The Campus Cheaters Redemption

CHAPTER 11: Away From Home

Dane’s POV

The team bus rattled down the highway toward the Ridgeline Raptors’ campus, and Dane kept his forehead pressed to the window, watching the tree line blur into a green smear. Beside him, Oscar was three energy drinks deep and narrating a T****k trend nobody asked about.

“Bro, you ever notice Jerome talks to the ball before he kicks it?” Oscar asked, craning his neck toward the back of the bus where Jerome sat alone, headphones in, nodding to something only he could hear.

“Everybody’s got their thing,” Dane said. “Long as it goes in the net, he can talk to the grass for all I care.”

“I’m just saying. Man’s weird.”

“You talk to your cleats before every match. Kissed the left one twice last week.”

“That’s different. That’s tradition.” Oscar cracked open a fourth energy drink like the first three hadn’t happened. “Tradition ain’t weird.”

Coach Miles stood at the front of the bus once they pulled into the visitors’ lot, one hand braced on the overhead rail, his voice carrying over the engine’s idle hum.

“The Raptors are scrappy, not scared. Don’t get comfortable because it’s a friendly. Anything that happens on that field today follows us into league play. Play like it counts, because it does.”

The locker room at Ridgeline smelled like bleach and old rubber. Jerome laced up in silence while Damian, the second-string striker, sat two benches down pretending not to watch him.

“You nervous?” Damian asked.

“Watch me,” Jerome said, and walked out first.

Dane lingered a second longer than the rest, tying his laces slower than he needed to, watching the door swing shut behind Jerome, Damian caught his eye.

“You think he’s ready for this? Really ready, not just talented?”

“Talent gets you on the field, ready gets you through ninety minutes without falling apart.” Dane stood, cleats clicking against the concrete floor. “We’ll find out which one he’s got today.”

“And if he’s not?”

“Then we cover for him - same as we would for Daniel.” Dane clapped Damian on the shoulder and followed the rest of the team out into the tunnel, where the roar of an unfamiliar crowd was already building on the other side of the concrete.

The first half was a mess of miscommunication. Jerome drifted wide when the play called for him central, and twice Dane had to sprint the length of the pitch to cover a gap Jerome left behind, lungs burning by the twentieth minute in a way he hadn’t felt since preseason conditioning. The Raptors’ number nine clipped him hard on a fifty-fifty ball, and the referee waved play on like it hadn’t happened at all.

“That was a foul!” Dane shouted, jogging backward, already thinking about Daniel lying in a hospital bed because a referee somewhere else had made the same call.

At the half, Coach Miles gathered them by the sideline cooler, jaw tight, water bottles passed hand to hand without anyone really drinking from them.

“Jerome, you’re playing like you’re trying to win the match by yourself, you’ve got a team, use them.”

“I had two clean looks, Coach.”

“And zero goals.. pass the damn ball.” Miles crouched down to eye level with the whole group now, voice dropping. “Every one of you is thinking about Daniel right now. I get it, but thinking about him and playing scared because of what happened to him are two different things. Play brave, play smart, not reckless.”

Second half, something shifted, Jerome dropped back once, twice, and actually found Oscar with a clean through-ball that should’ve been a goal if Oscar’s first touch hadn’t betrayed him and sent it rolling harmlessly wide. By the seventieth minute, the Raptors’ defense had started collapsing around Jerome every time he touched it, which left a lane open on the left that nobody but Dane seemed to notice.

“Jerome! Left side, now!” Dane bellowed, and for once, Jerome listened.

The ball found Dane in space, he didn’t think, just struck it low and hard, and it skipped past the keeper’s outstretched glove into the corner of the net.

The bench exploded, Jerome jogged over, breathing hard, and clapped Dane once on the shoulder.

“That’s how it’s done,” Jerome said, no ego in it for once.

“Told you he could talk to grass and still play ball,” Oscar shouted from the sideline, arms in the air, already filming himself for a highlight reel nobody had asked him to make.

The Raptors leveled it in the final ten minutes off a set piece nobody picked up, a header that clipped the underside of the crossbar and dropped in cruelly, and the match ended in a draw. Not the outcome anyone wanted, but Coach Miles didn’t look as grim as Dane expected on the bus ride home.

Inside the visitors’ locker room, nobody spoke for a full minute after Miles walked in. He set his clipboard down on the bench with a flat smack that made a few heads turn.

“Jerome, good half after a bad one. That’s not something everybody can do.” He let the words sit before turning to Oscar. “You had two touches that should’ve been goals. Fix your first touch before Thursday or Damian starts in your place.”

“Copy that, Coach.”

“Dane.” Miles’s eyes settled on him longer than the others. “You covered three men’s worth of ground out there today, that’s not sustainable. I need Jerome learning the position faster, not you burning yourself out compensating for him.”

“I can handle it.”

“That’s not the question I asked.” Miles pulled his jacket off the hook and slung it over his shoulder. “Get iced, get on the bus. we’ll talk formations Thursday.”

Jerome caught Dane by the arm on the way out, voice lower than his usual bravado. “Thanks for calling me over, left side. I wouldn’t have seen it myself.”

“You saw it, you just needed someone yelling loud enough to trust it.” Dane shrugged him off, not unkindly. “Keep playing like the second half, and Damian won’t get a look in.”

“That’s the plan.”

“A draw against a team that wants blood isn’t a loss,” Miles said, mostly to himself, staring out at the dark highway. “It’s data.”

Jerome sat two rows up, quieter than he’d been all day, replaying something on his phone that Dane guessed was probably his own missed chances. Damian leaned across the aisle and bumped his fist against Jerome’s arm without a word, and for the first time all season, the bench and the starters looked like one team instead of two.

Dane’s phone buzzed against his thigh, a text from an unknown number, no name attached.

Unknown: “Tell your coach to watch his back. Eric’s not done.”

Dane stared at it for a long moment, thumb hovering over the reply box, the bus’s dim overhead light making the screen too bright in the dark.

Dane: “Who is this?”

No response came. He looked up toward the front of the bus, where Coach Miles sat with his head tilted against the window, eyes closed, unaware that whatever quiet had settled over the season was about to be tested again.

Dane thought about waking him, about handing over the phone and watching Miles’s face change the way it had the night of Daniel’s injury. But the bus was dark and half asleep, and whatever this threat was, it could wait until morning light made it feel less like a ghost story and more like something they could actually plan around. He locked his phone and slid it back into his pocket, but he didn’t sleep the rest of the ride home, watching the mile markers pass instead and running the message over in his mind until it stopped making sense as words at all.