Page 18 of Campus Muscle

“I’ll forgive you for the Skittles incident if you give me something useful.”

My lips curled into a sarcastic smile. I was so ready to just walk away from her and pretend that none of this had happened, but she had to go there. She couldn’t just leave well enough alone.

“How about you keep your forgiveness and I give you this instead?”

I pulled my hand up and, as slowly as I could, I showed her my middle finger. Then I turned around and walked to the bus. An exaggerated gasp left her lips, and she tried to get the last word, but I didn’t even look back.

7

Dakota

I knew this meeting wasn’t going to go well before I even stepped into the office. Professor Adler didn’t summon students for no reason, and he definitely didn’t use such short emails to do it. He didn’t give me any context or reassurance. He just said Come see me after class. That alone told me everything I needed to know. So when I reached the office, I took a deep, reassuring breath and knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

His office carried that familiar mix of paper and stale coffee, the kind that clung to academic spaces that people forgot to leave. Files were stacked in neat, deliberate piles across his desk, leaving nothing out of place, and there certainly was nothing accidental. It was what I thought an office of my own would eventually look like. Feeling at ease, I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

“Dakota, I’m so happy to see you so quickly. Please take a seat.”

I did as I was told and put my notebook down on my lap. As usual, I rested my fingers on the edge, just in case they needed to start moving. Some people would say that I was nervous, but I refused to call it that. I liked to think that I was ready and alert.

“As you know, I’ve been tracking your progress,” he said, opening a relatively thick file. “And I must say, what I’ve been hearing is very concerning.”

“Is that why I’m here?” I asked, my heart slamming against the wall of my chest.

A flicker of annoyance passed over his face, but it didn’t stay. It disappeared almost immediately.

“Yes, I thought we should talk about it before you dig a hole you wouldn’t be able to get out of.”

I winced internally. Professor Adler had never spoken to me like that before, so I could tell that he was very unhappy, but I still hoped there was a chance for us to get on the same page. So I waited.

He crossed his arms over his chest and pinned me with his gaze. “This assignment was meant to push you in a new direction.”

“It is.” I lifted my notebook and started flipping through it. “I’ve been developing a long-form angle that—”

“No,” he interrupted, losing his cool for the first time since I had met him. “It was meant to guide you out of your comfort zone. Not to relocate you to another place that felt just as safe.”

My grip on my notebook tightened. “I’m following a legitimate story.”

I automatically rambled through what I had learned so far and dropped names like it was going out of fashion, but Professor Adler didn’t seem to be listening at all. In fact, each word I said just seemed to annoy him more.

“That’s not the point. You’re chasing the same kind of story you always chase, and that’s what I’m trying to change.” I swore he would’ve pulled his hair out. “With you, it’s always about institutional failures, corruption, and systems behaving exactly as expected.”

“Because that’s usually where the truth lies,” I countered.

“How are you still not seeing the problem? You were assigned to cover a growing program. A team that has been building something from nothing. There’s real value in that. It’s a story worth sharing.”

“Those are the types of stories anyone can write. I’m not interested in repeating something that has been done a million times already.”

This discussion wasn’t getting us anywhere. We were both too stubborn to give in, but I needed him to understand what I had in hand. It was groundbreaking information that could transform the sport as we knew it.

“You’re not interested in anything other than what you have on your mind. That’s not journalism. It’s a sign of immaturity, and I know you’re better than that. When you go out into the real world, you can’t pick what news you cover. You’ll have a boss telling you what to do, so you need to learn how to be flexible as soon as possible.”

His words came down a lot harder than I expected, but it didn’t deter me. I still believed that my story deserved to be told. People needed to hear the truth, and I wanted to be the one to share it.

I leaned forward slightly. “I’ve found patterns across multiple schools. There are funding spikes, recruitment shifts, academic inconsistencies—”

“You really need to stop,” he said, raising a hand. “Then you need to kill this little project of yours. There will be no more talk about corruption in sports, especially not when this school is involved.”