She types, the sound of clicking away, while she makes the smallmmof a woman who has been hoping the spreadsheet would say something different this time and has just confirmed, for the fourth viewing, that it has not.
“So, we have a wrinkle.”
Wrinkle?
We love wrinkles.
“Due to,” Patricia goes on, finally tipping her glasses down at me, “unforeseen enrollment this semester, the Omega housing block is at full capacity. There is no bed available for you in the standard Omega residence.”
I sit with that for a beat.
“Unforeseen.”
“Unforeseen.”
“I was personally invited to attend this college, Mrs. Henderson, six weeks ago. By the head coach of the men’s hockey program. With a scholarship that requires me to be housed somewhere with a roof.”
“I understand.” Patricia is unmoved.Patricia has heard worse.“I did not say there was no housing. I said there was no Omega housing. There is a difference, and I am about to walk you through it.”
She tucks the glasses back up her nose and rotates her monitor a degree, which is not so much sharing the screen as making it slightly easier for her to read at me.
“Your options. Option one. You take a placement in the figure skating residence. Scent-neutral facility, mandatory check-in at twenty-two-hundred hours, no overnight guests, no closed doors during quiet hours, dorm mother on staff. Most of our female athletes find it perfectly comfortable.”
“Dorm mother?”
“Dorm Mother.”
“I am twenty-four years old.” Does she really need a reminder that just because we’re Omegas doesn’t mean we’re children? We’re adults…no different to Alphas.
“So are most of the figure skaters. They like her. She makes biscuits.”
I sit withshe makes biscuitsfor a long, dignified moment.
“Option two.”
“Option two.”
Patricia’s mouth thins by half a hair.
“Option two is the hockey team housing.”
Now we are getting somewhere.
I lean forward an inch.
“The hockey program operates on a split-sector arrangement,” Patricia recites, in the tone of a woman reading the safety briefing for the four-thousandth time. “Two team houses, one assigned to each sector of the roster. The system has been in place at North Star for the past nineteen years. Athletes live with their sector. It encourages cohesion.”
“Two houses,” I repeat. “Two halves of the team.”
“Correct.”
“Which means, theoretically, I could be assigned to one of them.”
Patricia removes the reading glasses entirely. Sets them on the desk. Folds her hands.
The body language of a woman about to give me the polite version of something impolite.
“Sector one,” she begins. “Captained, I am told, by an Alpha named Brennan. Senior leadership includes Mr. Voss. I gather from the program director that you have already had the pleasure of meeting both gentlemen this morning. In the doorway of this very building.”
