Spontaneous (5 page)

M
onday was Halloween and school was back in session. The majority of kids and teachers skipped the getups entirely. I spotted a few “laser loafers” in the hall as a tribute to Brian, but that was the extent of the masquerading. Everyone was trying to pretend that things were back to normal, or at least the type of normal where you play football again.

All sports seasons had been put on pause after Brian, because obviously fit and limber kids need free time to grieve and freak out, the same as the rest of us sloths. Certain parents weren't thrilled about the hiatus, though, and they had a point. Our teams were usually state ranked, playoffs were around the corner, and there were college scholarships at stake. Not for Tess, necessarily, but it was still a vital part of her high school experience. While I didn't give a single shit about sports myself, I could at least appreciate that many of my peers depended on them for their health, sanity, and future.

The majority appreciated that too. After an open session of the PTA that Sunday, democracy declared
Play Ball!
, starting Friday with a football game against crosstown rivals, Bloomington. It was a rescheduled version of the previous week's homecoming game, there were apparently “playoff implications
,
” and while there would be no dance and no parade with floats ferrying high school royalty, the stands would be full of current and former students and anyone who wanted to give a defiant finger to our predicament.

For most kids, football games weren't ever about the football. These sporting events were excuses to hang out in the bleachers and catch up with friends, or lounge behind the bleachers in the softball fields, where blankets could be spread out and kids could watch the stars in the sky instead of the ones on the field. These brutal battles were distractions from our cloak-and-dagger variety of partying, where booze mixed with Gatorade was smuggled past lazy-eyed security guards. These rousing contests were perfect for covert kissing in the shadows and heart-to-hearts scored to the sounds of cheering parents and girlfriends.

The homecoming game was going to be my first date with Dylan. It was his idea and the arrangements were made by text, since there wasn't much time in econ to discuss such things. As the week chugged along, the three stories and their subplots fizzled in my head and mixed with the dizzying memory of his hand on my hand. I know, I know. Getting all worked up by a little hand-holding? Total middle school. Elementary school, even. But when you think about it, hand-holding can be really sexy, especially when you're holding the hand of someone who may or may not be any number of things.

Was I leery of Dylan? Obviously. Was I excited about seeing him again? Uh . . . yeah. During lunch on Wednesday, Tess made me promise to be careful. “If he's half the things we think he is,” she said, “I'm not sure you want to be alone with him.”

“That's why the football game is perfect,” I said. “Plenty of people around, but no one listening in on us.”

“I wish I didn't have practice that night. I want to watch over you.”

“That's sweet. But that's also creepy. I'll be fine. What are you worried about? That he'll fill me with quadruplets during halftime or that he'll douse me in gasoline to celebrate every touchdown?”

Tess took a potato chip from my bag and poked me playfully on the nose with it. “Do you really want to get close to someone who has three kids? Plus all the other stuff? Do you want to have a look inside all his baggage?”

I snatched the chip from Tess's hand, stuffed it in my mouth, and as I chewed, I said, “I've got plenty of baggage myself.”

“A carry-on at best. This guy would have to pay hundreds of dollars to check his.”

“Is Walsh doing a unit on metaphors in AP English or something? Because I don't think you get extra credit for using such pathetic ones, especially outside of class.”

“I should poison your drink,” Tess said with a fake sneer as she watched me take a slug from my strawberry smoothie.

“Should, but never would,” I said as I wiped my mouth. “You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because you would be sad. You would feel . . . All. The. Feels.”

Tess raised a finger. “How dare you? You know how I hate those words.”

“You won't hate those words when they're on the cover of my novel, the blockbusting award-winner that I dedicate
To My Darling Tessy
.”

“Royalties,” she said as she patted me on the cheek. “Dedications are sweet, but cutting me in on the profits would be a whole lot better.”

“Fine,” I replied. “I'll be your sugar mama until the end of days. I'll keep your toes dipped in sand and your body draped in silk.”

She put out a hand out and I shook it. The deal was officially sealed.

F
ront row center.

Or so said the text from Dylan that arrived Friday afternoon. I got a ride to the game with the Dalton twins because Dylan hadn't offered one. I figured there wasn't enough room on his skateboard.

The Daltons shared a red RAV4 bought with money they made bussing tables at Covington Club, the restaurant at our local golf course. At least that's where they told their parents they got the cash. In reality, the majority of their income was the redirected allowances of kids who partook in illegal plants and pills. Kids like the late great Katelyn Ogden. Like me.

Joe Dalton was older than Jenna Dalton by a few minutes, but he was definitely the younger at heart. And mind. Since he was supposedly one of the guys with Dylan the night the QuickChek burned down, I could have asked him if the whole Molotov cocktail thing was true, but I wasn't sure I wanted the answer to spoil
my evening. So instead I sat quietly in the back, while he drove and argued with Jenna about whether it would be better to retire to Florida or Buenos Aires.

Joe was advocating, poorly, in favor of Florida. “Bikinis, bottle service, and alligators, Jenna! Doesn't get any better!”

Jenna, on the other hand, was selling Buenos Aires like a real estate agent, highlighting “the mild climate, the European flavor, the dancing till dawn, and the steaks as big as laptops.”

After a while, they seemed to forget I was there and were trading inside insults, which are like inside jokes but even worse because as Joe hollered, “You're such an Aunt Jessica!” and Jenna yelled, “Go puke on Donald Duck again,” I had no idea who was winning. It was getting unbearably loud and so I started fantasizing about the two of them screaming themselves to death and leaving me all their drug money so I could hop on the back of Dylan's skateboard and the two of us could catch the next plane to Argentina where we'd forge a new life full of red. Red wine. Red meat. Red-hot love.

When we reached the lot for the football field, I slipped out with a “mucho appreciation, amigos,” and hightailed it to the bleachers. The fight song was pumping and the seats were as full as I'd ever seen them, but sure enough, there was Dylan in the front row with a bag of popcorn next to him, saving me a seat.

“Here I am,” I said, and sucked in a deep breath. I was not in shape. I had never been in shape.

He pulled the popcorn to his lap, revealing a buttery stretch of aluminum for me to sit on. “And there you go,” he said, but he failed to wipe any of the sludge away. It didn't bother me,
necessarily, though it did leave me with a decision. I didn't see any napkins, and I didn't want to be a pain in the ass from the get-go and ask him to fetch me some. I especially didn't want to call him out for being either clueless or inconsiderate. So I was left with a choice between having a buttery hand or a buttery butt.

Protip: Always avoid the buttery butt.

And that's what I did. I ran a hand across the seat a couple of times while Dylan was watching the referee flip a coin. As I sat, I flicked the butter down into the chasm beneath the bleachers. “What the, what the—?” muttered some poor dope who must've been beneath me, but that was all I heard because the crowd went absolutely apeshit when our team won the coin toss.
The coin toss
. It was going to be that kind of game.

“So,” I said once the cheering petered out. “You prefer the bleachers to, I don't know, somewhere we don't have to actually watch the game?”

“I'm looking forward to the game,” he said without even a hint of sarcasm.

“You are?”

“Sure. I've been a fan of the Quakers since I was a kid.”

Yes, you heard that right. We are the tenacious, the proud, the fearsome . . . Quakers! It goes back over three hundred years to when this area consisted of a few scattered communities of Quakers who didn't make it as far as Pennsylvania. The lazy Quakers, if you will. We're a public school now, without any religious or philosophical affiliations, except for a mascot who basically looks like the guy from the oatmeal box, except with a Quakerly sneer in place of a Quakerly smile.

“So always a Quakers fan, huh?” I said, because I didn't know what else to say to something like that. And then it dawned on me. “But wait, didn't you move here during sixth grade?”

“I've always been here,” he said. “Sixth grade was when I started taking classes. I was homeschooled until then.”

“Oh. That's news to me.”

“News to most people,” he replied, and as he spoke, he kept his eyes on the Bloomington players preparing to kick off, sizing them up like my grandpa used to size up horses at the track. “My dad died of a stroke that year. Out in a field while laying down some fertilizer. He was a dairy farmer, but he also helped my mom teach me. Once he was gone, it was too much for Mom to do alone, so I was transferred to the
general population
.”

He put his hands out and motioned to the crowd, which leapt from the bleachers as Jalen Howard caught the opening kick and returned it to the forty-yard line.

“That must have been tough,” I hollered over the noise.

Dylan shrugged. “Another Hovemeyer for your dad's favorite graveyard.”

It was a callback to the night at my house. And it was funny. Not because Dylan's dad was dead and buried, but because my dad is definitely the type of guy who would have a favorite graveyard. After all, he has a favorite public restroom (Covington Town Library, second floor), a favorite fire hydrant (the shiny blue one on Gleason Street), and a favorite park bench (the warped beauty in Sutter Park he calls Ol' Lucy).

So I laughed. And Dylan smiled.

“I never pegged you for a football fan,” I said.

“Drama,” he said. “There's always a different story. I like drama. I like stories.”

Our quarterback, Clint Jessup, threw an errant pass that went into the bleachers and the crowd let out a collective sigh. “What's the story this time?” I asked.

“Depends on your religion.”

“Meaning?”

He turned to me and his beaming face opened him up like a sunrise opens up a landscape. “This is a resurrection story. We're back.”

W
e
were
back. Our team had gone into the game as underdogs. Bloomington was a perennial powerhouse and we'd missed far too many practices to realistically compete. But compete we did. Leads were exchanged, and new numbers were constantly lighting up the scoreboard.

There was a certain amount of excitement and it was fascinating to see Dylan glued to every pass and tackle, but it confirmed to me that no matter how much drama there was, I still didn't care about sports.

What I did care about, however, was Harper Wie, Perry Love, and Steve Cox. They were players on our team. Benchwarmers, basically. Which was important. More than any touchdown, I wanted to see the three of them sit next to each other on the bench.

Why ever would you want to see something so mundane, you ask? Well, it goes back to junior year. In general, I don't have a problem with football players. At Covington High, they're mostly
nice guys. They don't beat up people in the bathrooms. They don't cheat their way through classes (as far as I know). They don't record their dalliances with cheerleaders and post them on RaRaBang.com or whatever the amateur porn site
du jour
is called. Sure, they're not saints, but they're usually too busy being football players to be much of anything else. Harper Wie, Perry Love, and Steve Cox were the exception. Or at least they were for a brief moment, and sometimes all it takes is a brief moment.

It was a Friday last fall and they were wearing their jerseys, as is the custom on game days. They were sitting together in the cafeteria when I walked by them and I heard Perry say, “Oh, what a glorious fag he was, the faggiest fag in all the land, and his fagginess will be missed, the fag.”

Or something to that effect, give or take a fag or two.

It made the two other guys burst out in laughter and made me immediately want to wring their necks. It wasn't really Perry's choice of words, which were more or less baby shit—gross, but juvenile and inconsequential. It was the target of his slurs. It had to be Mr. Prescott, our art teacher. He had passed away the week before and the school newspaper was planning to run an obituary. Perry was the editor and I had it on good authority (the authority being Tess, who worked on the paper too) that Mr. Prescott was gay. Not closeted, but not exactly advertising his lifestyle. The staff had been discussing whether to include this fact in his obituary. He was survived, they'd learned, by a partner named Bill. The two had been together for years, but they didn't bother to get married, even when they were legally allowed. Maybe they didn't care about marriage. I don't know.

Now, the death of Mr. Prescott was undoubtedly sad. But he was old. In his eighties, I think. Retirement was like marriage for him, I suppose. Never in the cards. Being an art teacher is a pretty mellow gig, after all. And it wasn't like he was my mentor or even my favorite teacher. But still, there's something about young men making fun of old men that really gets to me.

Go ahead and make fun of people your parents' age. Make fun of your peers. Make fun of babies, even. Old people, though? Completely off-limits. And recently dead old people? Please. Why would I even have to explain how fucked up that is? Which—flashing forward to my football date with Dylan—is why I wanted to see them lined up together on the bench. Harper Wie, Perry Love, and Steve Cox, in that exact order.

Still don't get it? Let me explain.

Football players have their last names sewn on the backs of their jerseys, and it may not be the world's perfect pun, but when you get Wie (pronounced We), Love, and Cox lined up and you snap a pic and post that shit on Instagram . . . well, it isn't exactly justice for them being a triumvirate of homophobic, ageist pubes, but there's a certain poetry to it. At least that's what I was telling myself.

So there we were, Dylan and I on a date—him watching football and me watching the bench. My phone was set to camera and resting on my thigh like I was a regular gunslinger. I couldn't settle for Wie Cox, which actually happened a couple of times. Because while that might have played well in Scotland, I needed the bingo, especially since Perry Love was the ringleader of the bunch.

During the moments my eyes weren't poised on the bench, they
were resting on Dylan. For most of the game, he was calm, studying the action and—when there wasn't any action, which was most of the time—studying the coaches or the huddles. He seemed to be analytical about it all at first, subtly shaking or nodding his head as he dissected decisions. But as the game went on, and the crowd got more riled up, something changed in Dylan. He didn't become the frothing-at-the-mouth chest-painter I imagined most rabid sports fan to be. He became something much more charming.

He became a kid. Whenever our team made a big play, he'd lean forward in his seat, gripping the edge like gravity was going to give out at any moment. Whenever Bloomington snatched back the advantage, he'd clench his teeth and rap the seats with his knuckles and send little tremors through my thighs. And in the fourth quarter, whenever things got particularly tense, he'd reach over and grab my hand, and shake it gently.

There had been chatting during the game. I had asked questions about what was happening and he had explained (in what were supposedly layman's terms) about formations and strategies, though I don't remember even a word of it. What I do remember was his tone. It wasn't condescending. It wasn't “let me explain some man stuff to this precious little doll.” Again, he was a kid. He was excited and proud. He might as well have been talking about his Legos.

So every time he grabbed my hand, I was holding a kid's hand and it was cute and innocent and it wasn't at all like holding Dylan's hand in my living room a few days before. The gentle shakes were the ones I recognized from my youngest cousins, the can-you-believe-that-we're-at-a-water-park-and-there-are-
waterslides-and-oh-boy-I-could-pee-my-pants-right-this-minute! variety of shakes
.

Kids grow up, though, and the kid version of Dylan went through puberty in the final seconds of the game. The scoreboard read Bloomington 38 and Covington 33. We had the ball at the fifty-yard line. Twenty seconds left on the clock. I'd seen enough movies to know that this was why people loved sports. Underdogs making good and last-second scores. Everyone on our team was wearing two black armbands, for chrissakes. Emotion to spare, my friends.
To spare
.

And Bloomington wasn't taking it easy on us out of sympathy. They were snarling, punching, and gouging. “It's a sign of respect,” Dylan explained. “No true athlete wants to be a charity case. This is the way it should be.”

The crowd was singing the alma mater, which pretty much never happens because it's a creepy bit of propaganda about “merging together as one, for the honor of mighty Covington.” Still, in this context, it was appropriate. We had suffered together and together we were fighting through it, one throbbing mass of cheers and tears. We didn't need to win this game necessarily, but we needed people to remember this game. Even a girl who doesn't care about sports can be on board with that.

Our quarterback, Clint Jessup, was doing a hell of a job, but with twenty seconds left on the clock, he buckled over and started puking on the field. I'm not sure if there are rules about such things, but I think that even in football, puking puts you on the sidelines for a play or two. Because that's exactly where Clint headed. Helmet on the ground, head in his hands, he stumbled to the bench.

“They don't have any timeouts left, so they gotta go with Deely,” Dylan said with a groan. “Deely has never even taken a varsity snap.”

Deely was Malik Deely. From pre-calc. And support group. The one cool head in our woeful bunch. He was the team's backup quarterback, which, from what I could gather, meant he stood around holding a clipboard all game until the last twenty seconds when he was expected to come in and save the day because our number one guy was too vomity.

“Don't worry, Malik can handle pressure,” I assured Dylan and Dylan gave me a you-better-be-right look, and it was that exact moment that he changed, that the hand-holding changed, that the charming became charged. He squeezed my fingers—a little too hard at first perhaps—but when he eased up, he soothed things by stroking them. He ran a fingertip over my palm, almost as though he were writing a message on it.

Maybe it was the crowd pulsing around us or the sweaty anxiety all over the field, but it was an unbearably sexy moment, at least for me. And when Malik Deely lined up behind his teammates and started barking out the play, I was basically at a point where I wanted to pull Dylan in and stuff my face in his neck and nuzzle, nuzzle, nuzzle. Weird, I know, and may not seem all that hot to you, but when you want something at a certain moment and you're not sure whether you can have it, but you know that it's within the realm of possibility if only you have the courage to go after it . . . well, I don't care who you are or what that thing you want is, the simple fact is this: It's fucking hot.

Problem this time was that I didn't go after it. It didn't seem right to distract Dylan. Because as Dylan ran that fingertip over my palm, and I thought about scorched convenience stores and dancing triplets and infinite nuzzling, Malik Deely took his first varsity snap.

I'm not exactly a sportscaster, so I'm not sure the best way to describe what happened next, but here goes.

Malik had the ball, raised up like he was ready to pass, and he moved left and right, looking downfield to see if there was anyone open. Two of the defenders from Bloomington pushed past the guys who were supposed to be blocking them and they closed in on Malik.

“Jarowski!” Dylan yelled, as did almost everyone else in the crowd, because the lumbering lunk named Jared Jarowski had broken free. But it was too late. The defenders were pouncing on Malik and Malik was bringing the ball to his chest and curling into a fetal position.

A collective gasp. And then . . . a collective cheer. Somehow, Malik slid out from under the two defenders without being tackled and there was an open patch of grass in front of him.

“Go! Go! Go!” Dylan hollered, tapping my hand with each
go!

Malik went. He burst forth with the ball tucked under his arm. He reached the forty-yard line, then the thirty-five, then the thirty.

Defenders pursued. Malik spun out of danger and kept running. He stuck an arm out and knocked a guy over. He hurdled another guy. He was at the twenty-five, then the twenty.

I'll admit it. Football wasn't entirely boring. I could see the
clock was in the single digits. I was as wrapped up in it as anyone else. A few of the guys on our team made some amazing blocks, throwing their bodies in front of Bloomington players who were nipping at Malik's heels.

“Please no flags, please no flags, please no flags,” Dylan chanted as Malik hit the fifteen and then the ten.

It was almost too good to be true. A touchdown would win it for us. We didn't even need to make the extra point. Get the ball into the end zone, spike the thing, dance a dance, and call it a day. But when Malik reached the five-yard line, it happened.

He dropped the ball.

The crowd howled. The ball bounced once. Almost everyone within a five-yard radius dove for it. Malik didn't need to dive though, because on the ball's second bounce, he caught it. A shuffle, two leaps, a dive, and he was in.

Touchdown!

Nuts
is not the word for what the crowd went.
Psychotic
is more like it. The stands shook as Quaker fans threw themselves on each other, over each other, and into the field. The band tried to break into the fight song, but the pandemonium sent their trumpets and tubas flying and the only sound they made was the clang of brass on bleachers.

I was hugging Dylan. I hardly realized it. Our hands were now clutching at each other's sides and we were hugging and hopping up and down and I was laughing myself to bits and it was magnificent in so many ways. The noise. The vibrations. The feeling of his chest pressing against mine.

Down on the field, teammates were surrounding Malik and
howling in his face like a bunch of Vikings, as players from Bloomington lay scattered on the grass, collapsed with exhaustion or doubled over and head-butting the ground in frustration.

In the stands at the opposite sideline, where the collection of Bloomington fans were either sulking or politely clapping in appreciation of our perseverance, I spotted two familiar faces. Special Agents Carla Rosetti and Demetri Meadows, dressed like they were on the job, stood side by side, intently watching something. But it wasn't Malik.

Rosetti raised her arm and pointed while Meadows raised his phone and tilted it sideways to take a picture of our team's bench. I figured our bench had cleared the second Malik had scored, but I was wrong. There were two players standing in front of it. Frozen.

The backs of their jerseys read
WIE
and
COX
. But there was a gap between them, an open space. Scanning the remaining players on the field, I realized I had missed my moment. So had Agent Meadows. Because a few seconds before, Perry Love had been standing in that open space.

WIE LOVE COX
.

Terrible, terrible joke. I can't believe I thought it would be funny, or suitable revenge. But whatever it was, it would never happen again. Because Perry Love was now splattered all over their jerseys.