by Scott Brown
Then she put that beautiful biscuit in the trash and walked out. Against every animal instinct, I left it there. I got out of that Carl’s Jr. I was off to do more damage.
Game Day. I was just getting started.
* * *
—
My self-loathing was definitely on the upswing. But it was [jack]’s loathing of me that put Game Day over the top, sent it into the record books of Epic Awfulness.
The picture started making its infectious rounds a little under an hour before tip-off, when the Harps would face puny West Mira Mesa and presumably waltz to the semifinals.
[jack] was a master of his trade. Knew his high school news cycles.
I was headed to the gym when I heard about it. Rafty met me ten steps from the door.
“Don’t go in there.”
“Huh?”
Rafty took a deep breath. “First off, I forgive you. For the backboard. I see now: it was a demonstration. Powerful messaging, really. I only wish the camera’d been on.”
“Raf, I’m sorry about the backboard. I’ll pay for it. But I gotta get—”
“Not yet. Lemme brief you first. Fact is: we’re in crisis mode.”
“What? What are you talking—”
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing the team can’t handle.”
“Don’t say team. There’s no team. Also: WHAT?”
Finally Rafty showed me his phone.
And I saw why he hadn’t been eager to.
It was a new image. [jack’s] handiwork, obviously. Lots of helpful arrows and things, annotations, etc. It had been taken at night, and the image was wreathed in the porny greenish glow of infrared. Technology is wonderful.
The image showed the parking lot at Black’s. And two people who—stupidly, I realize—thought they were alone: Monica and yours truly, Grow-liath, stripped to the waist. You couldn’t see Monica’s face; her back was to the camera. But her shirt was off. And Grow-liath was staring at her. Grow-liath was rapt.
(What Grow-liath was looking at, of course, were the old scars on Monica’s ribs, the ones that looked like a bear mauling. The ones I’d thought were from Martin. The ones Martin said were from Monica, trying to destroy herself.)
At first the image didn’t seem to add much to the existing rumor: Will Daughtry was hooking up with his stepbrother’s girlfriend, their mutual pal. Everybody knew that. I mean, did you hear? She lives with them now! All salacious enough on its own.
Ah, but there was more.
The headline for this photo was a bit farther south.
Around Grow-liath’s fabled midsection. At the corner of Pelvis and Rumor.
In the night vision, there could be discerned…by the discerning…or by the just plain old pervy…a shape. “Fusiform” is what the sea cucumber researchers might’ve called this shape.
The shape in the photo was—to use a ninety-dollar Monica word—tumescent. A dopey cartoon bomb of a thing, pointed more or less straight at Monica.
You could almost hear the cartoon bomb whistle sound that went with it.
It was just my rolled-down wet suit, of course, but that didn’t matter. If the shape fits, share it. And lies don’t need much traction if they’re based on a true story.
“We can spin this,” said Rafty. “There’s precedent. In fact, it could be our friend. Our little friend. Our not-so-little friend, right?”
“Rafty…”
“Kidding! Sorry! Look, two pieces of advice: Don’t go to the game. And…if you would just…say the Scarface line into my phone?”
“What?”
“ ‘Say hello to my little friend!’ Just say it into my phone, let me record it? I could attach it to the picture, and we can get in front of the story with a little irony, a little self-parody—”
“Rafty.”
“Totally kidding. But…not kidding. This could add! To your mystique! Will! Where’re you going? Come back! We can leverage this!”
* * *
—
I went into the gym. Against managerial advice.
I wasn’t sure if Drew had seen the picture, or if Monica had. I only knew I needed to see them. To talk this through. To make a plan. Or change the Plan. Or replan. Something. Anything.
I ended up sitting right behind the Harps’ pep band as C+C Music Factory’s whatever-that-one-song-is assaulted my eardrums. The bleachers shook with chaos and brassy blatting, because the Harps were one quarter into completing their ceremonial annual pummeling of West Mira Mesa, an annual Feast of Beatdownery that even WMM’s long-suffering fans seemed to enjoy. News 8 had its spidery viscera, wires and such, spattered all over one end of the gym. Tonight, local media was here for Drew and Drew alone.
I searched the stands and found Monica next to Laura and Brian. She gave me zero direct eye contact. It was still more than I deserved.
And yet.
She’d kissed back.
Fweeeet!
Game on.
Drew was in the zone. And the zone was sealed off, air-locked, quarantined. In the zone, Drew breathed only the canned air of Purpose, Mission, GAME.
It’d been a waltz for West Mira Mesa so far. An accident of bracketing had pushed this team, a mediocre-to-bad squad, right into the slaughterhouse chute that was Keseberg. They were poised for a hard Harping.
But they were about to get an assist from a remarkable player.
Andrew Michael Tannenger.
He hung on a good long time before it all came down, like a casino on fire.
Third quarter, and the Harps were up by twenty. No surprise.
Then West Mira started fouling. Fouling Drew. Fouling like crazy.
Pretty soon, the whole game was just Drew at the line.
Which should’ve been the end of it. Because Drew was great at the line.
Like, 78 percent for the season.
That night? He hit two of thirteen.
They weren’t even respectable misses. Drew was bricklaying. And every time he did, he’d shake his head, like there was something in there he was trying to shake loose.
I knew what it was. So did everyone else.
Except Brian and Laura, who didn’t understand.
Across the bleachers, I lip-read Laura asking, “Is he sick?”
I lip-read Monica saying nothing.
Drew ponged one off the back of the rim. His seventh miss in a row, and I watched the zone collapse. Implode, like a nuclear sub sinking to depths it wasn’t designed to tolerate, crushed by pressures no one ever imagined it would have to cope with. Trying to recover the rebound, he fouled. His fourth. With eight minutes left.
And that’s when Drew…laughed.
I couldn’t hear it over the noise, but I saw him laughing. I saw his teammates look at him like he’d sprouted a tail. And I knew just from looking: it was a crazy laugh. An all-done laugh. An O.K. Corral, hail-of-bullets kind of laugh.
His eyes met mine.
I shook my head at him: No. Don’t do whatever it is you’re thinking of doing.
Drew was still laughing as he was setting up for the inbound. The Mira center passed him on his way to the key, said something to him.
I could guess what. But it didn’t matter, because—
—Drew punched the guy right in the face.
The geyser of blood that came shooting from the big man’s nose was truly impressive, and showed up really well, from multiple angles, on the literally hundreds of videos made of that moment.
Here’s the other thing you can see on the video: Drew, blood on his hand, wheeling…and pointing to me.
That was for you….
Oh, I had no doubt.
Whistles blew. Refs converged. Madness reigned.
I looked over at Brian and Laura, clambering down the bleachers to get to Drew,
who was being escorted off the court by Coach Gut and Eric Forchette.
Monica was gone.
You don’t need a play-by-play from here, I don’t think.
* * *
—
Drew was ejected, with the possibility of suspension for the remainder of the postseason. But that wasn’t necessary, because four minutes later, the Harps’ postseason was over. Without Drew—and totally blindsided, completely demoralized—they just fell apart. Crummy old West Mira Mesa, on the other hand, saw a nice fat corpse to feast on. They were avenging their big man and his big, squirty broken nose. The slaughter was vast and epic. (By which I mean: the Harps lost by seven. Against West Mira Mesa, that’s like losing by fifty.)
A program, a legacy, and a Plan with a capital P—this whole starry constellation of possibilities—sank into the ocean. Just like that.
* * *
—
I couldn’t go to Drew, couldn’t comfort him. What was I supposed to say? I wish you’d punched me?
I couldn’t explain to Brian and Laura why I couldn’t go to Drew.
I couldn’t go to Monica, because chances were, Monica was somewhere waiting for Drew. I even hoped she was. He needed her.
So I went to the woods.
Not just any woods.
The woods.
But first I sent a message.
* * *
—
The message I sent was addressed to two recipients: Spencer Inskip and his thinly veiled troll persona, [jack]. Copied ’em both. Why beat around the bush?
When you can burn the bush?
Isn’t that a thing? Like, in the Bible? “We’ll burn that bush when we come to it”?
WillD: hey buddy! let’s do that thing we keep putting off. let’s do it tonight. you and me. the woods next to the party toilet. bring all your bones so i can break them. one by one.
And then I headed for the Party Toilet, my Fiat reaching speeds Fiats rarely reach when they’re not being pushed off cliffs.
I sat on the stump of the fallen tree, the place where I’d had the misfortune to cross paths with Spencer Inskip last spring, putting me back on his sociopathic radar for the first time since middle school.
Now it was his turn to have a misfortune. If he showed.
He had to. He just had to. I needed this so badly. A monster needed slaying tonight.
“Daughtry, what the hell?”
Spencer. He’d come. He’d actually come.
“Oh, thank God,” I actually said, mostly to myself.
I wanted to squeeze his head off like a childproof bottle top, empty his contents all over the pine needles. I was so happy he’d showed. I was so grateful.
“Hi, [jack].”
Spencer sauntered into the light. “What’s jack? Your safe word?”
He was a head shorter and eighty pounds lighter than I was now.
This seemed almost cruel. It nearly gave me pause.
Luckily, he kept talking. And sauntering. Right into twisting/squeezing range.
“Heard you dumped my ex,” said Spencer, inspecting the clearing like he was thinking of moving in. “Well done. Power move. I can confirm: she gets more irritating over time.”
I cocked a fist back, with every intention of sending it right through Spencer’s skull—
—and was surprised to find myself suddenly on the ground.
Something of substantial mass had collided with me from behind, sent me tumbling down like the towering rage inferno I was.
Something…rhomboid.
Of course he hadn’t come alone. Parallelogram and Quadrilateral were there, too.
Four against one.
Weirdest part was, this little wrinkle kinda made me happy. I wasn’t the least bit worried now. Not because I was sure I’d win a one-on-four against beefed-up, daily-deadlifting football players. No, I was happy because all of this seemed fair—everybody, including me, seemed to be getting just what they deserved, and I was sure I’d like the outcome, no matter which way the wave broke.
I started to get up. Parallelogram and Quadrilateral sat on me. Actually sat on me.
“Damn, Daughtry, you are a weird freakin’ beast,” Spencer was saying. He was seated on the log, kinda prim, straight-backed, great posture, Jane goddamned Austen.
“You troll the hell out of me for months, show up at football tryouts for one damned day, just to make me look like shit. Bang my ex. Run me down to all your new friends, ’cause you have all these new friends, ’cause all of a sudden, people think you’re an X-Man kinda freak instead of a special-ed kinda freak, and then, after I’ve almost forgotten I even gave a shit about you and your bullshit—you challenge me! To a fight! And since I’m such a nice guy, I’ll give you one.” He flicked his eyes at his boys. “Just had to even the odds a little. You understand.”
“I do understand,” I said.
And then I got up.
Upending two meaty polygons.
Spencer got up, too. He hadn’t realized quite how strong I’d gotten. I hadn’t realized it, either.
Suddenly the odds didn’t feel so even.
I enjoyed the look on his face so much. Too much. I’d actually made him afraid. I’d shown him a bigger monster.
Now I wanted to do more than show. I wanted him to feel it.
His henchshapes were thrown, literally and figuratively. But they were recovering. And arming themselves with tree limbs. Welp, I thought, here it is. Somebody’s going to the hospital, somebody’s going to jail. Either way: change will come.
Lucky for me, at that precise and fatal moment, when I was all too ready to throw everything away, two bright lights cut through the darkness.
Tires squealed. A car hopped the curb, pulled up grumbling over Jazzy’s wide green lawn.
Mutual What the hells united me with my enemies for a hot sec.
Drew? Monica? Rafty? None of them knew I was here.
A figure emerged from the car, backlit by halogens.
It took me a very, very, very long time to realize it was Ethan Neville.
The yearbook photographer. Returning to the scene of his forced intoxication last spring, when I’d found him draped over this very stump, barfing his guts out, with these very meatheads standing over him, laughing. Right before Sidney saved us both.
Ethan Neville had just driven his battered Hyundai Sonata across Jazzy’s lawn.
That was weird enough.
Then Ethan said, “Kill me.”
Spencer shrugged. “Okay.”
“No,” said Ethan. “Not you. Him.”
He pointed to me.
“I,” said Ethan Neville, in a Gandalfian voice I did not know he had, “am [jack].”
I just stared at him. Nothing was connecting.
Ethan clarified. Dropped the voice-of-God thing. “I’m…y’know, I’m [jack]. Your troll? I sent out the photos? I humiliated you? Hi.”
“You? What?” My head was full of Legos that didn’t quite fit. “Wh-why?”
Spencer started laughing. “Oh, my God. Is…this”—he pointed at Ethan—“why you’re here? Because you let this little shit stain wind you up?”
There came rumbling, hooting polygonal laughter. And suddenly it was all just one giant joke. All that fear and rage, balled up in anticipation of good old-fashioned male violence…just released itself. All over us. In a (I’m so sorry, but it’s true) spurt. It was like we’d been sprayed by baboons, and also we were the baboons doing the spraying.
I wasn’t angry. I was too confused to be angry. The adrenaline was draining fast.
I think Spencer sensed the derision wasn’t having quite the effect he’d hoped. So he got back in my face. Game move for a small man who’d, just a second ago, looked pretty terrified of me. So terrified, in fact, that h
e’d made me a little terrified of me.
“Hey, Will. You still want us to fuck you up?”
I made a thoughtful sound. “Um. No? I…I just don’t think that’s necessary now. Unless you do?”
I was very close to Spencer now. His backup boy band was too spread out in the confusion. There was nothing stopping me from a first strike. Strategic incompetence, inability to read a changing field of play: this is why Keseberg football sucked so hard.
Spencer digested all that. He was looking for an exit now, I could feel it. So I gave him one. Stepped aside. He hesitated a second, then started to go, with a dismissive hmf!
I have no idea why I couldn’t just leave it there.
“Spencer?”
He looked at me. Those empty eyes, those caves.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
One species peered into the face of another and saw no kinship. No common ancestor. And yet, just a few minutes before, we’d been the same animal. We could’ve died of each other’s diseases. That kind of closeness.
“Let’s go,” Spencer said to his polygons. “Give these two a moment alone. They deserve each other.” He walked back up the drive, bumping Ethan hard as he passed.
“He’s right,” said Ethan. “I deserve…whatever you’re gonna do to me.”
My high-metabolism inner lava mouse screamed for his blood.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Waiting to be pummeled.
The drama. I was so tired of mammals. All their heat and fuss.
I asked myself, What would a Great Creature from the Age of Fish do?
“Ethan? I’m taking you to fuckin’ Carl’s Jr.”
* * *
—
So I took him to fuckin’ Carl’s Jr.
I took my tormentor, the garbage troll who’d ruined my life, to Carl’s Jr.
For a long time, I just watched Ethan Neville eat a chicken sandwich. He had salt crusts on his cheeks, like slug trails, where his tears had dried. They wiggled when he chewed.
Finally I asked the natural question:
“Why?”
