It wasn't even light outside yet, and somewhere in our apartment building, someone with an impressively loud speaker was blasting Garland's fight song—a frustratingly catchy cacophony of tubas and cymbals and every wind instrument I could name.

I rolled over in my bed, checked the time on my phone, and pulled my duvet up over my head with a groan.

The first home football game of the season was usually something I looked forward to. I loved the thrill of being part of a crowd. I loved standing shoulder to shoulder with fifty thousand other people and feeling like we were family, as we cheered and chanted and chugged watery beer under the heat of the midday sun.

Hanna and I had made a pact freshman year that we'd get to the stadium early, every game, so we'd be somewhere in the first five rows of the student section. That way Andre could always find us in the crowd.

I loved Gameday.

And so I probably would've jumped out of bed whistling along with our fight song, if it weren't for the fact that I'd spent the past four nights staring at the ceiling all night as I imagined all the ways that this article about Vaughn could blow up in our faces.

Distantly, and muffled through my duvet, Hanna's mattress creaked and groaned on the other side of the room. Two footsteps thudded against the floor, and then there was a weight on top of me and my blankets were yanked back from my face.

"Rise and shine!" Hanna bellowed. "It's Gameday!"

I blinked up at her, disgruntled and still half asleep.

"Your breath is heinous," I said.

"Yeah, yours isn't too hot, either. C'mon. Only five hours until kickoff. Go shower so I can curl your hair."

❖ ❖ ❖

I've never been to the Vatican City, but I can only guess that the crowds at Garland University on the morning of a home game must look an awful lot like Easter Mass at St. Peter's Square. Except I don't think anyone's doing keg stands outside the Basilica.

Then again, I've never been a very good Catholic, so what do I know?

The point is—campus was crawling with people, from baby-faced freshman to ninety-year-old alumni in wheelchairs, all of them gathered under pop-up tents and shady oaks trees with their coolers and portable grills.

As soon as Hanna and I set foot on campus, we became two more specks in the sea of dark green.

"How is it this hot already?" I grumbled, shielding my eyes with my hand. "It's, like, nine in the morning."

Hanna tugged her tube-top up with a frustrated huff.

"I really wish I had boobs," she grumbled.

"No you don't," I said. "My boob sweat is unreal right now."

I'd worn my usual Gameday outfit—Andre's practice jersey from freshman year, with his last name and number on the back. It stilled smelled vaguely of sweat despite the number of times I'd run it through the wash, but it was comfortable and large enough that I could drink as much beer and eat as many snacks as I wanted without worrying about bloating.

Hanna, on the other hand, had chosen a black corduroy overall dress and a Garland green tube-top. She looked entirely too trendy to be gallivanting around muddy lawns on campus in search of friends and free alcohol.

We were halfway across the quad outside Buchanan, both of us slinking along under the hot sun like animals in search of a watering hole, when Hanna tugged my arm to point out a cluster of fifty or so students gathered in the middle of the grass under a green pop-up tent surrounded by rickety beer pong tables and cornhole boards.

"I think that's the Volleyball House's tailgate," she said. "Look how tall they are. And they've got BP! Let's crash."

It was only once we'd started across the grass that we noticed almost everyone there was wearing a neon pink wristband. Wristbands usually meant the tailgate charged you to drink, and neither of us had the budget for that.

But I did have an idea.

"Hold on," I said. "Wait here. I'll be right back."

While Hanna hovered at the edge of the crowd, I marched headfirst into the chaos murmuring excuse me and sorry as I brushed shoulders and side-stepped the crushed beer cans littering the ground.

In the middle of the tailgate, directly under the tent, I found a makeshift plywood bar manned by two very tall, very baby-faced boys (freshman, undoubtedly). Both of them were hunched over the bar so they could take orders from the cluster of girls waiting for drinks.

"I just need to see your wristband," one of the guys was saying.

"Mine fell off," a girl whined. "But I paid the twenty bucks! Promise."

While the freshman tried to inform her that no wristband meant no alcohol, I darted around the side of the bar and stepped up to the counter.

They had vodka—giant plastic jugs of it, each one larger than my head—and off-brand lemonade, along with several plastic bags of plastic cups.

It wasn't wine, but it would do.

Anything to help me take my mind off the article.

I glanced up to check if anyone was watching me. No one was, of course, so I uncapped the vodka and went for it.

It took me all of fifteen seconds to make two vodka lemonades so strong I could've used them as nail polish remover. Then, with a red cup clutched in either hand, I slipped out from behind the bar and darted back into the crowd again, quick as a woodland animal weaving through trees.

When I surfaced on the other side, Hanna blinked at me in open-mouthed disbelief.

"You're kidding!" she cried, her face splitting into a grin. "How the fuck did you do that?"

I shrugged, feigning nonchalance even as I grinned.

Invisibility. My favorite party trick.

I handed Hanna one of the cups. She stuck her nose over the rim and took a long sniff, then scrunched one eye closed as a shiver of revulsion rolled down her spine.

"You've outdone yourself," she said. "This might actually kill me."

We bumped our cups together and said our cheers. The vodka made us both cough and splutter after the first sip, but we both took second gulps anyway before we started towards the center of campus.

"Can we stop by the Art House's tent?" Hanna asked me. "Just real quick. They're doing a fundraiser for the Pollock party, and Mehri said she's supposed to be manning the tent until eleven. I think we can still catch her."

Mehri Rajavi was a fine arts major who liked to paint enormous watercolor depictions of flowers and had remembered my full name the second time we met, which meant that I considered her one of my friends.

The Art House usually set up their tailgate over by the architecture school, in a shady lawn where the grad students usually congregated to smoke cigarettes and chug black coffee. But Hanna led me to a tent along the parkway, over near the student union, where a hand-lettered sign that read PATTIES FOR POLLOCK was strung up over a folding table.

Mehri stood behind the makeshift counter, the sun glinting off her gold nose ring and the glittery temporary tattoo of Leopold the Lion (Garland's mascot) on her right cheek.

"Five dollar burgers!" she was calling out to passerby. "Help students in need buy art supplies!"

A pair of middle-aged alumni stopped, persuaded by Mehri's sales pitch, and pulled out their wallets.

I almost laughed out loud.

Mehri wasn't technically lying. The Art House was going to buy paint—it just so happened to be for Pollock, the blacklight paint party they hosted in a giant tent in their backyard every October.

While the sports-centric houses on the Rodeo were typically known for throwing better, wilder parties, Pollock was the exception. Last year, three people had left the party in ambulances (one for alcohol poisoning, two for crowd surfing related injuries).

Hanna and I already had our all-white outfits picked out.

So when we waltzed up to the counter just as Mehri was passing a paper plate of hamburgers to the alumni, Hanna tugged a pair of crumpled one dollar bills from her pocket and slid them across the table.

"I'd like to make a donation," she announced.

Mehri sighed and pushed them back.

"You're helping with set-up," she scolded, in a way that told me they'd already had this discussion before. "And you're gonna need these to buy a bottle of water at the game. I can smell whatever's in your cup from here."

Hanna held the drink out in offering.

"Vodka lemonade," she sing-songed. "Want some?"

Mehri sighed, like she really had to think about it, then plucked the cup out of Hanna's hand and tossed back a sip. She coughed, then smacked her lips.

"Nice," she said, and took another gulp.

"You going to the game?" I asked.

Mehri threw her head back and laughed as she passed Hanna her drink. "Me? At a sporting event? Oh, absolutely not. But I'll be at the Art House tonight if you guys wanna swing by for the afterparty."

We told her we'd see her there, then wandered off towards the trio of newer buildings on campus—the ones where Andre and I had Human Sexuality on Tuesdays and Thursdays—and sat on a set of cool concrete steps in the shade to finish our drinks.

When we'd drained every last drop of stolen vodka, we tossed our cups in a trashcan and started the long walk to the stadium.

❖ ❖ ❖

Our opponent for the afternoon—Oregon State—won the coin toss and gave Garland the chance to play offense first.

Hanna and I, who were both buzzing from our vodka lemonades and sweating excessively under the blazing California sun, watched player stats cycle on the big screen and sang along to Katy Perry's "Roar," which was blasting over the loudspeakers for what had to be the tenth time that morning (an unfortunate side effect of having a lion as the school's mascot).

We'd managed to grab a pair of seats in the second row of the student section.

The trio of girls in front of us, down in the first row, were all wearing knee-high socks and replicas of Kyle Fogarty's jersey (available for purchase at the campus bookstore, if you were prepared to pay a hundred bucks for some green mesh with a Nike swoosh on it). When Fogarty's face appeared on the big screen, side by side with his height and weight and other numbers nobody except the diehard football fans actually cared about, they erupted in drunken giggles.

"Guys, look, it's our husband!" one of them shouted.

Another cupped her hands around her mouth and called, "Hey! You forgot a stat! He's got a ten inch dick!"

The three of them dissolved into hysterical laughter.

Hanna shot me an exasperated look.

"Oh, come on," I chided under my breath. "That was funny."

"I know," she mumbled in reply. "But he's actually my husband, so—"

The rest of her sentence was drowned by the roar of the crowd as Bodie St. James appeared on the screen.

Six foot five. Two-hundred and thirty pounds.

You should mention how big his dick is, Kyle Fogarty's voice echoed in my head.

I quickly averted my eyes from the big screen and turned to look out onto the field, squinting as I shielded my face with my hand. But of course, the second I started searching the crowd of uniforms for Andre, my gaze landed on the very person who's stats I was trying not to think about.

Bodie was standing with his back to me, his head bent low as he looked down at the playbook Coach Vaughn was holding in one arm.

The boy looked damn good in Garland green polyester spandex pants.

I huffed in frustration.

Hanna seemed to notice my sudden distress, because she nudged my side with her elbow to get my attention.

"I can't wait for your article to drop," she told me. "I can't even look at Vaughn without wanting to punch him in the face."

The article was ready.

On Friday morning, Ellison called every senior editor on the Daily staff into a conference room off the media center, locked the door, and distributed hard copies of the article. She told them that whoever could poke a viable hole in the story would be offered a permanent position on the front page for the remainder of the year. Eight hours later, no one had managed to do so, and we had the green light.

I'd been told that my interview with Bodie had supplied a few key quotes.

"He's not exactly the brightest, is he?" one of the senior editors had joked, before launching into a stuttering impression of Bodie's first few responses.

I'd bristled and muttered, "He was nervous."

For the last twenty-four hours, I'd thought of nothing but the article. I had no appetite—which was probably good for my bank account but was really bumming me out—and I couldn't sleep.

The song over the loudspeakers shifted to some angsty rap music. I could feel the bass in the concrete under my feet, like well-timed earthquakes.

"What if we're making a huge mistake?" I blurted. "What if those tips were fake, or wrong, or—what if the women at the country club were mistaken? What if they ran into someone who just looked like Vaughn, and—"

Hanna spun on me and clapped a hand on either side of my face, forcing me to look her right in the eyes.

"Laurel," she said, very seriously. "Chill."

"I'm trying," I whined.

The student section erupted with noise. Hanna and I abandoned our heart to heart and looked out onto the field, quickly deducing that we'd gotten a first down, and both threw our arms in the air with excitement.

The next two downs were far less thrilling—two lousy runs, each eating up only a few yards to the next first down.

And then came the third down play. 

After the hike—chaos. While the defensive line and the offense crashed together, Bodie leapt back two long strides and surveyed the field. A few seconds passed like some kind of eternity, and then Bodie cocked his elbow back and launched a throw.

It was the cleanest spiral I'd ever seen.

And it landed square in the palms of Kyle Fogarty, who'd somehow found a pocket of negative space forty yards down the field, right on the edge of the end zone. The nearest defenders scrambled to catch up to him, but it was already done.

He tucked the ball to his chest, turned, and took two steps.

Touchdown.

The stadium exploded with noise. In the row in front of us, the three girls in Fogarty jerseys were beside themselves with joy.

"That's! My! Husband!" one of them bellowed.

I could guess that Kyle Fogarty was doing some kind of celebratory posing and peacocking for the crowd, but I wasn't watching him. I was watching Bodie St. James, who punched a triumphant fist in the air and then turned to chest-bump his nearest teammate.

His elation with contagious. I found myself laughing as I clapped along with Garland's fight song.

But my joy dissolved to dust the moment I saw the image on the big screen.

It was close up of Truman Vaughn on Garland's sidelines. His headset and mic were resting around his neck, and his baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes, casting them in shadow. He stood with both arms stretched out, palms to the sky, welcoming the roar of the crowd. He looked vaguely like the Pope.

And the crowd was willing to treat him like it, because Truman Vaughn was the kind of mastermind who knew how to orchestrate a play that would leave his best tight end wide open just one yard from the end zone.

He was better than good—he was the best.

The lukewarm vodka lemonade churning in my stomach was like battery acid against the back of my throat. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream, at the top of my lungs, that Truman Vaughn was not the man he'd convinced everyone he was.

But I didn't. I stood there and let the crowd cheer at his charade.

I knew that, on Monday, it would all come crashing down.

❖ ❖ ❖

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Gameday is a HUGE deal at USC (I think it's huge at most big universities in the states).

Anyway. Thanks for waiting! The upside of working in batches of nine chapters is that I feel more on top of my shit and get to edit things to a standard of quality I feel comfortable with. The downside is that you guys kind of have to twiddle your thumbs and hope I didn't, like, die or anything. I'm still editing this next batch (because I've been really hard on myself lately and just generally dealing with anxiety and my shortcomings as a person) so I might have to go a few weeks here of posting one a week.

But I am really, really happy with this story right now.

Your friendly author,

Kate