Chapter 1 — The Hit Heard Around Campus

Luca

The video had three million views before Luca even got out of the shower.

He didn’t know that yet. What he knew, standing under water gone lukewarm, was that his shoulder ached where he’d checked Dominic Hale into the boards, that the locker room had gone quiet in a way locker rooms weren’t supposed to go quiet after a win, and that Coach Harrelson had looked at him like he didn’t recognize him.

They’d won. Northridge 4, Ashford 2. Nobody was talking about the score.

By the time Luca toweled off and checked his phone, his hands weren’t steady anymore.

@NorthridgeHockey_Insider: does anyone know why De Santis absolutely tried to end this guy’s career???

47.2K retweets

The clip was eleven seconds long. Hale, gliding along the boards, no puck anywhere near him. Luca, coming out of nowhere, dropping his shoulder, driving Hale into the glass hard enough that the whole rink had gone up in one collective gasp Luca could still hear if he closed his eyes.

What the clip didn’t show was the forty minutes before it. What the clip didn’t show was Hale’s stick catching Marco Ibarra across the back of the knees for the third time that period, low and mean and utterly deliberate, the kind of hit that ends a nineteen-year-old’s season if the angle’s wrong. What the clip didn’t show was Marco’s face when he skated past the bench, white and rattled, refusing to look at anyone.

The clip just showed Luca. Furious. Reckless. A villain, if you didn’t know the rest of the story.

And Luca couldn’t tell the rest of the story. Not without telling everyone what else Hale had been doing to Marco all season the texts, the threats, the thing Marco had begged him, begged him, not to repeat to a single living soul.

So Luca said nothing. Which, as it turned out, was the worst possible move.

By Sunday morning it was on SportsCenter. By Sunday afternoon, it had a hashtag. #DeSantisOut was trending in the greater tri-state area, which felt like an absurd sentence to think about his own name, but there it was, right under a meme of his face photoshopped onto a wanted poster.

“You’re a mess,” Beckett said, dropping onto the other end of the couch with two mugs of coffee, handing Luca the one that said WORLD’S OKAYEST CAPTAIN, a gift from Gia two Christmases ago that had become permanently, mockingly his. “Suarez called. Twice. You need to call her back before she starts calling your mother.”

“She already called my mother.”

Beckett winced. “That bad?”

“She’s making a lasagna the size of a door, Beck. That’s how bad.”

His phone buzzed again. Marlene Suarez, Athletic Director, third call in two hours. Luca stared at it until it stopped, then made himself walk to her office instead, because at some point you had to stop being a coward about your own disaster.

Suarez’s office smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, and she didn’t offer him a seat, which told him everything about how this conversation was going to go before she opened her mouth.

“Do you have any idea,” she said, “what this is doing to this program?”

“I know what it looks like”

“I don’t care what it looks like, Mr. De Santis, I care what it is, and what it is, is a viral clip of my hockey captain assaulting a player from a rival school with no explanation, no context, and no comment from you, which any PR consultant on the planet will tell you is the single worst way to handle a scandal.” She said the word scandal like it tasted bad in her mouth. “The board wants you suspended for the season. Ashford’s alumni are talking lawsuit. Do you understand what that means for this program? For your scholarship? For every kid on that roster whose season now hangs on whether the public decides you’re a monster?”

Luca’s jaw tightened. “I’m not going to be suspended for protecting my team.”

“Then give me a reason not to suspend you that isn’t ‘trust me.’”

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t, not without Marco’s name coming out of his mouth, and he wasn’t doing that. Not to save himself.

Suarez studied him for a long moment, and something in her expression shifted from fury into something colder and more calculating. “Fine,” she said. “Then we do it my way.”

“Your way?”

“The university’s media department has been developing a docuseries student life, athletics, the human side of campus. I’m putting you in it. Effective immediately. Cameras, interviews, the full circus. We control the narrative instead of letting T*****r control it for us. You’re going to be seen being a good person, on camera, until the public remembers you’re twenty-one years old and not a cartoon villain.”

Luca felt something cold drop through his stomach. “You want to put my life on a reality show.”

“I want to save your career, Mr. De Santis, and this is how we do it. Consider it mandatory community service with better lighting.” She slid a folder across the desk. “And to sell it properly, you need a story. A person. The narrative research team is very clear that redemption arcs perform significantly better with a and I’m quoting the memo ‘grounding romantic thread.’”

“A romantic thread.”

“A girlfriend, Luca.”

He almost laughed. Would have, if she weren’t dead serious. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I’m aware. Which is why we’re going to find you one who’s willing to fake it for a semester in exchange for a very generous scholarship stipend.” Suarez folded her hands. “I already have someone in mind.”

Isabella

Isabella Rossi was elbow-deep in a stack of freshman comp essays about The Great Gatsby four separate students had, without apparent irony, argued that Gatsby “really loved” Daisy, as if the entire novel weren’t a slow-motion warning about mistaking obsession for love when Priya dropped an iPad on top of her homework with the reverence of someone delivering a subpoena.

“You need to see this.”

“I need to finish grading these or Professor Alden’s going to make me retake comp myself.”

“Bella. Look.”

She looked. It was a video some hockey player, dark hair, broad shoulders, absolutely leveling another player into the boards while the crowd screamed. The caption read: NORTHRIDGE CAPTAIN LUCA DE SANTIS GOES VIRAL FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS.

“Okay,” Isabella said slowly. “And I care about this because…?”

“Because I just got off the phone with my cousin who works for the athletics department, and apparently they’re doing damage control by putting him on that reality show thing Northridge Confidential and they need a girl to play his girlfriend, and Bella.” Priya’s eyes were huge. “They asked about you specifically.”

Isabella set down her red pen very carefully, the way you set down something you were trying very hard not to throw. “Absolutely not.”

“They’re offering a scholarship stipend. A big one.”

That stopped her.

“How big?”

Priya told her, and Isabella did the math instantly, the way she did math about money now out of pure survival instinct rent, Nico’s school fees, the thing with her mother’s sewing machine that had finally, mercifully died last month and needed replacing before Elena Rossi lost half her clients.

“I don’t date athletes,” Isabella said, which was true, and which was also not really the point, and they both knew it.

“You wouldn’t be dating him. It’s fake. It’s acting. You get paid to pretend to like a hockey player for a few months and then you never have to see him again.”

Isabella thought about Jordan Pierce’s face across the dining hall, laughing with his teammates the week after he’d told half the baseball roster that her poetry was “cute, like, for a hobby.” She thought about the exact particular flavor of humiliation that came with being someone’s punchline while thinking you were someone’s girlfriend.

“I hate this idea,” she said.

Her phone buzzed. An email, university letterhead, subject line: Northridge Confidential  Meeting Request, Athletics Office, Tomorrow 10 AM.

She hadn’t even said yes yet.

“They already scheduled the meeting,” Priya said, peering over her shoulder, delighted. “I love this school’s respect for consent.”

Isabella stared at the email until the words blurred, doing the math again Nico’s fees, her mother’s machine, the stipend, and underneath all of it, quieter, the thing she wasn’t ready to admit even to herself: some small, treacherous part of her was curious what kind of person needed a fake girlfriend to convince the world he had a heart.

She was going to regret this.

She hit reply anyway.

I’ll be there.