Brawler

by Tracey Ward

  She wasn’t much into football, but she always sat and watched with us. It was either that or spend time with Laney and her mom, and I realized after only one day in their house that Jenna got along far better with her dad than those two. She wasn’t into the things they were. Not even some of them. Not the shopping, the salons, the gym, the book club where as far as I could tell they only read and discussed books with half naked Highlanders on the cover.

  “It’s a bear,” I told her, answering her question about the Bruins. “A huge, hulking, murderous bear.”

  Dan shot me a look. “Calm down. It’s a brown bear, not the anti-Christ.”

  “Better than Stanford’s mascot,” I muttered, taking a sip of my Gatorade.

  “What is their mascot?” Jenna asked. “Isn’t it some derpy looking tree?”

  I nearly spat my drink out through my nose laughing.

  “What does ‘derpy’ mean?” Dan asked her.

  She grinned. “Nothing good.”

  “Sounds about right,” I chuckled, unable to stop laughing. “They just lost possession. Couldn’t make the first down. USC’s ball.”

  “Perfect,” Dan growled. He snatched his bottled water off the table and stood. “I’m getting a beer. This game is going to hurt. Either of you need anything from the kitchen?”

  “No, thanks,” I replied.

  “Snapple, please and thank you,” Jenna answered sweetly.

  “A derpy Snapple?” he asked.

  “You’re not using that word right.”

  “It’s not a real word.”

  “Not yet.”

  Dan left the room whispering something to himself about weeping for the future.

  When he was gone, I nodded to Jenna’s sketchpad. “What are you drawing?”

  She looked over her shoulder, an instinct she had of checking for her mom. Karen didn’t approve of how often Jenna could be found working on art, even if it was in her downtime. I kept my mouth shut ‘cause it wasn’t my place to say anything, but I thought it was stupid. Jenna was an amazing artist with a lot of talent and potential.

  “I thought your mom was out,” I told Jenna.

  “She is. She’s organizing a charity event for next week.”

  “Is Laney with her?”

  “No, she’s with her new boyfriend. Derrick. She was supposed to be home by now to watch the game.”

  “Derrick Cromer?”

  Jenna shrugged.

  I didn’t like Derrick Cromer. He was a baseball player and a real asshole. We’d been on the Homecoming Court together my Junior year and he’d bragged for twenty minutes to me about how much ‘pussy’ the status was getting him. Admittedly, it didn’t exactly hurt my social life, but I wasn’t a complete piece of shit about it. I made it a point to never go near him after that.

  “Quit stalling,” I said, kicking my foot out until it nudged Jenna’s knee. “Show me what you’re drawing.”

  “It’s a face and it’s not very good,” she replied reluctantly. “I’m trying to get better at them.”

  “Whose face?”

  “My dad’s. He doesn’t look happy.”

  “You’ve been sketching him watching the game?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Show me. I want to see what utter defeat looks like.”

  Jenna laughed as she spun her sketchpad around so I could see what she’d been working on. It was only about halfway done, but what was there was incredible. She was working entirely in charcoal pencil but what she could accomplish – the raw emotion she could convey with just black and white – was insane. It looked everything like her dad. And he looked so annoyed.

  I whistled low. “Damn. You nailed it. That’s crazy.”

  She shook her head, lowering the paper. “Yeah, right.”

  “I mean it. You’ve got skill, Nonpareil.”

  “Thanks.”

  We sat in silence for a while, both of us watching the Stanford Derptrees destroy USC’s offense and retake possession of the ball in record time. I was surprised she was watching, but when she hesitantly spoke, I realized she’d been sitting there debating.

  “Hey, I’m supposed to ask you something,” she said.

  I immediately tensed, worried where this could be going. It was a weird feeling to have in that house considering how relaxed I always felt there. I didn’t get that at home. I was always on edge. Always waiting for the next fight or the next fist to fly. My only respite was the gym but since I’d been invited to spend so much time at the Monroe’s house, I hadn’t needed it as much. I didn’t feel the anger flare as often.

  I wasn’t constantly afraid.

  “Okay,” I answered Jenna, trying to sound casual. “What’s up?”

  Her long, thin fingers played with the spiral at the top of her sketchpad. “Christmas. It’s in three weeks and my mom is scared to ask you what you want because you told her that you don’t celebrate your birthday. She says you refuse to tell her when it is.”

  I ran my hand over my face once, trying to clear it. I didn’t want to scowl at her. She didn’t deserve that, but the topic annoyed me. Everyone always pushed it and questioned it, but I hated talking about it.

  Birthdays to me were my mom. They were small home baked cakes and blue candles in a tiny, darkened kitchen. They were shiny wrapping paper and brilliant green eyes. Eyes that had faded and yellowed as the cancer took over. That flickered out like the candles. Nothing but gray smoke and the empty blackness left behind.

  “I don’t tell anyone,” I said quietly.

  “My dad knows, doesn’t he?”

  “Probably. It was in my arrest file. He’s seen my driver’s license.”

  “He’ll never tell anyone.”

  “Good. I was counting on that.”

  She nodded silently. No more questions. No digging.

  It was why I loved her. It was why I’d made friends with her so quickly – because she didn’t try to be one. Jenna simply was what she was and she let me be what I was without pressure or judgment or expectation. She didn’t want anything from me, especially not something I wasn’t looking to give, which made it so easy to give more than I ever had.

  “August eighth,” I told her.

  Her large gray eyes found mine, a faint smile on her lips. She drug her pinched fingers across them slowly, a sign of zipping them closed. An oath to keep my secret and her silence.

  “Oh my God, I could kill Derrick! He drives slower than grandma!” Laney shouted. She blew into the room like a tornado; purse, wallet, keys, and coat all flying in different directions until she was seated on the couch next to me with her eyes intent on the screen. “They lost possession?! It was a turnover, wasn’t it? That son of a bitch, donkey of a QB is worthless.”

  “Dad is coming right back,” Jenna warned her.

  Laney rolled her eyes. “I’m a grown woman. Dad doesn’t care if I swear.”

  “I meant that’s his seat.”

  “So? There’s another one over there by you. He’ll get over it.” Laney turned to me, her face flushed pink and her eyes bright with laughter. “So… your precious UCLA… how’s that going?”

  I smiled calmly. “We’re playing Oregon. It’s an all offense game. It was always going to be a high scorer.”

  “You’re losing.”

  “For now. We’ll take it back.”

  “Stanford would have crushed them by now.”

  I shook my head in disgust at her endless delusions. “Stanford wouldn’t last a second ‘cause all you have is a hulking SEC wannabe defense and your offense is on the wrong side of mediocre.”

  “Pfft,” Laney scoffed. “Defense wins championships. We have the best offensive and defensive lines, and we ground and pound teams like yours into submission.”

  “That’s only true when you have a good quarterback who makes other teams respect the pass, and a running back who can follow blocks. Most years your offense is out there wiping their ass with the ball instead of passing it. You’re only a contender
when your QB is decent and that happens when? Every ten years? That’s a hell of a long dry spell.”

  Laney suddenly leapt up out of her seat, shouting and jumping up and down in celebration.

  Stanford had scored.

  She turned to smile down at me triumphantly, her arms still in the air. Her shirt had ridden up to expose the flat, tight lines of her stomach and hip bones, both tan to a golden brown with whispers of summer, sun, surf, and so many other things that I shouldn’t have been thinking about.

  “Looks like it’s raining now, baby,” she taunted breathily.

  For the next hour Laney sat there next to me, her body brushing against mine as she jumped up out of her seat to cheer or crashed back against the couch in defeat, and I started to wonder how strong I really was. A smoking hot girl is temptation enough. A smoking hot girl giving you an opening every second of every day – that’s tough to turn down. A smoking hot girl who can talk shit to you about football and knows how to back it up – that was a goddam Herculean Trial for me to handle.

  Every time I looked at her I felt like I was going out of my mind. I wanted her. I wanted to touch her, taste her, smell her, and the hardest part of it all was that she obviously wanted the same thing. But if you locked me in a room with her, I’d go crazy in a different way. We had nothing in common, nothing besides football and a mutual admiration for each other’s bodies. That would have been enough for me with just about any other girl at school, but not with Dan’s daughter. I owed him and his family more respect than that. No matter how much I wanted her, no matter how much she wanted me or pursued me, I knew I would never, ever date Laney Monroe.

  At halftime I stood up from my seat on the couch to take the chair next to Jenna.

  ***

  That night after dinner as I was getting ready to go home, Dan stopped me.

  “Come into my office. I have some paperwork for you,” he said, leading the way.

  This was familiar. It was how I’d ended almost every night with them when my case was still active, but now that I was in the clear I had no idea what paperwork he could have for me.

  I followed him into the large mahogany coated room. It felt less like Dan and more like what a stereotypical library/office/study/congressman’s playroom was supposed to look like. There was even a globe in the corner that opened up to display bottles of amber liquid and highball glasses of gleaming, cut crystal. Jenna had told me that Karen decorated it, not her dad, and it immediately made much more sense to me.

  “Should I sit down?” I asked, gesturing to a small side table flanked by two chairs. It was where I’d sat with him and gone over all of my paperwork before.

  Tonight he shook his head. “No, I’m going to send you home with this. It’s all blank. You need to fill it in.”

  “What is it?”

  He pulled a thick manila envelope out of a side drawer in his desk and held it out to me. “College applications.”

  I didn’t take them. I stared at the envelope, letting the slightly off orange color burn into my vision. I had known this was coming, that I needed to go do it, but after all my years of hard work and planning, I suddenly wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for the fights it would start at home. For the hits I’d take over it. For the worry and the wondering every single day if something had shown up that would send the Asshole over the edge, or worse – that something had shown up and he never let me see it. It was that suffocating impotent feeling he always gave me that made me feel powerless to take hold of my life and drive it where I wanted it to go.

  Finally, I shook my head. “I can’t afford it,” I said, making excuses.

  Anything to avoid admitting I was scared.

  “There are ways,” Dan assured me. “Trust me, I know. We’ll exhaust them all.”

  “I can’t even afford the application fees.”

  “They can get hefty, absolutely. Stanford’s fee alone is ninety dollars.”

  I grinned crookedly. “I’d never apply to Stanford.”

  “Then you just saved yourself almost a hundred dollars. Most colleges will waive the application fee for anyone in financial need.” He pressed the envelope against my chest, forcing me to take it. “Show them you want it. Show them you’ll work for it and they’ll give you a chance because that’s all you need. Then it’s on you. You’ll make your future, not them, and when it’s all said and done you’ll know you’re a man who made something of himself because he couldn’t stand to be anything less than absolutely everything he was capable of being.”

  I stared at him dead in the eye, not blinking. Barely breathing.

  He stared back patiently.

  “Why?” I asked, finally voicing the question that had banged around in my brain since I sat down in his office in the gleaming, golden tower. “Why are you doing this for me? All of it.”

  “Because you’re worth it. I know that you don’t always believe that, but I do. So does Karen. One hundred and fifty percent. You. Are. Worth. It. You’re a good kid and you’ll be a great man if you just let yourself.”

  I blinked hard. “I don’t even know what I’m going to study. There are days where I feel like I planned this all out perfectly, but there are huge holes like that. Like what am I going to do with my life?”

  Dan laughed. “Even I ask myself that some days. You’ll try things. You’ll figure it out. That’s the beauty of it. You can take on whatever subject you want. You have what it takes to be so many things. A doctor, an educator, an athlete, a—“

  “Lawyer?”

  Dan grinned. “Anything you want.”

  I nodded, clenching the folder in my hands until it crinkled loudly in protest. “Okay. I’ll fill them out tonight. I’ll give it a try.”

  “That’s the first step. That’s all anyone can do.”

  That night when I opened the folder and poured the contents onto my bed at home, I felt oddly faint. Like the way it felt when I was in the ring and someone clocked me out of nowhere, taking me completely by surprise and throwing me out of myself for a second.

  This was huge. It was a chance to be more than the poor kid with anger issues. I wouldn’t be defined by my bank account, I’d be measured by my intelligence. And for once, I’d be able to pull ahead.

  Names were emblazoned proudly at the front of each packet, every one of them more impressive than the last. Each one telling me just how highly Dan thought of me.

  Brown. Cornell. Princeton. Yale.

  These weren’t just good colleges. They were prestigious. Ivy League. Out of my league. I was smart, but good God, this was insane. MIT! I saw UCLA mixed in, making me smile. Behind it was the University of California Berkley. San Diego. Irvine. Stanford

  I opened one up at random, flipping through the pages of required information. There were essays to write, endless forms to fill out, but I was surprised to see some had already been done. All of my contact information was already typed in. My name, my cell phone number, and an address where I could be reached with replies.

  The address was Dan’s.

  Chapter Seven

  Five Months Later

  I passed on graduating early. It was one-part because of what Laney said about missing out on the end of year fun, and fifty-parts because it kept me out of the Asshole’s apartment. I went to school in the morning, had one class to go to, then I was out. I was free. And the Asshole had no idea. After my morning class ended, I’d wait for Callum to finish at lunchtime so we could leave and head to my boxing gym downtown. More often than not, I’d text Jenna during her study period while I waited.

  You’re up, I reminded her. Hit me with it.

  I’m running low!

  Is that the joke?

  Only if you’re laughing.

  Tick…tock…

  Fine! Okay, here it is. So a baby seal walks into a club…

  I shook my head, typing, Wow.

  I’m not proud of it. Your turn.

  Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar. One says, “I’ve lost my electr
on.”

  Why are your jokes always so nerdy?! she demanded.

  I ignored her. The other asks, “Are you sure?” The first answers, “Yes, I’m positive…”

  There was a long silence and I knew she was face palming over me. It made me smile to picture it.

  That was so lame. You win today. Hands down.

  You made it too easy. Bring your A game tomorrow.

  No school 2morrow

  “Oh, hell no,” I muttered, typing quickly. No text speak! Full words, full sentences. This isn’t Twitter and you’re not a Kardashian, so don’t type like one.

  A Kardashian walks into a bar…

  I waited patiently for the punchline, hoping she actually had one. She didn’t disappoint me. She never did.

  And walks out pregnant, she finished.

  I chuckled at my phone. And Jenna Monroe closes the round with a one-two knockout punch.

  Thank you. Thank you. You’re still the gold medalist in today’s Lame Joke Olympics, though.

  Damn straight.

  What do you want for your winnings?

  What do I always want?

  Burritos.

  I frowned, surprised she was wrong. Enchiladas, I corrected.

  *eye roll* You do this every time.

  Do what?

  Forget what food you like. You don’t like enchiladas, you like burritos.

  Bullshit.

  Bull nothing, it’s true!

  Enchiladas. I insisted.

  Burritos.

  Enchiladas.

  You’re hopeless. You’ll eat what I make you and you’ll love it.

  That was true so I let it slide.

  “Yo, Coulter!” Callum shouted from the parking lot. “Shake a leg, bitch! Let’s move!”

  I slid down off the picnic table I’d been sitting on, typing Jenna a quick goodbye as I headed for Callum’s truck.

  Gym. Warm up. C U 2nite.

  Hypocrite.

  U luv me n e way.