by Marie G. Lee
Abogee was already up. He was sucking down a bowl of ramen. Well, Oodles of Noodles from Northland Foods to be exact. It was perfectly quiet except for that sound, the one that a drain makes right after it’s unclogged.
He looked at me a little quizzically, noodles hanging down from his mouth like a mop, but didn’t say anything, not even “good morning.” SCH-LOOP!
“Hi, Pop,” I said, not waiting for a reply. I slapped peanut butter and honey together to make four sandwiches. Mikko had turned me on to this combo, which was far tastier than the Spam-plus-mayo, warm and probably salmonella-laden by lunchtime, that Mrs. Knutson seemed to favor. It was nice of her to offer to make our lunches, but Young was always wondering if she was actually trying to kill us off so she could get new tenants. Maybe ones that didn’t go SCH-LOOP, SCH-LOOP in the wee hours of the morning.
I was out the door by five forty-five. The back of my teeth felt a little fuzzy—I’d forgotten to brush them. No big deal. In football, a certain amount of seasoning is required.
The air was heavy with moisture, which clung like pollen around the pale illumination of the street lamps. There was absolutely no sound except for the slight breathing noise the early morning makes. Perfect. The library was dark, like it was sleeping. I blew out clouds of breath and began jogging toward the school, not because I was late, but because I was feeling frisky.
I cut across the field by the school. Dew slobbered water all over my shoes. The sky had turned from frying-pan black to gunmetal gray. Another day.
Rom was the only one in the locker room when I arrived. This was the first time I had seen him without Jimmi Beargrease attached to his side.
“Hey, Rom,” I said as I sat down to change into my cleats. He didn’t look up. He was sitting there in his practice shirt, pants half hitched up over the hugest, hairiest thighs I’d ever seen.
Young was right. He did stink. It was the putrefying smell of someone who eats a lot of meat: digested gristle, muscle, veins, and melted fat.
“What are you?” he said, his voice flatter than the EKG of a dead person.
“What?”
He poked me as if he were testing a package of ground beef. “I said, what are you? A chink or a jap?”
Whoa. This guy was my teammate. Or was supposed to be.
“You have a very eloquent way of putting things,” I said. “I’m neither Chinese nor Japanese. I was born in Korea.”
I finished with my cleats, threw on my practice T-shirt. It crackled slightly, with salt.
“And what are you?” I asked, still trying to figure out exactly what he was getting at.
Rom growled. He reached over and poked me again. “Huh. I’m one hundred percent American, nigger—and don’t you forget it.”
Holy cow. This guy was calling me chink, jap, and nigger. I didn’t realize I was so many things to him.
The locker room door opened and a couple of guys shuffled in.
“Hey, Chan. Hey, Rom.”
I felt a slight chill in the breeze they’d let in, and then I realized I’d been sweating.
Jimmi didn’t show up to the morning practice. No one asked where he was, either. He was there in the afternoon, though. When I walked home with Mikko, I asked him about it.
“Oh, Jimmi lives in the Neeshawatin Res,” he said. “He’s Indian, if you haven’t guessed.”
“Hi, Mikko,” called a blond girl in an IRON RIVER CHEERLEADERS jacket. She licked an ice-cream cone as she eyed ALL-PRO.
Mikko half-waved at her.
“A few of the kids on the res go to school here,” he went on. “But it’s like almost an hour away. Jimmi can’t get in for practice in the morning, but Rom gives him a ride home at night.”
“Rom and Jimmi seem like a weird combination,” I said. “I mean, especially given Rom’s, uh, opinions.”
“It is kind of strange,” Mikko agreed. “But to each his own, I suppose.”
We walked down Iron Mining Way. Mikko lived on Taconite Avenue, where all the nice houses in town were.
“You live in that big house by the library, don’t you, Chanster?”
“Uh-huh.” Someday Mikko was going to find out we only rented the top floor of Mrs. Knutson’s house, but I didn’t want to tell him right now.
Tackling drills. Kearny would toss a ball to the runner, and the defensives went for the tackle.
Catch the friggin’ ball, I goaded myself. Mikko had given me some gloves with sticky fingers, kind of like the Korean grocer ones, and they helped.
“Hup,” said Kearny in a bored voice as he sent the ball into a lazy spiral. All eyes were on me as I moved out to get it.
“Down you go, jap boy,” hissed Jimmi, cutting me off at the knees and grinding my head into the ground.
Then, under cover of his back, he punched me, in the soft underbelly place where the pads don’t cover.
I saw green. The contents of my stomach rose upward, clamoring to become puke. “Gak.” I swallowed it. It burned the back of my throat.
“Kim, get up, you pansy,” Kearny yelled. “Toughen up.”
I forced myself to stand, hawked up some phlegm, and spat. There was dirt in my mouth guard.
Damn if I wasn’t going to kill Jimmi when the positions were reversed.
“Hup!” Jimmi ran out. I charged. His waist felt like a tree. It was like bringing down a water buffalo. One-two. I did it.
“Jeez-us—what’s that you’re doing, a dance?” Kearny sneered. “I thought I was going to be your date on Saturday.”
Jimmi snickered.
This was just one drill, one practice, I told myself.
The coaches told us to hit the showers, and I went with Mikko to do a few laps around the track. He always did extra after practice, ALL-PRO always went two hundred percent. I admire that in a guy.
Today we had a great view of the girls’ tennis team. Every so often, since the courts were next to the field, they ended up whopping their balls over the fence and had to come and pick them up.
“Who’s that?” I motioned to a girl whose hair was even blacker than Young’s and mine, and was so thick she had it tied on the top and bottom.
“Rainey Scarponi,” said Mikko. “Her dad owns Scarponi Sausages.”
I tried not to make it look like I was staring at her, but gads, she was beautiful: long legs, muscular arms, and that hair. I must have a thing for girls with messy hair.
“Put your eyes back in their sockets, would ya?” ALL-PRO gibed, punching me in the arm.
We ran, not talking anymore. At one point Mikko gave me a goofy, smirky smile, and I found myself grinning back, for absolutely no reason at all. We still didn’t say anything to each other. In the fading light our shadows made one shadow.
sixteen
“I joined the band,” Young announced at dinner. “I get free flute lessons fourth period.”
“Chotta,” said O-Ma, looking slightly relieved. As we had suspected, there were no Juilliard graduates teaching flute in Iron River.
“And also, we play all the football games, so I’ll get to watch Oppa.”
All eyes turned to Abogee.
His face actually softened the tiniest bit, the way wax softens when you warm it in your hand. He loved to watch Young play her flute and never missed a recital, come hell, high water, or earthquakes. So if she was getting an opportunity to play, even in a dorky school band, he would be grateful. And it would be due, at least somewhat, to my playing football—right? And we’d be doing something together.
When we were toddlers, O-Ma told us once, Abogee could not get enough of Young and me, the way we played together, the way we went waddling around hand in hand. “Your father used to sit for hours watching you two play,” she said. “Chan, you used to pat Young’s cheeks with your chubby little hand. It would make us all laugh—and want to cry a little bit too. It was so sweet.”
“Field goal practice, team one kicks,” Kearny yelled. Coach stood at the side, as he usually did, observing everything l
ike a hawk.
I was the kicker for team one. Jimmi kicked team two. We lined up in formation.
I waited for the snap.
A second later I was flat on my back, staring up at the sky, sparks of light swimming before my eyes. Stars of pain pulsed from my back, shoulders, legs, and head. Rom stood over me grinning, the way I think a poisonous snake would just after it bites someone.
“Buck up there, Kim,” yelled Kearny. Coach frowned.
“And Beargrease, close that hole, would ya! Man! If someone doesn’t come straight at you, look around. Kreeger, don’t use your head to block the ball—even though we know it’s your least important part.”
I’d been set up. I was sure of it. Rom wasn’t that fast; no way he could reach me with that amount of momentum if I had half-decent coverage. Which Jimmi Beargrease was supposed to provide.
This was going to get interesting.
I stayed after practice again. While Mikko jogged, I worked on shortening my kicking time, which was already short. The shadows lengthened, and it was harder to see.
“Ready to go in, buddy?” Mikko asked.
“Yeah. But hey, could you work on some plays with me tomorrow?”
Mikko grinned. He had a gap in his teeth that made him look like a farmboy, like that was where he would put his piece of hay, or his corncob pipe.
“You really work it.”
“You were the one who recruited me. I can’t let you down.”
We headed to the locker room. I limped, not necessarily because my leg hurt, but because everything hurt. I laughed at the horizontal red line the helmet left on Mikko’s forehead, although I probably had the same one.
A bevy of girl tennis players fluttered by. The lead girl stopped to say hi to Mikko, so the whole crowd of them stopped too. By awesome luck of the draw, I found myself face-to-face with Rainey Scarponi.
She had a huge racquet case slung over her shoulder. It looked like it could—or did—contain a machine gun. She was looking sort of curiously at me.
“Hi,” she said.
Now was my chance. I had to say something. Something good. Something that would get me noticed. I stole a glance at her and saw that she was smiling slightly.
“Duh … hi,” I said, suave as hell. I studied my shoes. Think of something cool, I ordered myself.
You look like you could be in an ad for something clean—no, that was ridiculous. Brain … hello, brain?
“Are the football players going to be at the party?” I heard the other girl say to ALL-PRO. He grunted something unintelligible and then turned to me and said, “Come on, Chan.”
He waited until we were in the showers.
“You gotta be smooth, boy,” he said. “You can’t show you’re too interested, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, thanks, Dear Abby,” I said. I realized I had totally blown it. I promised to be more surly next time.
seventeen
Even when I was in math class, I ran plays in my head, studied the playbook. When I played soccer, Manuel drilled us over and over, so when you got the ball in a pass at a particular angle, with your opponent leaning over to take it away, your body knew to feint left, dribble, and pass without even consulting your brain. I wanted football to be that automatic for me.
Our next game was away. I must have been one of the few players who liked away games. I got a kick out of seeing the other schools in the area, even if we did have to drive three, four hours to get to, say, Croquette, a town that had a paper mill and smelled like rotten eggs.
Today we were invading Moose Creek. All I knew about it was that it had a mental hospital and a detox center, so referring to someone as having gone “up the creek” was shorthand for a lot of things. “Look, Chan, bullet hole.” ALL-PRO pointed at a globular swelling in the glass in the door to the school. “But the glass doesn’t shatter because there’s chicken wire in it, see?”
The wire looked like a bunch of stop signs stuck together, or an M. C. Escher drawing. The glass at I.R.H.S. was nice and clear. For some reason no one had thought to shoot at it.
The locker room was all concrete, covered in lumpy lime-green paint that looked like it had been poured on the walls straight from the can. The rubber mats on the floor were curled and moldy. I’m not that picky, but no way was I going to let my bare feet touch that crud.
“These dudes won the conference title last year,” ALL-PRO said. “We were in the running at sectionals, but they just stomped us.”
“Do we have a chance this year?” I unpacked my soccer shoes and football cleats. Lately I’d taken to putting the soccer shoe on my right foot when I kicked.
Mikko shrugged. “A couple of their really good players graduated. And we still have Rom and Leland. This year’s the one for us if it’s any year at all.”
“Kim, you’re going in,” Coach yelled.
We had taken an early lead and were feeling pretty good.
The plan was to fake a bootleg. The wide receiver and I, at halfback, would go out as decoys. Leland would then hand the ball off to Jimmi in a reverse.
Moose Creek didn’t bite. A Mack-truck-size guy hit Jimmi, and the ball squirted out of his hands. The ball skittered downfield and I dove for it, ending up at the bottom of a very heavy pile.
Coach told me to come back out.
“You might have to punt soon. Don’t want you getting messed up.”
“Nice going, Geronimo!” snarled Kearny as Jimmi woozily returned to the sidelines.
“C’mon, Coach. No one could get hit like that and not fumble.” He was holding his elbow.
“Would you like a little cheese with your whine?” Kearny played an imaginary violin. He always came on too strong, like anchovy pizza.
By the half we were tied.
“We can do it,” Coach said. “We just have to make that extra push.”
“Look,” said Kearny. “If we push ’em back now, we’ll just breeze right down to State. We’ll be golden. So go out there and finish ’em!”
I didn’t have a real idea of how important a team Moose Creek was to beat, until we lost.
We lost by only one point—they made a freak two-point conversion—so I didn’t think it was so bad.
But there was a deadly silence in the locker room, as if a glass jar had descended and sucked all the air out. No one talked. Hell, no one even breathed.
Then Coach spoke.
“You’ve made this all the harder on yourselves,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming from another dimension. “We want to go to State just as much as you do, but Coach Kearny and I can’t do it for you. We’ll have another crack at them at sectionals, but it’s going to be an uphill battle.”
“Lousy, lousy defense,” Kearny snarled. “The line, except for Kreeger, was an absolute sieve. My ninety-year-old toothless grandma could’ve run past you guys. You aren’t men, just a bunch of pussy-boys.”
“We screwed up” was all that ALL-PRO said to me on the bus ride home.
eighteen
ALL-PRO was out sick, so after practice I worked on my kicks and did a few laps until the sun went down. The girls’ tennis team must have had a meet, because the courts were empty.
The locker room was deathly quiet, although it smelled like a passel of steaming, putrid guys had trooped through, which, in fact, they had. Added to that was the smell of the stuff the janitors used to clean the showers—some major fungicide, I suppose. It was acrid and burned my nose.
I shed my pads like I was a snake molting, and peeled off my T-shirt and pants. The concrete floor was littered with torn tape and used Band-Aids. One of them was a Sesame Street Band-Aid—Bert and Ernie. It made me grin momentarily, but I was still tired. I sat down.
Even if I had been expecting it, I don’t know what I would have done.
A rough, mildewed towel suddenly covered my face—my nose, eyes, everything—and a split second later bodies leaped on top of me, grabbing my arms and legs. Whoever they were, they were strong.
; I kicked out, hit something, and heard a muffled “Damn!” But someone still had my arms and I couldn’t twist away.
Arms grabbed my legs, and I felt my jock strap being pulled down. I tried to kick, but I couldn’t move. Then I realized they were tying my ankles with my jockstrap.
I hate the thought of being tied up. It makes me sick. Everything in my insides jumped and skittered like tiny fish. I twisted, kicked with both feet, yelled, and got a mouthful of towel for my trouble.
“A little necessary roughness, huh?” It came out barely audible, like the hiss of a tape player. There were at least three of them, I think. They got my hands tied.
Someone shoved me into the lockers and I fell like a stone to the wet floor. I couldn’t breathe. I twisted my neck until a bit of the towel gave by my mouth. I gasped in the air.
I screamed. The cold cement pressed into my hip. “Come back here, you cowards!”
I was tied with some kind of cloth; once I wriggled my hands free I saw it was one of my socks. There was blood staining it. The jock was still knotted tight around my ankles—one of which was beginning to swell, right above the bone. Now that I’d stopped yelling, I realized it hurt like hell. It was golf-ball size now, which meant it would be much bigger later.
“Who did this?” I yelled. No one answered. Only the lockers stood in silent, solemn testimony to what had happened to me.
nineteen
“What happened to your leg, Oppa?” said Young when I limped through the door. I felt like I was going to puke.
“I wiped out on the street walking home,” I said, doing my best to control the shakes in my voice. “I think I sprained my ankle. Ha, ha.”
“Did you hit your head, too?” she said, pushing aside my hair. “Ewww, this looks terrible.”
“Actually, I fell in the locker room—but don’t tell O-Ma. She thinks football is dangerous.”
“Let me get you some ice. You should have called. Someone could’ve picked you up.”
But then I would’ve had to explain why I was crying.
I felt like I’d been raped, honestly. Being tied up and left naked on a dirty locker room floor is probably the closest you can get to it.
