by Sophie Gunn
Her letters, unopened, were gathering dust in the in-box.
She carefully picked up a framed picture from the desk. Her heart skipped a beat. It was the boy who had died, Ramon Martinez. She recognized him from the Galton Daily front-page story that had ran the week after the tragedy. She studied his face. A huge grin showed perfect white teeth in a cocoa-brown face. He was handsome and tall. Not as tall or as handsome, however, as the dark-haired man next to him with an arm around his shoulder and a whistle around his neck.
This must be Coach Bo Smith.
He was, not that it mattered, gorgeous.
She put the picture of the boy and his coach back where it had been—the traditional spot on the desk for the obligatory shot of the wife and family.
There was, not that it mattered, no picture of wife or family.
“Coach is in the weight room.” A huge boy in a red Galton sweat suit stood in the doorway.
Georgia followed the boy’s directions to the clanging, grunt-filled room at the end of another maze of hallways. She took a deep breath, the last almost-fresh air she suspected she’d get for a while—and pushed through the doors. A few heads turned her way, then away again, back to business. A thirty-seven-year-old woman in a suit and pumps wasn’t of much interest to this crowd.
A man with a clipboard stood in a group of intense young men.
He was the man from the picture.
Bo Smith was tall, broad-shouldered, square-chinned, with a morning’s worth of black stubble. His dimples were so deep, they almost looked like scars. His black hair was short-cropped. His black eyebrows set off blue eyes that didn’t smile. His skin was so tanned, she worried for his health. Had he never heard of sunscreen? He obviously spent a good deal of time outdoors, working on his impressive physique—
Physique? What a word. Was she eighty years old? She felt eighty years old in this place. Eighty, frail, over-weight, and slow.
She put her attention to his physique into a box, where it belonged, shut it tight, pushed back her shoulders, and strode to the group. “Coach Smith?”
He looked up. They all did.
“I’m Dr. Phillips. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
His eyes narrowed. “I know who you are. I got your messages. Sorry. I’m still not reachable.” He went back to his conversation with the boys, something about reps and rear delts and needing core strength on the back four, whatever that meant. She had aced Anatomy 101 her first year of med school, but she couldn’t parse the idea of four back muscles. There was the intertransversarii muscle group and the multifidus spinae. Those connected to the gluteous maximus which was, technically, not a muscle of the back but rather of the butt. Since Coach Smith had turned his back to her, she could ascertain that his gluteous maximus was remarkably well-formed—
Close the box. Seal it with tape. Mark it return to sender. Clearly, she was suffering from testostrone poisoning in the thin, laden air of the weight room. “Coach Smith” she said, raising her voice. “We need to talk.”
He jotted something on his clipboard. “No. Actually, we don’t.” Then he walked away, leaving her facing the group of boys.
The boys snickered and smiled at her slyly. They were, each in his own way, adorable, like a line-up for a casting call for healthy, rugged teenage boys of every shape, color, and size. The one with the shaggy blond bangs who had led her into this cave shrugged as if to say, Whatareyagonna do? That’s Coach.
She followed Coach Smith, keeping her eyes off his gluteous maximus. He was showing classic signs of aggression, but she didn’t take it personally. Rather, she enjoyed this encounter with a textbook case of a classic athlete personality.
She liked it when life and her textbooks agreed.
He hung his clipboard on a hook on the wall. She cornered him at the back of the room, if she could call it cornering. With his size and physicality, he could bowl her over with a flick of his pinky if he had wanted.
“We can talk in private somewhere quiet or I’m going to talk here, directly to your team. Your choice,” she said.
He crossed his arms over his chest, sighed, and looked past her to a boy bench-pressing across the room.
“Aren’t arms beside the point on a soccer player?” she asked, looking to the bench-pressing boy.
“Dr. Phillips,” he said, his voice dripping with annoyance. “Thank you for your services, but we don’t need your kind of help. They boys can get counseling if they want it from health services. This is overkill.” He gestured to her. “And no, their arms are not beside the point. Soccer is a full-contact sport.” He looked directly at her as if to say, And if you don’t get out of my way, I’m going to show you just exactly what full-contact feels like.
So many forms of aggression displaying at once in one man. So many forms, but one still missing. “Unfortunately, Coach Smith, it’s not for you to decide. I’m hired. The school doesn’t want to get sued when one of your players does something harmful to others or to himself because he was expected to go out and seek help. Or because he avoids help that he associates as linked too closely to the university. The unexpected death of a friend and teammate can go deeper than these children anticipate.”
A hundred and eighty pound, tattooed child walked by, towering over her. Coach Smith raised one eyebrow as if some sort of point had been made.
She lowered her voice. “Death, especially of a peer upsets the psyche in ways we can’t always anticipate, but there are signs we can foresee. It is our responsibility as adults to recognize these signs and make sure they are dealt with. We must be proactive.” She explained her point, the university’s point, the various points of potential lawyers on both sides of potential lawsuits, the perspective of parents and experts in the field. “And so, therefore—“ She stopped.
He was staring past her into the distance.
“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying,” she said.
He roused to attention as if he’d been woken from a delightful nap. “You done?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He fixed her with his intense blue eyes. “Dr. Phillips, the school, the lawyers, the parents, and especially the experts can all kiss my ass.” He began to walk away.
“Actually, coach, you can kiss theirs,” she called after him.
He kept walking.
“And mine.”
He stopped, turned, and for the first time, smiled. His eyebrows raised. The corners of his mouth lowered. And slowly, so slowly, his eyes scanned her head to foot, as if he was considering her offer.
Ah, the last form of male aggression finally displayed: sexual. She’d worn her sky-blue Dior suit with the gold buttons and her nude pumps with a conservative heel. Still, his once-over made her feel as if she wearing a string bikini.
The man was a walking cliche.
“Coach, I’m only going through you to be polite. If you don’t want to cooperate, I’ll go around you. I have no problem with that. In fact, I’d prefer it.”
He cocked his head. Frowned. Then shrugged. “Suit yourself. Good luck with that. It was nice to meet you, Dr. Phillips. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have a championship to win.”
He was across the room in three long strides.
She had been dismissed by a cro-magdon idiot.
So she put two fingers between her lips and let loose her loudest whistle.
The clanking weights stopped. Every head turned to her. “Excuse me. Hello. Sorry to interrupt. I’m Dr. Georgia Phillips. I’ve been hired by Galton University to consult with your team. This summer, as we all know, there was a terrible tragedy.”
She could have heard a pin drop. Every face stared, set and hard as granite. No way this crowd was going to let out a peep of emotion, at least, not in front of their belligerent coach. But if she could reach even one boy on the team, it would be worth it.
She went on, aware that she had to make this quick, never an easy task for her. “Ramon Martinez’s death will affect all of you in different way
s, but trust me, it will affect all of you. When something like this happens, there can be feelings that are hard to acknowledge. Grief, pain, guilt. All sorts of thoughts and fantasies that you don’t expect, that maybe you don’t understand. If anyone would like to talk about what happened, about what is going to happen next, that is my job. I am a psychiatrist. I am paid by the university, but anything you say to me is strictly confidential. I am completely independent.”
They were starting to stir, to cough, and to sneak glances at their coach, who at the moment looked like he wanted to take off her head with his bare hands.
She strode to a bulletin board on the far wall. It was covered with inspirational quotes, diet tips, and instructions for various painful looking exercises she couldn’t have managed without tearing a few dozen muscles. She tacked her business card to the board under a piece of paper that read, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
My God, these children were at the mercy of idiots.
“I am at your disposal. You can call me anytime. We can meet privately or I will be available after your practices on Thursday afternoons right here in this building.” She pulled a letter out of her purse, then her reading glasses. “Office 234, right here in this building, the O’Halloran Athletic Complex, Thursdays, six to seven o’clock. Thank you.” She took off the glasses. The sea of hostile faces in front of her swam onto focus as if they had formed themselves from mist.
Well, that had been awkward and difficult, but the start often was. Just one boy, she told herself. She moved toward the door, the glares of the team boring a hole in her back. As her hand closed around the door handle, a voice called out. “Ramon didn’t die in vain! We’re gonna win the championship this year for Ramo!”
A collective roar nearly knocked Georgia over. “Yeah!”
“For Ramo!” the boy yelled.
She turned to look at the room, not surprised by the emotion rumbling in these boys just under the surface. This kind of emotion was what would explode out of these kids, each in a different way, at a different time, over the course of the next year or so. They’d sublimate it into their athletics until—-well, who knew exactly what would happen?
“For Ramo!”
“Yeah!” they responded.
“For Ramo!”
“Yeah!”
“For Ramo!”
“Yeahhhhhh!” The boys broke out in whoops and calls. They high-fived each other and a few crossed themselves, their eyes flicking toward the ugly florescent lights set in the even uglier drop ceiling. Coach Smith nodded his head. A smile played around the corners of his lips.
She waited for them to quiet and when they did she said in a calm voice, “What if you lose? All kinds of things happen that you can’t control. Bad bounces, bad refs, bad luck.”
The silence that descended was so deep, so charged, so hostile, it slammed against her like a cold wind. Hatred read on their faces so brutally, she felt as if she had an idea what it might be like to play against this team.
This was what the coach wanted: anger and hostility. It was his currency. He didn’t want her to drain the boys of this rage because he cared about winning, not about them.
Coach Smith stepped in front of his team, his arms crossed. The boys arranged themselves behind him like a single, seething being. Georgia’s heart melted for these little men who thought they were tough guys who’d seen it all, boys who thought winning would solve something unsolvable.
Their beast of a coach was old enough to know better, and her heart hardened against him.
Coach Smith said, “Dr. Phillips, we don’t talk about losing. Not in this room. Not anywhere. We are going to win it for Ramon. We believe,” he said.
She had a million things she wanted to say to that, but she had heard enough to know where these boys and their confrontational leader stood in relation to reality. The discussion, whether they knew it or not, had begun and in typical fashion: with a delusion.
“I hope you do win,” she said to them with complete sincerity. She let her eyes linger on the boy who’d led the chant. She had a hunch that if she could get him on her side, the rest would follow, coach or no coach. “I’ll be rooting for you.”
As she left the room, she noticed that her business card was gone.
No, not completely gone.
It was crumpled in a ball on the floor.
(To learn more about Sophie’s other books in the Enemy Club series, visit http://SophieGunn.com)
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Sophie Gunn also writes contemporary romantic comedy as Diana Holquist.
For more information visit:
http://dianaholquist.com
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