“All right.” Ronny felt himself bright and blushing. Relieved that he had some money in his pocket. People on the union steps were watching, maybe wondering whether he needed help. He ran hands though his hair.

Tate was grinning and pointed a finger at him. “And you don’t do anything for that motherfucker Ben till you get mine done.”

“Now, you know I can’t promise that. I’ll call tomorrow.”

Tate headed back to the dorm again, all swagger and strut, and started to sing at the top of his lungs, lyrics from “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. Ronny shook his head. Somebody blared a horn at Tate from the road and he waved, disappearing into the pines.

Ambiguous

RONNY HAD NEVER INTENDED TO HELP anyone cheat and thought of himself as an honest person. In the spring of his sophomore year he had a class with Otis Pike, one of the linebackers on the football team, who sat at his desk in the basic newswriting class as if he were about to crash it to the floor, his bulk overpowering. Ronny recognized him from the dorm, lumbering along the concrete, his big hands wrapped around a tiny book or a tiny beer or carefully touching the tiny hand of a minuscule girl.

Otis looked fierce in the dorm but awkward in the class. The work was exacting, learning the principles of newswriting, the composition of a lead, the inverted pyramid of paragraphs (structuring each article so that it could be quickly cut from the end, the most important matter close to the lead), the use of sources, the number needed for veracity, the accuracy required. Ronny had already begun working on the copy desk of The Tar Heel a couple of evenings a week. He liked the way the reporters talked about their writing; newswriting felt less precious than the creative writing class he had tried. So he took to it. Through the early weeks of term, the trees bare outside Howell Hall, the classroom cold, steam barely flowing in the radiators, he lost himself in study. He was accustomed to standing out in class, so it was no surprise in February, when the professor gave a team assignment, to find he had his choice of partners, Otis among them.

He agreed to work with Otis because they both lived in the same dorm, he claimed, even to himself. Otis was a good partner to a degree. A person could imagine being afraid of him on the football field, but sitting in his dorm room, talking about who to interview about the athletic department’s compliance with Title IX, Otis was like any other student struggling to figure out how to do something he had never done before. He thought he might want to be a sportswriter, he said. He’d been involved in athletics all his life. It was he who suggested the topic for the article because his ex-girlfriend Amanda was on the swim team. She’d broken up with him at the beginning of term, but she’d made him think about whether the athletic department was doing everything it could to develop sports programs for women.