Something about him makes me nervous. Not in a he’s-going-to-turn-you-into-a-skinsuit nervous, but more that I don’t like the way his vivid eyes and easy smiles make my heart pound. I feel the need to pull out my glucose measuring tool to make sure an unexpected hormone release isn’t wreaking havoc with my body.
He tilts his head. Then rubs his chin. Then sweeps his hair back away from his face. “This is new,” he mutters to himself. He gives me a tight smile. “Can I borrow your pen?”
I hand it to him warily, hoping he’s not going to spend the rest of the night trying to spin the pen while simultaneously trying to convince me to change my mind, but he doesn’t. Instead he pulls the rules book toward him and writes down seven digits. “This is my number. If you find some extra time, give me a call.”
2
Matty
It’s been a long time since I’ve been rejected. I hadn’t come to the Brew House with the intention of picking up a girl. I was going stir crazy at home, and none of my roommates was around for me to talk to, so I decided to take a walk. This place was on the far end of campus and I’d never stepped foot inside it before, which meant that it was as safe a spot as any.
Then she strolled in, her long blonde hair streaming down her back like shiny ribbons. She sat down and started flipping her pen and sighing so hard I thought she might blow herself off the chair.
It would’ve been a crime to not offer her an ear. And when she looked at me with her big brown eyes, I couldn’t tear myself away. The invitation came out of my mouth because…well, that’s what guys do with pretty girls. They ask them out. And I guess they get turned down, too.
I’m not a slouch in the academic department. I get good grades and have been an Academic All-American every year since I’ve been eligible, but no one I know starts studying until a week before midterms.
Studying as a reason for rejection lies somewhere midpoint between I can’t because my mom died and I can’t because I’m clipping my toenails. At least she looked regretful turning me down, as if she wished she could take me out for a ride but couldn’t quite bring herself to throw her leg over the saddle.
Any other night, maybe I would have pursued her harder. Or just brushed off the rejection, snapped my fingers, and waited for a willing babe to magically appear and soothe away the sting. Which isn’t exactly a stretch—when you play football for Western, there’s no shortage of willing babes at your disposal. But I’m not in the mood tonight.
I’m not sure why. It’s not because I popped into my friend Masters' place this afternoon and he was reading a book while Ellie was on her computer. They looked domestic and boring. The little pang in my chest was probably heartburn from the three burrito bowls I had at lunch. It wasn’t…envy
Halfway home, my phone buzzes in my pocket. Pulling it out, I see a text from Stella Lowe, one of the team managers.
Stella: Coach wants to see you.
I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks it’s weird Stella calls her dad Coach. The digital clock reads 8:05 p.m. It’s been a week since the National Championship game. You’d think he’d be enjoying some R&R. Guy certainly deserves it.
I’ve taken full advantage of the post-championship high. There’s not a bar in town that doesn’t have a bottomless tap for a Warrior player. Not a girl on campus—or off it—who isn’t chomping at the bit to do a little chomping on my bits.
Okay, maybe there is one girl who isn’t interested, but for the most part, I’m sitting on top of the mountain of life. Other people are struggling. Other people are sighing their asses off in the coffee place. Me? Anything I want is mine for the asking. I could walk into any bar in the city and people would be trampling each other to buy me a drink. At the Gas Station, there are coeds who would suck me off under the table while I watch SportsCenter highlights.
Life is good. So good that I don’t even care I just got shot down. So what if some uptight girl—who’s spending a Wednesday two weeks into the semester studying so hard that it makes her head ache—turned me down for a date? Just gives me more time to enjoy my off-season, what little of it that I’m allotted. Spring ball will be here soon enough, and I’ll have to fend off hungry freshmen and sophomores who think they should be ahead of me on the depth chart.
Until then, I’m planning on coasting through classes during the day, napping long into afternoon, and enjoying late, wonderful nights.
Well, and apparently random evening summons from Coach.
On it. I type back.
* * *
“You wanted to see me, Coach?” I stick my head around the corner into Coach Lowe’s office. He is on the phone but gestures for me to enter. I suppose he’s recruiting. The official signing day starts in about four weeks.
No one likes coming into the coach’s office. Meetings on the field, inside the locker room, during film—you know what those are all about. When you’re summoned to his office, you’re literally being called on the carpet.
I step inside gingerly and make my way across the thick pile—dyed Western State Warrior blue—and over the helmeted head of our mascot woven in rich gold, black, and white, to stand by one of the heavy leather chairs situated in front of a massive dark wood desk.
“Sit down, Matthew.” He gestures to a chair in front of him. Coach Lowe doesn’t look like a football coach. He’s small, under six feet, and wiry. He never even played college ball, but it hasn’t hurt him. He’s got two national championships under his belt in less than ten years. That’s enough for the whispers of “dynasty” to start.
Coach Lowe steeples his fingers together and leans forward, his wrists resting on some cut sheets. Reading his own good press? I’d do that, too, if I were him.
I position my hands the same way and wait patiently. Mirroring is a good technique to set someone at ease per the sociology class I'm taking on human interaction this semester.
Coach Lowe examines something on his desk before turning his attention to me. “You enjoying your off-season, son?”
Not the question I was expecting.
“It’s going okay.” It’s been pretty fricking awesome, thank you.
“I’d like to win another National Championship next year. How about you?”
“Yessir. I want that, too.” My interest perks up. I’ve been wanting to discuss draft placements, combine invitations, and scouting visits, but figured that wouldn’t take place until spring ball or the summer camps. This is probably what I’ve been antsy about today, why I didn’t want to go to the Gas Station to get laid, why the rejection from Lucy at the coffee shop hung with me longer than it should have, why the sight of my friend Masters and his wife, Ellie, made me feel like I was missing out.
What I really want to hear is that the scouts are drooling over me and that Coach Lowe is telling them I need to go high in the draft.
“You still hungry to win? Because some kids win once and they take their foot off the pedal. They stop training as hard. They let the outside world become a distraction. They lose focus and then they lose games.” He glances down at the photos under his wrists.
My good mood evaporates. From what little I can see, those pictures contain nothing good. If I’m here to talk to Coach about those, I better brace myself for a tongue lashing—and not the sexy kind I got a couple of days ago from a cute red-headed Delta Gamma in the bathroom at the Gas Station.
“I want to win,” I repeat slowly. “Nothing’s going to be more important come fall than making sure the BCS trophy stays here at Western State.”
“Hhmmph,” Coach grunts.
Err. Not the answer he was looking for?
“This is my worry. Without Masters pushing you every second, is the defensive squad going to be as sharp or tough? Physically and mentally, are you going to be a National Championship team?” He reaches for the photos and tosses them toward me.
I look at the colored papers and inwardly cringe. After the championship game, it’s safe to say we went a little crazy. People treated us like god
s and there was a never-ending funnel of booze that night. And the women. Holy shit. They were everywhere, and they came in pairs and more. They were all tens. Maybe elevens.
I couldn’t count much that night. I don’t have to look at the pictures to know what they contain. They’d been on the Internet within hours of the game’s last whistle. Hammer and I and the D-line were getting drunk, doing whipped cream body shots off of various coeds.
There’s a worse photograph that I don’t see in the pile. That’s the one where I’m lying on a bar top with one girl’s head between my legs while Hammer is pretending to spank her in the ass. Another girl is leaning over my mouth feeding me a shot. My mom raked me over the coals for that one. My “I had my pants on, Ma,” excuse didn’t fly with her, and I suspect it would go over equally poorly with Coach.
“This was after the season was over,” I point out.
He taps a finger on the top photo. “Where’s your captain in these photos?”
Knox Masters was fucking his new wife, the girl you had banned from having any contact with the team, is what I want to answer, but I know that’d go over like a lead balloon. Besides, I’m not throwing my teammate under the bus, even one who’s no longer technically a Western State Warrior.
“At his hotel.”
“Right.” He gives one final tap and shoves backward. The motion sends the photos flying off the desk onto the floor, and I see the last one in the pile is indeed the foursome picture. Fan-fucking-tastic. “Your captain was at the hotel, avoiding the press and ensuring the Western State Warriors’ reputation was untouched while you and the rest of your crew were out there making us look like a bunch of high school kids who’d never seen a set of tits before. Do you know how hard it is to assure a worried mama that we’re going to take good care of her son and won’t let him sin his way through college when these pictures are everywhere?”
“No, sir.” The mom may not like it, but the son sure as shit does. I keep that nugget to myself.
He pins me with a hard stare. “You’re a superb talent, Mr. Iverson. You will undoubtedly be drafted, but how high you go depends a lot upon the off-the-field qualities you show. Your scouting reports say that your leadership potential is unknown. Being captain of the defense could go a long way to shoring up your intangibles.”
Captain? That’s not something I’ve ever gunned for. I love playing the game because that shit is fun, and all the other hard work I put in, from eating the right foods to working out hours a day to studying game film, helps me do what I love at a high level. But captaincy? Leadership? That sounds like a lot of BS that I don’t really care to shoulder, but I can’t really say so to Coach.
If he’s asking, the appropriate answer is always “yes” because if you say no, you’re getting voluntold to do it anyway. Might as well make yourself agreeable. Path of least resistance and all that.
“If that’s what the team wants from me, that’s what I want to give the team.”
Coach Lowe gives no indication my lack of enthusiasm bothers him. “With Masters gone, someone needs to keep the defense in check. I don’t want to see more of this.” He gestures toward the pictures I have awkwardly collected in my lap.
“Not a problem.”
“If it does become a problem…” His threat hangs unspoken in the air. I didn’t even sniff the field my first year behind a first team All-American linebacker who was drafted in the third round by the Niners. He’s not in the league anymore, but when I walked onto campus, he was one of the big men and I was his understudy.
Since my sophomore year, I’ve held that inside linebacker position against all challengers and I’m not giving it up now no matter how many blue chip recruits and backups are chomping at the bit to take my place.
“It won’t.”
“Good.” He leans back into his chair and swivels so he’s looking out the window onto the practice field. “I think you would be a good captain, Matthew. Your teammates like you and more importantly they listen to you.” The dry note in his voice says that right now they’re listening to all the wrong things. “But taking your direction in this”—he brushes a palm across the clippings—“is an easy path. You need to prove to me you can lead them in something else.”
“Absolutely.” I straighten in my chair. I’ve always gotten good grades, and I have no problem cutting down on the booze and chicks. The guys on the defense don’t mind having someone else in charge. Between Hammer and me, we’ll have it covered. “What do you need?”
“No more pictures with girls. No more excessive partying.” He ticks a finger with each order. “And convince Anderson that he’d be better off at safety.”
I nod. No chicks. No booze. Get Ace—
“What?” My screech is high enough to be mistaken for a teenage girl, and I think my hearing short-circuited. JR “Ace” Anderson is our quarterback. The one we won the National Championship with. Coach knows all of this, so I must have misheard him. The only thing I can think of to say is, “I’m on defense.”
Coach Lowe doesn’t even spare me a glance. “I’ve got a commitment from Remington Barr out of Texas. He’ll come if he can start. That kid won four straight Texas State High School Championships. I want him. He’s going to be the key to my future here. Ace is athletic, but we both know he’s not good enough to play at the next level. So you convince Ace to move to safety and the C is yours.” He shoves a patch toward me.
The circular patch in gold and blue, with a big old “C” in the middle, is sewn onto a captain’s jersey. It’s an honor to wear the patch, but in order to own this letter I’ve got to tell my quarterback, the one who just helped us win us a national title, that his time at the vaunted QB position is over?
I swallow hard. Not only do I play on the opposite side of the ball as Ace, but my time spent with him generally consists of running by him during practice since he’s considered off-limits even when we’re wearing pads. We aren’t best buds even though we do play on the same team.
“I...I’m on defense.” I sound like a broken record. “I mean that I don’t have any classes with Ace. We don’t hang out. I’ve never had a meaningful conversation with the guy beyond encouraging him to play well. I think my influence over Ace is about the same as I’d have over a herd of cats.”
There. That sounds reasoned and sane unlike Coach’s bizarre request.
“I haven’t asked you to ride herd over cats. Besides, you don’t have to convince Ace directly. You’re free to talk to the rest of the team. If he doesn’t have the support of the team, he’ll move on his own.”
Is there any way to tell your coach that he sounds like he’s taken one too many drags off the pipe? That he’s talking out his ass? Because this shit seems off to me. Shouldn’t he be talking to Ace and addressing the team? Why me? I try another tack. “I have no problem playing monk for the rest of my tenure here—”
“Son?” Coach Lowe interrupts, tone mild as if he hasn’t just released napalm in his office.
“Yeah, Coach?”
“You’re dismissed.”
Okay then. I heave myself out of the chair and walk toward the door. Maybe if I turn around and come back in, the conversation will be completely different.
“Mr. Iverson,” he calls. I turn back just in time to see the patch sailing across the room. I catch it reflexively. “You forgot something.”
3
Lucy
When I get home, I find my two roommates installed in front of the television eating ice cream and watching Say Yes to the Dress. While none of us is even dating, we seem curiously addicted to the show. I think it’s because we have shitty relationships with our moms and this show is all about the momma and daughter drama.
“Tell me there’s a half gallon left of that.” I don’t wait for an answer but throw my backpack on the chair and start rummaging in the freezer. If there was ever a night for real cream, sugar, butter and eggs, tonight was it. I need some relief after talking with Matt Iverson. His number has implanted i
tself in my head followed by the words call me.
But I can’t eat sugar unless I want to risk sending myself into a diabetic coma, so I resign myself to the sugar-free, fat-free frozen yogurt, which I tell myself is just as good. Just like turning Matt down was the right choice. I stare at my frozen yogurt container with a frown.
“I was going to ask how your mock trial practice went, but since you’re shoving yogurt into your face like tomorrow is the last day on earth, I’m guessing it was shitty?” Sutton rests her pointed chin on the edge of the sofa. Her streaked violet hair clashes against the rich red velvet of the cushion.
“Shitty is too nice of a word to describe how poorly it went.” I throw myself into one of the two Papasan chairs that Sutton contributed to the décor and dig into the yogurt. The icy tartness hits my tongue, and some of my agitation melts away. “But it’s early. We still have a lot of time.” Regionals are right before Spring Break so there are nearly two whole months for us to get our act together.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Charity, my other roommate, informs me.
I pause, my spoon halfway to my mouth, and narrow my eyes. “Why not?”
“Remember 1C complaining about cockroaches?”
“What now?” 1C is an apartment inhabited by two Stepford Wives in the making—both blondes with stick straight hair, identically styled. Every time I’ve seen them, they’re wearing headbands. Who above the age of eleven still wears headbands? Even if their matching hairstyles didn’t remind me of the plastic women from the infamous novel, the robotic looks on their faces and the fake smiles they wear creep nearly everyone out.
But the number one reason we don’t like 1C is because they complain all of the time, and they regularly canvas the apartment complex to get others to sign on to their complaints. They’ve complained about everything from noise (it’s a goddamned college apartment complex) to garbage (too many pizza boxes stuffed down the trash chute) to non-resident visitors after ten (again, we’re goddamned college students).
Jockblocked (Gridiron Book 2) Page 2
