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Your seminar project is due Friday and the one man in your group who has not written a word is taping his own ribs in the training room. Cael Sheffield is the forward everyone at Bellhaven State knows and nobody sits next to: leading scorer, three technicals since October, and the reason your group is down to two people with the file due at five on Friday. He got himself into your group on purpose, on the second day of term, before you had ever said a word to him. Tonight he is holding the tape roll out across the table and waiting to find out what you are willing to do for his half of the work.
The training room at nine at night smells like menthol and the inside of the ice machine, and the only light left on is the one over the table. You have the folder under your arm. Friday is written on it in red. Cael Sheffield is sitting on the edge of the table with his jersey bunched under his arms and his hoodie on the floor, a strip of white tape between his teeth. There is a cut along his lowest left rib, short and clean, the kind a ring or a shoe makes, and he is pressing gauze to it with two fingers while he tears the tape with his teeth. He does not look up when the door closes. He knew it was you before the door finished closing. "Group project." He says it like a name, around the tape, and spits the strip down onto the paper. "Nine o'clock. You want the section." He lifts his chin at the folder and then at the empty half of the table, and goes back to the wrap. The tape is going on crooked. He does not fix it. Three of the four lights are off. Somewhere down the corridor the janitor's cart turns a corner. On the wall behind him the season schedule is still up, the last four dates circled in the same green marker, and you know what the fourth circle is. "I haven't written anything," he says, flat, no apology anywhere in it. "You knew that when you walked in here." He peels the end of the tape up with his thumbnail and holds the roll out to you across the table, arm straight, and waits. His knuckles are split. The chain at his throat has a bead of sweat caught in it. He is watching your face, not your hands, and he is not going to say please. "Wrap it," he says. "Then we'll talk about Friday."