If You're Reading This

by Trent Reedy

  “— he died. I’m so sick of you saying —”

  “— to say. No, I’m sick of it!” I hammered on the dashboard. “I’m sick of all of this! I can’t go on just doing homework and school and farmwork and nothing else. What use is a constant focus on the future if there’s nothing good in the present? When I live that way, I have to listen to my spoiled sister, who gets everything she wants, who goes out with friends to Piggly’s or shopping with my money half the time — listen to you tell me that I’m not cool enough. Just shut up!” I pointed at her. “Just shut your mouth and enjoy your ride in the truck that I bought with the money I worked for, and do not say one word!”

  Mary barely made a sound the rest of the way to school, except for a few sniffles as she wiped her eyes. I knew I should apologize. In her own way, she was trying to help.

  “Listen,” I said when we pulled into a parking space. But she threw off her seat belt, jumped out, and was running toward the junior high wing of the building before I’d even put the truck in park.

  Mrs. Potter was home with a sick child that day, and I didn’t feel like trying to explain to the sub why I needed to use her office to watch the videos. By the end of the day, I had calmed down a little bit, but I was still grateful for eighth-hour Woods II. Something about ripping into lumber with a saw and smashing nails with a hammer eased me down from a rage to more of a dull fury.

  Cody tapped me on the elbow. “Dude, can you hand me the three-quarter-inch chisel?” I gave him the tool. “You okay, man?”

  “Fine.” I wasn’t okay. After this class, I had to go to Coach and quit football. Would someone like Cody even talk to me after that? The guys would be furious with me for letting them down. I could be heading back to the way things were in junior high, with everyone picking on me all the time. I hammered a finishing nail into my stupid wooden-box project.

  “Just that you seem mad. You know Coach always says the team has to stick together. That we should try to help if —”

  I dropped my hammer to the table. “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  Cody frowned. “You know, when I’m mad —”

  The fire alarm sounded. Mr. Ferguson looked up from where he’d been helping someone with a project. “Okay, people, scheduled fire drill. Out to the parking lot.”

  We put our tools down and marched outside, careful to pass the first row of cars according to Ferguson’s repeated instructions. We’d be protected behind the vehicles in case the school exploded or something, I guess.

  Cody elbowed me when we were outside. “So, like I was saying, when I’m mad, I either lift weights until my muscles are totally fried, or I go to my old man’s garage, where he keeps a punching bag. I beat on that thing for a while, and I usually feel better.”

  “I know what you mean.” I showed him my swollen, red knuckles, surprised that Cody and I had this violence-therapy thing in common.

  Ethan, Dozer, and Sullivan approached. “What’s up?” Ethan asked.

  “You okay, Mike?” said Sullivan. “You look a little ticked.”

  “It’s stupid. Just …” These guys only liked me because I played football. They were worried about me now, but after I quit the team, at best they’d ignore me, and at worst they’d hate me. “Nothing.”

  “It doesn’t sound like nothing,” Ethan said.

  “Trouble with Isma?” said Dozer with an edge of teasing.

  “Yeah, how’s it going with her, anyway?” Sullivan asked sincerely.

  “It’s …” It was great, but I didn’t want to talk about it here in the parking lot surrounded by dozens of people. “You know.”

  Clint Stewart and Maria Vasquez had joined the group. “That’s not what I heard,” Maria said. Dozer put his arm over her shoulder, and she leaned her head on his. “Hailey Green lives across the street and one house down from Isma. She said she saw you and Isma making out on her doorstep before you went inside, and her parents weren’t home.”

  “Wilson, getting some of that exotic desert loving,” Dozer said.

  Maria laughed. “Like that girl from Aladdin.”

  Clint grinned. “I hear those Arab girls are really hairy, like their religion won’t let them shave anything. What was it like seeing her all hairy and —”

  “What!?” I said. Why did these people have to be so cruel? “Exotic desert loving”? And the hug Hailey had seen was hardly making out. “People should stop spreading lies. It’s not what you think. Everyone should mind their own business and not make up a bunch of crap about —”

  “Ooooh, are you in trouble now!” Maria said. Dozer shook his head like he pitied me.

  “Oh, why?” I said. “Because Hailey’s gonna be mad at me?”

  “No, dude,” said Sullivan. “Because she is.” He pointed over my shoulder, and I turned to see Isma walking away, pausing long enough to look back and glare at me. “She was right behind you when you were talking about her.”

  “Isma, wait up!” I shouted, and ran to catch up with her, but just then the teachers gave the all clear. As everyone started moving back inside, I lost her in the crowd.

  * * *

  “Can I talk to you?” I said to Isma after school as she slammed her locker and marched away. She’d misunderstood the situation. I was trying to make people stop spreading lies about us. “Isma, come on.” I reached out and caught her elbow just before she reached the door to leave the building.

  “Let me go!” She yanked her arm away and shoved the door open.

  I followed her outside. “Come on. Let’s talk a second.”

  She was about twenty yards from the school when she finally stopped. “I heard everything they said! Everything you said!”

  “Just listen a second. I can explain.” I reached for her but she drew back.

  “Explain what? That you let them say horrible things about me and didn’t even try to defend me?”

  “I did try!” I said. She rolled her eyes and walked away. I jogged around to stop her again. “You’re the one who told me not to fight.”

  She threw her hands up. “Yeah! What a concept! Don’t punch people! That doesn’t mean you can’t tell people off. Don’t know how?” She pointed at me and then at herself and then back again. “Pay attention to this right here then.”

  “I was telling them the rumor wasn’t true. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that you should have silenced that racist crap they said. What’s wrong is that you were all, ‘It’s not what you think,’ like kissing me was the sickest idea you could come up with. You’re so concerned about impressing your popular sports-worshipping buddies, you act like our relationship is nonexistent. You could have fooled me when we actually were making out.” She looked down. “I guess you did.”

  “Isma, listen. It’s not —”

  “My father likes you!” Tears welled up in her eyes. “Even Mom was coming around. She always said I shouldn’t trust boys, but I’d almost convinced her to invite you over for dinner.” A tear ran down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it. “I hate you for making her right. I hate you for making me cry in front of you!” She walked away.

  I called out to her, but she only started running.

  * * *

  If I was still going to be on the football team, I would have run to practice. Instead, I took my time, trying to figure out how my life had fallen apart so quickly. Just this last weekend I’d been living life the way Dad hoped I would, knocking down one mission after another. I was getting along with my mother. I’d hung out with the guys from the team as friends.

  Most of all, I finally had a girlfriend. And not just a girlfriend, like a girl to make out with just for the fun of it or a girl to be with just for the sake of being able to say I had a girlfriend. I had Isma, this brilliant, beautiful, funny artist of a girl who really liked me. She’d liked me even before I’d shown the school that I was any good at football.

  Now I’d lost her. And why? Because of guys like Clint Stewart and Robby Dozer. Beca
use of Maria Vasquez, Hailey Green, Nick Rhodes, and that whole crowd. They always talked crap about Isma, and she was right. I never had the guts to stand up to them. I’d been so afraid of losing those people I called friends, when they’d never bothered with friendship until I’d scored touchdowns for them.

  For a moment I thought about waiting until after practice or even until tomorrow morning to tell Coach I wanted to quit the team, but no. It was best to face the Volcano while my anger gave me something like courage.

  “You’re late, Wilson!” Coach Carter shouted when I finally made it to the practice field. The team was running its warm-up lap. Most of them were way down past the softball diamond. “Why aren’t you suited up? What’s the matter?”

  “Coach,” I said, “I’m quitting the team.”

  The words were out there, and I couldn’t take them back. I waited for the Volcano to explode, but he didn’t. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said instead. “You’re doing very well. You seem to be having fun. Why are you quitting now?”

  “I have to quit, Coach.”

  Sullivan was jogging by and came to a stop. “Why would you quit, Mike?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a choice,” I said to him and Coach.

  Carter folded his big arms over his chest. “Of course you have a choice.”

  “No, I …”

  “I think I’m entitled to some explanation here, Wilson.”

  I finally looked up and met his intense gaze. I knew he wouldn’t like the explanation I had to offer, but I told him the truth about how I’d lied to be on the team, speaking quietly so nobody else would hear. By the time I’d finished, most of the guys were returning from their lap.

  “Walk with me, Wilson,” Coach said in a far calmer voice than I had expected. He motioned to Coach Brown to take over the practice and led me along our warm-up-lap path. He didn’t say anything for a long time. “What have I told you about why we wear that jersey on game days?” he finally said. “What do those colors stand for?”

  At first I thought these were rhetorical questions, the opening to his speech, but when he said nothing else, I knew he expected an answer. “They stand for Hard Work,” I said quietly. I remembered all the painful hours of practice. “They stand for …” My throat caught. “… Integrity,” I said, knowing I had failed Coach and the team because I had none.

  “What else does that jersey represent?”

  “The jersey represents Team,” I said.

  Coach nodded. “We talk a lot about how Team means fulfilling your responsibilities on a play, holding your block to open a path for the running back, running your route as fast as you can to get open so the quarterback can pass to you. We also say Team means things like helping your teammate with homework, making sure he isn’t doing something he’s going to regret, and looking out for him. But it’s more than that. I say that one of the Big Three is Team, not just teamwork, because Team also means belonging. If you’re on this football team, you are part of our group, one of us.”

  Until the guys had bashed on Isma this afternoon, I had believed that. I wanted to believe it still. But I guess it didn’t matter now.

  “Wilson, I know your mother. She was a few years behind me in school growing up here in Riverside. I know your situation. You were unfairly faced with the reality of having to choose between integrity — that is, doing what’s right — and belonging to a team. You couldn’t have them both at the same time, so you sacrificed some of your integrity for the sake of joining the team.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, Coach.”

  Carter held up his hand to silence me. “I understand why you did what you did. If I had been in your situation, I might have done the same thing.”

  We started our way around the back of the softball field.

  “This is my tenth year of coaching Roughriders football. I always have our team photo taken shortly after the last game, not at the beginning of the season the way a lot of schools do. I want the photograph taken at the end of the season because every year some guys quit. Others might do something stupid and become ineligible. I want the picture to represent those young men who toughed it out through the whole season.”

  That wasn’t me. I’d become one of the losers, one of the failures who had quit.

  “Do you like playing football, Mike?”

  I’d never heard him call anyone by his first name. “What?”

  “Do you want to be in that team picture at the end of the season?”

  I couldn’t speak. I only shrugged.

  “Do you want to be in that team photo, Wilson?” he repeated more sharply.

  There went “Mike.” “Yes, Coach,” I said.

  “Then we have a problem.” He tilted his head to the right and then the left to stretch his thick neck. “Nobody knows about the forgery except you, your mother, and me. I’ve had you on my team all this time with no permission. That’s a potentially serious legal liability. If people find out about it, there could be major trouble. But … if you were able to get your mother to change her mind and sign the permission form — I mean really sign it this time — we could get you back in that uniform and forget this whole mess ever happened.”

  “But isn’t that a violation of integrity?” I said. “I mean —”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Carter said. “In a dilemma like this, it’s hard to say what’s the ultimate right thing to do. I just want you to know that if you can get permission from your mother, you have permission from me. You can go for now, but understand that this doesn’t have to be the end.”

  “Thank you, Coach,” I said. I watched as he jogged back to the practice field, leaving me behind.

  I spent Wednesday night driving around in the Falcon for a while before going home to tear loose on the punching bag in the attic. I didn’t even bother going to work. Derek could join the list of people already mad at me.

  Mom let me keep driving after I told her I quit the team. I guess she liked the idea of me serving as a shuttle service for Mary.

  Thursday somehow sunk even lower than Wednesday. It made the days when I got beat up back in junior high seem like fun times. At least I had learned how to defend against physical attacks since then. But word had somehow gotten out that I was quitting the team, and now, at various times throughout the morning, Adam, Clint, or Rhodes would whisper (not too quietly) about how I was a wimp or a coward. Sullivan completely ignored me. Robby Dozer complained loudly that I’d let the team down.

  At lunchtime, I sat down at a table in the back. The greasy beef burger and soggy tots didn’t do much for my appetite, so I picked up my book, Nevermore: Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I figured if I had to be miserable, I might as well read poems that let me know others were too.

  “Mind if I sit here?” Ethan put his tray on my table and sat down across from me. “You going to tell me what happened?” He ate a tot.

  I closed my book and put it down. “I quit the team.”

  “I know you quit the team. Everybody knows you quit the team. Nobody knows why.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah, it matters! You’re good, Mike. We need you. More than that, I’m kind of worried about you. First what happened between you and Isma, then you just quit the team. Some of the guys are saying you quit because of her. It’s no secret she hates sports.”

  “Leave her out of it. She’s not why I had to quit.”

  “Then why?”

  “I can’t tell you.” If I told him the truth, and anyone found out, it wouldn’t be long before the whole school knew, and then the “mama’s boy” jokes would never stop.

  Ethan didn’t say anything for a while. Finally, he rose and picked up his tray. “I’ll be over with the guys. You should come with me.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  “Dude, don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t totally disappear again.”

  He said that as he walked away, leaving me alone so he could join the others. I thought about followi
ng him, but I couldn’t handle all their questions today.

  * * *

  I tried to get Isma to talk to me on the whole walk from seventh-hour history. The shop and the art room were both located at the end of the school’s back hallway, and we usually talked at least a little bit while waiting for Mrs. Kamp, the part-time art teacher, to arrive from the elementary and unlock her classroom. Today Isma wouldn’t even look at me. “Come on. I’m sorry,” I said. “What else do you want me to say? What do you want me to do?”

  “Sorry I’m late.” Mrs. Kamp hurried down the hall, jingling her keys in her hands. She unlocked and opened the door. “Mike, shouldn’t you be in shop class?”

  “I’m going, Mrs. Kamp,” I said. Seeing that Isma hadn’t gone straight into the art room, I held out hope that she might talk to me. After Mrs. Kamp went inside, Isma turned to face me. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she opened her eyes again.

  “I want you to leave me alone,” she said.

  I watched her walk away.

  * * *

  “Where were you yesterday?” Derek said when I showed up at the farm after school. He had the deck off his rider mower and was scraping the bottom of it with a putty knife. He must have noticed something in my look, because he put the tool down and stood up. “What’s wrong?”

  I told him everything that had happened in the last few days, even about what I’d learned in Dad’s video. “So, even though Mom’s a huge liar and always acted like we were a big happy family, even though she’d planned to divorce my dad, I still took your advice and Dad’s advice and calmed myself down so I wouldn’t be too hard on her. What does she do? Ruins my life!”

  “Wow, buddy. I’m sorry all this happened. But … maybe she’ll change her mind about football at least. Have you tried talking to her?”

  “This all went wrong because I tried to talk to her in the first place! I’ve barely said two words to her since she made me quit the team.”

  “Have your dad’s videos helped?”

  “I can’t even watch them! I don’t have a computer, and Mrs. Potter’s been home sick. I haven’t been able to use her office computer.”