candid.

  “So, Mr. T. Can I call you Mr. T?”

  “No,” he said, adjusting his hat.

  “Cool. Mr. Triad. Can you tell me—”

  “Coach T,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “You can call me Coach T,” he said.

  “Very specific. Noted,” I said. “Coach T, can you tell me about your experience being the baseball coach at Springdale? How many years have you been here?”

  “I’ve been here for over forty years. Coaching this team has been one of the best experiences of my life. I was a Spartan back in the day, and being able to pass down that legacy for years to come means everything to me,” he said.

  “That’s sweet,” I said. I wrote down baseball is an incestuous lovefest in my notes. “And how many years have you been working alongside Jolene Foster?”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Jolene Foster, the dance team coach,” I said.

  “That’s her name now? They come and go so quick that I can never learn all their names. She’s blond, right? Cute dimples?”

  I wrote down pervy old man in my notes. “Yes, she’s blond. So why do you think they have such a high turnover rate?”

  “I don’t know, their husbands get new jobs? They start having kids? It beats me,” he said.

  FUCK THIS OLD DUDE, I wrote in my notes.

  “Do you think it has anything to do with their salaries?” I asked.

  “I’m sure they get paid a fine amount for what they do,” he said.

  “Well, according to public record, you make a tenured salary of sixty-five thousand dollars a year and growing each five years that you stay, while Ms. Foster’s salary is under twenty thousand dollars a year. The salary for this position has not changed in over ten years, even though our dance team has won state competitions the last two years in a row. Do you feel like that’s fair pay for what she does?” I asked.

  “How did you figure out my salary?” he asked.

  “It’s public record. Could you please answer my question? Do you think it’s fair pay for what she does?” I asked.

  “Well, I suppose not,” he said.

  “The dance team practices every afternoon after school in the gym and has for years. They are preparing for their state competition in two months. It was brought to my attention that the baseball team recently took over their spot without warning and outside of their typical training season. Is this correct?”

  “I didn’t know that they use that space,” he said.

  “Really? In your over forty years here, you didn’t know that the dance team uses the gym in the afternoons during the first quarter of school?” I asked.

  He squirmed in his seat. “Well, I guess I had an idea. But our team is bigger than ever this year. We needed a larger spot to start our HIT—high-intensity training—for the season. The gym is the natural spot.”

  “So you overtook the dance team’s space outside of your competition season because you felt entitled to it?” I asked.

  He scrunched up his face before standing from the wooden benches that we squatted on in the locker room. “I don’t enjoy your tone. I’ve answered enough of your questions.”

  “That’s fine with me. Do you have anything else you’d like to add, on the record? Any remorse for taking over their spot?” I asked.

  “I don’t have any remorse. They keep me around for a reason. They pay me more for a reason,” he said.

  “And what reason is that?” I asked.

  “You don’t see the dance team bringing in revenue for the school. You don’t see them bringing in recruiters. It’s just the way the world works, doll. I’m sorry to say,” he said.

  He hobbled his way out the door, and I sat back down, looking over all my notes. I had some gold here. Now all I had to do was investigate the revenue that the baseball team was actually bringing in for the school, if recruiters were doing any shady gift giving to the school/coach behind closed doors, and seriously get an interview with Jolene Foster. If she had to put up with this crotchety old man for any longer than five minutes, I felt horrible for her.

  The first person I wanted to tell about the interview was Grace. She’d be so excited to hear all the juicy details of Not Mr. T being a total sexist pig in his interview. He played into my hand even better than anticipated. Apparently he’d taken a nap through the school’s PR seminar at the beginning of the year.

  She was already sitting in Mr. Kavach’s room when I rounded the corner. She looked up at me expectantly, but the bell rang for the start of class before we could talk. I eagerly took out a sheet of notebook paper from my bag and did a very un-studious-Savannah thing and decided to pass notes with Grace during class.

  I had the interview with Coach Triad this morning!

  I slid it under her arm. She opened it immediately, not even trying to be sneaky at this point. She scribbled in her signature purple pen before handing it back to me.

  How did it go?!

  He spilled. Major. I can’t wait for you to listen to the recording.

  No. Way.

  Yes way. We’re going to be able to blow this one up, Grace. This is going to be our big story for the Spartan Spotlight!

  And then, Kavach called us out on our not-so-subtle note passing and my brain slipped back into our calculus class.

  * * *

  After calc I raced to Mrs. Brandt’s class to give her the recording of my interview and tell her how well it went. Her eyes lit up when I went over every truth-baring detail that Coach Triad spilled (and made appropriately angry faces for every sexist thing he uttered, too).

  “Oh, Savannah, this is going to be a big story,” she said, grabbing a piece of notebook paper. “I want you to talk to Chase Stevens. He was a student of mine from about three or four years ago who was approached by recruiters after baseball season. Now that he’s done playing college ball I think he’d be willing to talk about what went down without the fear of having it hurt his chances at playing.”

  “Ooh, that would be perfect,” I said. “I’m also going to make a point of getting an interview with the dance team coach, and maybe a few fr
om the past just to confirm the numbers we have on salary. Should we expand it a bit? To other sports? I think the next natural step would be to get the softball team involved, since it’s the closest parallel.”

  “You’re on the right track,” she said. “But is the story going to be about the disparity between boys’ and girls’ sports? Because I think that story has been blown in the past.”

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “It’s totally about the money that is funneling into that program. There’s something that isn’t adding up.”

  “Bingo. This is why I keep you around,” she said, winking. She handed me the piece of paper with Chase’s information on it and smiled down at me. “I’m really proud of you for working so hard on this. You know that this will most likely get pushback from the school, but you’re going for it anyway. I hope you’re considering a journalism program for school. I could help you identify some standout programs.”

  I shifted my weight, looking down at the ground. “I think I’m going to Indiana State in the fall. They have a decent program.”

  She nodded. “I’m not knocking Indiana State, because I have a lot of students who go there and love it, but not all of them have the academic success that you have. Savannah, I really think you should consider applying to places like Columbia and NYU with your test scores and your talent. And you have a very happy teacher who would be willing to write glowing recommendation letters for you.”

  “That means a lot to me,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  I put the scrap of paper in my backpack as the last warning bell for second period rang. I now had T minus two minutes to run to the gymnasium and get dressed for PE. It was going to be another one of those days where I got docked points for taking too long to get dressed.

  “I’ve got to get going. I’ll keep you updated when I get those interviews scheduled,” I said.

  “Sounds great!” she called after me.

  I didn’t understand the guilty feeling that ate a hole into my chest as I left her room. Wasn’t it my choice where I wanted to go to school? I’d decided a long time ago that I’d go to whatever school Ashley went to so that we could fulfill our destiny of being the best college roommates ever. Knowing that I had my future planned out so securely was a sense of comfort for me. It helped me get through every fight with Mom, every time my dad canceled his plans to come out and visit us—as long as I could count down the time until I was in college with my best friend again, everything would be okay in the present.