Page 105 of Final Drive

“These go out on the AVNC media wire. They’ll be on a dozen sites by the weekend.” Vance keeps her voice down. It’s a courtesy, and she’s still saying it in a boat bay with nine other people in it. “I’m thinking about the comments under them.”

“So am I.”

“Then let me put you in the back row. You’re a hundred and twenty-five pounds, nobody expects you front and center, and it solves it.”

There it is.

I’ve spent my entire life being the person who makes the awkward moment go away. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been reliably good at, and I could do it right now. I could laugh and say something about nobody putting the cox in the back unless they want her steering the photo. Vance would laugh, Reese would end up in the back row, and everybody in the bay would get to feel better about it.

Every man in here is waiting for one of us to speak. Gray hasn’t moved or blinked. Jackson has gone very still against the far rack, and if Jackson speaks first, this ends with somebody’s career.

So I don’t give them the joke.

“No.”

Vance turns. “I’m sorry?”

“She’s the coxswain. She goes in the middle, in the front, with the box in her hand, since that’s where she is in every photograph any crew has ever taken.” I walk over, pick the cox box up off the bench, and put it in Reese’s hands. “And nobody’s covering anything.”

“Mr. Monroe, I’m trying to protect her.”

“I know you are. You’re the first person from that building who’s tried, and I’d like you to hear that I mean it.” I face her properly. “Here’s the part you’re not accounting for. If she stands in the back with her collar up, then every one of those sites has a photograph of a program that put her in the back with her collar up. That’s the story. Not the mark. The hiding.”

Vance doesn’t answer straight away.

“That’s a media strategy.”

“It’s the only one available.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

“Since about six this morning.”

Behind me, Zane says very quietly, “He does this.”

Vance looks past me at Bennett, who’s had his cap in his hands this entire time and hasn’t put it on.

“Coach?”

“She’s my coxswain,” Bennett says. “Put her where she sits.”

Vance closes her folder and stops arguing.

The photographer moves us three times, and Vance stops fussing after the second setup. Bennett stands at the end of the front row because I ask him to, and I ask him in front of Vance so there’s no version where he says no. Bo ends up behind Reese with his hands at his sides. Cameron won’t take the jacket off and nobody argues about it. Jackson looks at the camera the entire time and doesn’t blink once. That photograph is going to come out strange, and nobody will be able to say why.

Reese sits in front with the box in her lap, the mark on her throat, and her chin up. The photographer takes six hundred frames and we’re done in fifty minutes.

Afterward everybody drifts. Jackson goes straight up to the erg room. Bo takes Zane and Tyler back to the house, and Zane’s talking before the truck doors shut. He talks when he’s rattled, and he’s been rattled since six.

I find Reese on the edge of the dock with her shoes off and her feet not quite in the water. I sit beside her and watch a novice crew at the far end butcher a start sequence.

“You were good in there,” she says.

“That’s the job.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Usually I’d have something ready for that. I don’t, and it takes me a second to notice I’m not looking for anything either.