by Alan Janney
“If I see you out again,” I said, and my voice was a dark, dangerous snarl. “I’m going to kill you.”
He nodded furiously, his mouth working without sound.
Back at the ATM, the other crook had disappeared. I took the girl’s cash, stuffed it into a deposit envelope and dropped it into the bank door’s slot; she could retrieve it tomorrow. In the distance a fresh set of sirens sounded like they were approaching, so I sprinted away.
After the colossal events of the past hour, my car felt impossibly small. I drove past police vehicles as my old Toyota and I headed towards home. The adrenaline rush wore off in the safety of my car, and the reality of my actions settled in. I had acted foolishly and risked too much. Plus I was so exhausted I could barely focus. And I had the beginnings of a killer headache.
I braked to a stop in front of Katie’s building and I pulled out her phone. But I pulled out...two phones.
Two?
In one hand, I held Katie’s phone. In the other, I held...a phone that looked a lot like Katie’s. I had too many phones. I must have picked up that girl’s phone at the ATM, mistakenly believing it to be Katie’s. Whoops! Well, I knew where she lived. I could return it to her building’s lobby as soon as possible.
Katie’s phone had no battery left so I plugged it in to my car charger, waited for it to power up, turned on the phone’s video camera and pointed it at myself.
“I found your phone. You’re welcome,” I said into the camera. I turned the phone off and slid it her family’s mailbox at 1:15 in the morning. Then I drove home and ate an entire box of cereal.
I forgot all about the other cell phone.
Chapter Five
Thursday and Friday, September 6/7. 2017
Thursday at lunch, Katie told us in ecstatic tones about the return of her phone. She obviously hadn’t found my video yet, so I let the mystery remain about its miraculous homecoming. When she found it, we would most likely be married within the hour. Maybe.
I was still marveling at the good fortune of surviving the pit bull when I arrived at English. Hannah told me with big blue concerned eyes that I looked tired and that she would scratch my back. And she did, for almost the entire hour and a half. This was the first time I’d ever wondered if a girl liked me. I desperately had to pee but I didn’t dare get up to use the restroom.
That night the team went to watch our JV squad play. Cory and I sat together in the stands, commenting on the players we knew. When I returned home Dad was up and we watched the news. On my way to bed, Dad asked if our first game was tomorrow. “Remember, son,” he said slowly, draping his heavy arm around my shoulders. He was tall, about 6’4. “Remember. You’re just the back-up. So relax. You can’t screw up. No one will remember you.”
“…thanks Dad.”
However, finally, today was Friday. Game day. We’d been preparing for this day for months and my focus sharpened on the task at hand. The greetings in the hallway became entirely supportive today, all the students wearing school colors. Mr. Ford was especially odious but the rest of my teachers wished me luck.
I did a double-take when Katie walked in. Somehow she’d found a football jersey in school colors, red and black, and it had my number on it. She wore a matching tank-top underneath. Her thick brown hair was up in a ponytail, tied with school colors and she wore eye black tape. She looked beautiful, especially when she saw me and beamed.
The night we’d been robbed, she’d crawled into bed with me and it had triggered something deep inside. A seismic shift was taking place in my soul and my emotions were rearranging. Katie had always been the little girl that made sense, the girl I could talk to, my good friend. Katie now seemed like the perfect girl I couldn’t take my eyes off.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed her. That entire day she was surrounded by more and more guys I didn’t know and didn’t like. It seemed unfair and stupid that all these guys would start hanging out with her just because she grew prettier every day. I had been friends with her for years, and they hadn’t.
Hannah was dressed in her cheerleading uniform, her posture perfect, leaning slightly forward towards me, her eyes and smile looking eager to please. Luckily she sat behind me, else I wouldn’t be able to focus.
The cheerleaders made the football players little goodie bags, and Hannah gave me mine. Mixed in with the chocolates was a little pink note.
Chase,
Good luck tonight!! You don’t need luck, though. I think often about how far you threw that football during practice. I bet you’re the strongest guy on the team.
( And the handsomest! =) ) Go Eagles!
Love, Hannah.
PS. I’ll go to tonight’s party only if you go.
I reread the note eight times before class ended, unable to comprehend that a goddess like Hannah Walker would plan her party attendance around me. Me?
I wished Katie’s name had been signed at the bottom. But it wasn’t. The note was from someone else and now everything felt like it was changing.
Our school day ended with a pep rally under the typical gorgeous Los Angeles sun. The entire school herded onto the seats at the stadium and the fall sports teams were led one by one across the field to cheers. Katie, I noticed, was sitting with some guys I didn’t know. Ugh. Maybe I should bust their noses with a football.
Between speeches, the cheerleaders would dance and lead games. I kept my eyes on Hannah, who would wink or stick her tongue out at me when she noticed. She moved with the natural grace of a hip-hop dancer. Even among her cheering peers she stood out as the most fresh, bright and vibrant.
After school, Cory, Lee and I all gathered at Katie’s place to relax, and her mother made us Puerto Rican barbecued jerk chicken with beans and rice, as was our Friday Home Game tradition. I ate two plates, Cory devoured four, and Lee talked so much he barely finished his first. Katie constantly moved, filling our glasses with tea, fetching butter for the hot bread, and piling our plates and bowls with seconds.
Gymnastics is a largely ignored sport by the media until the Olympics roll around every four years. I had grown up competing in a gym with only light applause and almost no recognition from my peers, despite some success. I didn’t fully realize the fanatical nature of football until I attended my first game as a sophomore. It came as quite a surprise, therefore, when ten thousand fans had shown up and screamed all forty minutes of a JV game.
And I wasn’t really accustomed to it yet. Football, for whatever primal and territorial reason, was paramount to the people of Glendale. Victorious football seasons felt more important than political wins. Even parents of un-athletic kids, like Katie, treated us as special and worthy of extra attention. I didn’t understand or fully approve of the system, but it was hard to argue with a mouth full of chicken. At five fifteen, Cory and I stuffed ourselves into my Toyota and returned to school.
Locker rooms are legendary places. Most kids grow up wanting to play football. Only the best get picked to play Varsity, turning the Varsity locker room into hallowed ground, full of the tallest, biggest, strongest and fastest boys America can produce. The inhabitants are testosterone filled young men who have hardened and strengthened their bodies to the pinnacle of teenage perfection and who like to preen and strut in front of each other.
It is also a very broken place. Successful football players are necessarily physical, and that physicality often comes at the expense of violence and anger, or is the product of violence and anger. The testosterone, the adrenaline, and the rage can be controlled by healthy kids. Or they can be suppressed by good disciplinary coaches. Or they can be tools leading to destruction. Locker rooms are usually a cocktail of all three, with the potential to explode.
I didn’t fit in. Quarterbacks often don’t. Our weapon is our brain, not our strength. We relate more to the coaches than the gargantuan monsters on the field with us. So instead of participating in the bawling and chest bumping, I merely watched, marveling at how much larger the Varsity players are than the JV.
Game preparation is a deliberate and often superstitious process. Some players wear the same lucky underwear every game, but I didn’t. First we pull on name brand compression garments, like UnderArmour. Players help each other strap on pads, which can be bulky and cumbersome depending on the position. Then we dress in our school’s shiny jerseys. Now the team starts resembling a uniformed army, a military unit of enormous padded soldiers. Then socks, wrist bands, knee braces, eye-black, and ankle supporters, but gloves and helmets are saved for the field.
The most essential step is the shoe lacing. If your foot slips inside the shoe or the laces come untied then you’re lost. You fall or, worse, sprain something. It is a methodical procedure of threading, tugging, tightening, testing, and threading again. Finally we click-clack out onto the field for warm-ups.
The stands are only sparsely populated with die-hard family members this early, still forty-five minutes before kickoff. We stretch, do jumping jacks, run sprints, go through brief passing, catching, tackling and blocking drills, and watch the team on the far side of the lush, verdant field do the same.
I tried not to watch. The other team looked too much like a pack of angry giants bent on my destruction, even though I wouldn’t play. The offensive coordinator Todd Keith and Coach Garrett came to discuss our game plan, talking at Andy while I passed to receivers. They’d only planned out the first quarter, leaving the rest of the game open to adjustments. I could tell they were taking measure of him, probing for signs of nervousness or panic. The initial game plan was simple: nothing but runs and short throws. They didn’t want their star quarterback getting maimed during the first series of the season.
After warm-ups, teams traditionally return to the locker room for a final speech by the coaches. It’s an odd tradition, asking warriors recently returned from warm-ups to sit quietly and listen. We have seen our opponent, we have their scent in our nostrils, we are quivering with anticipation, and we are over five tons of pent-up furious energy crammed silently into one room. The speeches are standard. We can’t be perfect this season if we don’t win today. Our opponent will take advantage of every mistake. We need to execute. Play hard, play smart. The road to our district championship begins now. We need to swarm the ball, block and tackle. By now we can hear the accumulating crowd’s heavy drone coming down the concrete hallway. Team on three. One, two, three, team! Before leaving we kneel for the Lord’s Prayer, always my favorite part of the pregame ritual.
Back on the field, the crowd had turned into a heaving, raving mass of fanatics, twenty thousand strong. The passion and the sound was a physical force, a living entity that could be felt anywhere on the field. We were introduced and we ran straight into the hurricane-force screams. The cheerleaders were shooting free t-shirts into the greedy crowds with slingshots, and the band blared our fight song. The result of the chaos was a disorientating assault on the senses.
Scanning the stands I found my father in the family section with some friends. He saluted me. I knew if I searched harder I could find Katie and probably her mother.
There is always a strange pause in the mayhem, a calm before the storm, as the national anthem is played; a tip of the hat or a wink to the fact that we are all Americans for that one minute before reverting back into enemies. Then the announcer takes over, introducing the referees and detailing specials at the food vendors.
I watched the kickoff from the sidelines. The ball sailed a majestic fifty yards before landing into the arms of our opponent. Bodies crashed against bodies in a collision of red and black and green and white that could be felt more than heard.
Their quarterback ran onto the field with his team. Our opponent, the Pasadena Panthers, was a running team. Their quarterback was black, short, and quick. Our defense formed a wall at the line of scrimmage and repelled three running plays in a row, throwing the Panthers backwards. They punted the ball to our forty yard line.
Our turn. I stood nearby as Coach Garrett grabbed Andy’s facemask and yelled, “You got this, Babington. You’ll be fine. Stick with the game plan.”
“Coach,” he laughed. “I’m good.”
“I know. Now go show it.”
On the first play, our running back ran for two yards. On our second play, he ran for six yards. On our third play, Andy Babington got demolished. Some miscue on our line allowed a linebacker to sprint through cleanly and nearly kill him. Everyone within half a mile froze. No one breathed. The only hope for our successful season lay on the field groaning.
Get up, get up! the whole crowd thought.
Get up, get up! I almost shouted. Please! This wasn’t good.
The trainers ran out to Andy, and after a brief evaluation helped him up. He wobbled unsteadily. The crowd applauded with relief as he limped towards us, leaning on a trainer.
“I’m fine,” he tried to laugh through grinding teeth. “Ankle hurts. It’s nothing. I’ll walk it off. Move,” he barked to the crowd of concerned teammates.
We punted and our defense took the field. I stood beside Coach Garrett, both of us watching the game numbly. He finally spoke after the longest minute of my life.
“Well, Ballerina,” he grunted hopelessly. “You’re going in.”
“Yes sir,” I whispered. For the moment, he and I were locked in a crystal ball. Nothing existed in that moment except us and the awful nightmare we found ourselves in.
“At least until we sort Babington out.”
“Yes sir.”
“If you have to run a few plays, I’ll just call runs. Got it? Easy. Don’t worry about throwing it.”
“I got it.”
“Let’s check on Babington,” he said.
“Good idea.”
“He can’t play,” the trainer told us, indicating Andy with a tilt of his head. Andy was gingerly trying to walk, a football gripped near bursting in his fists. “Ankle’s either sprained or broken. I’ll reevaluate in a few minutes.”
“Coach,” Andy said, limping up. “I’m alright. Hurts a little, that’s all. I can go in.”
“You can’t even walk, Babington,” Garrett said.
“So? It’s a helluva lot better than the Ballerina,” he yelled. “You can’t put him in.”
“Get off that ankle,” Coach Garrett replied. “Rest it. I’ll be back.”
“This is a joke,” Andy snarled. “Ballerina can’t go in.”
“Go sit down.”
“Kid,” Andy snapped at me. I almost jumped. “Don’t you dare throw a pass. You throw a pass, we lose. You’re not good enough. Just hand the ball off to Jesse, and then I’ll come take over. You understand? You understand, kid?”
I did understand. I just couldn’t talk.
The other team was punting. Our team needed a quarterback. Our team was in trouble. I pulled my helmet on, fully expecting to be buried in it.
I trotted out onto the field of battle, buffeted by competing screams of delight and fury from the opposing stands, our side painted in tribal red gore and black. The responsibility of the game settled onto my shoulders and began pressing downwards the closer I got to our huddle. On my back was borne the hopes and expectations of my teammates and our fans, which suddenly felt like a thick blanket threatening to choke me.
Your Glendale Eagles take over at their own forty, called the announcer.
The huddle was tense and anxious, watching me expectantly.
“You okay, rookie?”
“Yes sir,” I wheezed. “I mean, Mayweather,” I said between exhalations, breaking the tension and earning a few smiles. “Wing right thirty-one dive, on one.”
We approached the line. I couldn’t believe how big the other team was. All eleven Panther defensive players were glaring at me across the line, snorting and calling. Everything they did depended on me. Their defensive linemen looked like they weighed three hundred pounds each, and their linebackers were uniformed gorillas pounding on their chest and jumping around. And they all wanted to break me in half.
I crouched u
nder center, an arm’s length from the enemy. If my line didn’t hold up then I was dead. They could pounce forward faster than I could backpedal. All twenty-one football players tensed and waited for me to break the silence. So did the twenty five thousand fans. My best friend Cory was our biggest and best lineman. Maybe I’d just cower behind him.
“Hut!” I called and pandemonium erupted. The linemen dove into each other, grunting and bellowing while the linebackers searched for openings in the wall, howling for my flesh. I turned and shoved the ball deep into the running back’s gut.
Too hard! I caught him off guard and he couldn’t hold onto it. Fresh cries, a mad scramble and I fell onto the loose ball, which had taken a providential bounce. The whistle blew before the Panthers could hit me.
Number Nine Chase Jackson fumbles the ball but quickly recovers, the stadium speakers announced.
Busted play.
“What’s wrong with you, man?” Jesse yelled when we huddled again fifteen seconds later. “Just gimme the ball, like in practice, rookie!”
Jesse Salt, our running back, was good and would probably play college ball for a small program. He was fast, strong and liked to talk.
“You’ve been doing this a lot longer than me,” I said, trying to make my voice sound less pleading. “So help me out. Hold onto the ball.”
Huddles usually support the quarterback, so Jesse Salt was reduced to grumbling quietly as we went back to the line. We ran two more running plays. Jesse jumped and pounded his way for nine total yards, but we had to punt.
“That’s okay, that’s okay,” Coach Garrett told me as I ran back to the sidelines. “Not a bad first series. We didn’t turn the ball over, and we’re winning the field position battle.”
Andy had not improved so I stayed near Coach Garrett, meekly peering over his shoulder at the game. I could almost feel eyeballs evaluating me by thousands from the stands. Our defense formed another wall that the Panthers helplessly crashed against. Three more running plays, zero yards, and our fans shrieked in blood-thirsty pleasure. The Panthers punted and I returned to the field.
