“Exactly. Do that here. This is a bad thing goin’ on in the backfield.” He laughed, a strange, weak laugh. “You don’t like what you see, change it. You’re not a homosexual, Bobby. I know you. Just ignore those thoughts and get some new ones. What about Carrie?”
“She’s great.”
“Well, great. There you go.”
“But—”
“No buts . . .” said Coach. “Pun intended.” He laughed, and I just stared at him. “Bobby, how many gay quarterbacks do you see in the NFL?”
“None.”
“Exactly. And another thing. Don’t tell people. These are private things, Bobby. Do I tell you about what I do in bed with Mrs. Castle?”
I blushed. “No . . .”
“Well, there you go. Now, what else can I do for you?”
The conversation had not gone the way I had wanted it to. I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to go, but now I felt worse.
I was pretty sure that Coach was wrong about this, that it wasn’t the same as him telling me about having sex with his wife. Of course that was inappropriate. But he was asking me to lie.
Isn’t that different?
I wished I could rewind the clock, back to the second before I entered Coach Castle’s office, and call an audible there.
Later in practice, I screwed up my progressions as we were practicing a new play in tier formation. Rahim was covered, and instead of looking to my secondary target, Austin, who was playing again, I went directly to Somers, who was supposed to be a decoy on the play. This would normally have been a time for Coach to go ballistic on me—he’d done it hundreds of times before. But instead, he was quiet on the sideline. He looked down at his notepad, made a mark, and said, “You’ll get it next time,” without looking up. The entire offensiveline did a double take. I just shrugged it off and headed back into the huddle.
After a few more plays, we took a water break. On the sideline, Austin ran up to me and punched my shoulder. “Something’s up,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
Austin crooked his head at me and took a quick squirt of water from a squeeze bottle. “You look weird today.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot, dude.”
“No, I mean weirder than you usually look. Usually you’re just plain ugly, but today you look, I dunno, ugly and weird, too. What up?”
I looked around, saw that Coach was busy working with our defensive line. “I told him,” I said, looking away.
“Who?” Austin raised his voice.
“Coach.”
“Coach?” he said, laughing. “You crazy? You have to be crazy if you think that’s a good idea.”
I took a squirt of water and looked at him. Austin shook his head.
“Man, you are crazy. You tell your friends, that’s one thing. We’re young and we understand this shit. You can’t be telling Coach, he’ll probably drop you off the team. Damn. No wonder he didn’t yell at you.” And with that, Austin put his helmet back on and ran back onto the field. I watched him, the way his upper body barely moved, how he carried all his weight so effortlessly just with his legs. For a moment he looked so different to me, foreign.
This was my best friend of the past six years, and as he ran away from me it made me think how random our friendship was. What did we even have in common? History, maybe? I watched him run and imagined him continuing to run, farther from me, getting smaller and smaller, until he was just a useless speck on the horizon.
And the anger built up in my veins like venom, and I grabbed my helmet and stormed back onto the field, hoping to have a chance to throw a pass to Austin that would sever him at the neck.
15
I arrived in the locker room for my usual pregame one-on-one with Coach, but his door was closed. So I waited outside of his office for a few minutes. Minutes passed. Other players started to arrive and change. No Coach.
After about twenty-five minutes, an assistant defensive coach came out of Coach’s office. I started to stride toward it, but the guy closed the door behind him.
“Castle can’t meet with you today,” he said.
I nodded, wondering if he knew, if Coach was telling people. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Our meetings were a pregame tradition. An hour before every game I’d ever started, he and I would sit and chat for about ten minutes. We’d go over the game plan, talk about the opposing defense, sometimes even joke around.
So I walked over to my locker and began to change into my uniform, feeling vacant inside. I tried to reason with myself. Maybe he was focused on the defense. Perhaps because Laguna Hills was not supposed to be a real challenge for us, Coach figured he didn’t need to focus on me.
Yeah, right, the other part of my brain said. We hadn’t spoken one-on-one since our conversation two days earlier. That’s what this was about.
The team was busy getting rowdy, which is what we did before games. Rahim was leading our breakdown, Rocky was break-dancing, and everybody was hooting and carrying on. I was, too, except it didn’t feel the same. It was like the shouts were coming out of my mouth, but they weren’t connected to me.
I looked over to Austin, but he was joking around with Dennis and I didn’t have the energy to deal with Dennis right now. So I sat by my locker and tried to get my head in the game.
As we took the field in front of our home crowd, I felt totally unprepared, and scared. I stood on the sidelines, adjusting my helmet strap, and felt like I wasn’t quite there, like the boisterous crowd around me was an illusion.
I walked over to the stands to give my mom and dad a hug. My mom grasped me and said, “Give ’em hell, Bobby Lee.”
My dad hugged me, but it felt like he wasn’t paying attention. When I pulled away, I saw his eyes looked sort of hollow and unlike him.
“I’m thinking five touchdown passes,” I said, because that’s the kind of thing my dad likes to hear from me before games. But he didn’t say anything back, he nodded and smiled a weak smile and I wanted to say, Dad, snap out of it! What’s wrong with you?
I mean, sometimes people got busy and preoccupied. Sometimes they were really tired. Did that mean they got to stop paying attention to the things that mattered to you?
I turned and trotted back toward my teammates.
It’s all wrong. The game is wrong. My coach, teammates, friends, family, everything is wrong.
As I ran across the field, I shivered and felt tingles along my sides, like an iceberg had formed there, on the inside. No one could touch me.
The first play was supposed to be a deep pass, and I knew Rahim was too fast for any of their cornerbacks. I took the liberty of waiting an extra second for him to get a step on the defender, and just as I cocked my shoulder to throw, I was blindsided. A flying shoulder, with the weight of a two-hundred-pound linebacker behind it, pummeled me directly in the small of my back. The ball flew out of my hand and I hit the turf, face mask first. My neck absorbed some of the shock of the surprise hit, and I felt a quick jolt down my spine.
I stayed down, even as I heard the crowd roar in a way that made me guess that we’d recovered. I wondered if, when I moved, something would begin to pulse along my spinal cord. I tightened my stomach, frightened. But when I sat up, there was nothing, just a dull pain in my back where the guy had hit me. I stood up, wiped dirt and grass off my jersey, and headed back to the huddle. We had recovered the football. In the huddle, Rahim grabbed a handful of turf out of the top of my face mask. “Thanks,” I said. He nodded and cuffed me on the shoulder.
We were a little off, or at least I was. At halftime we went into the locker room down by a touchdown to an inferior team, and Coach was savage in his pep talk.
“I don’t know what’s going on out there. We’re in the hunt for a state championship,” he said, looking right past me and frowning, “and you guys are letting a lot of meaningless shit get in your way. It’s unprofessional. You can’t do that, you’re letting everyone down when you do that.”
I knew his co
mments were directed at me, but he wasn’t making eye contact. I felt the block of ice shift in my stomach and reverberate into my throat, chilling me and making me wheeze.
He went on to attack our defense. I shut my eyes and tried to will myself to be more intense, more focused, but it just wasn’t working. Something was off.
The universe had taken some strange turn and I could sense it in my bones. If something didn’t change, we were going to lose the game to Laguna Hills, a not-so-great team, on our home field.
As Coach continued his rant, the door leading from the tunnel to the locker room opened and Principal Morris stepped in. Coach stopped speaking and looked at him. Morris surveyed the room and sighed, heavily, something weighing on him. His eyes darted from player to player until they settled on me.
“Bobby Framingham,” he said.
Was he going to yell at me, too? Was it against the law to have an off day? And then, as I looked at him closely and saw the pain on his face, I realized, with horror, what was about to happen. The word had gotten around.
He is going to humiliate me. He’s going to shame me in front of my teammates. He is going to kick me off of the team, here, at halftime.
“Come with me please, Bobby,” he said. I felt my lungs sear with rage.
“No,” I said. “Just say it. Say it here. I don’t care, just get it over with.” There were some surprised murmurs throughout the room, and the boiling blood raced to the edges of my face. “Shut up,” I yelled.
He exhaled and looked at Coach. Coach shrugged. Morris looked back at me. “You need to come with me, Bobby,” he said. “It’s your father.”
16
The emergency-room waiting area was too bright. Everything was so shiny, from the bright yellow vinyl-covered couches to the TV, which was playing some stupid dating show.
Who thought to put fluorescent lighting in a waiting room? It gave the room a false cheeriness, bright and cold like a fake smile. Nobody stood in a hospital waiting room feeling cheery. They should’ve just made it real dim and gloomy—the lighting, the furniture. That way you’d feel comfortable in your misery. My head pulsed, a nasty pain behind my eyes. I couldn’t get my head around it. My dad. Something was wrong with him.
Standing in a waiting room was never fun, but doing it on a Friday night in a football uniform was worse. I wasn’t so selfish that I wanted to leave and play football, but it made me nervous, thinking that our perfect season was on the line and we might lose because I wasn’t there. I wondered which would be worse—losing, or them winning without me—and that thought made me feel awful.
My mother was sitting up very straight, her eyes not really focused on anything. Every time I looked at her I felt pressure in my chest, like a balloon expanding and ready to pop. I paced and sat, sat and paced. Sitting was hard, when you were waiting for news about your dad, who’d just fainted at your football game.
My father had fainted on the sidelines, and was out for about a minute. My mom called 911. Some other parents offered to help and sat with my mom, who was freaked. When Dad sort of came to, he was completely disoriented. They waited for the ambulance, and once it arrived, they had Principal Morris get me.
“How’re you holding up, Bobby Lee?” my mother asked me, squeezing my hand as I sat down beside her. I stroked her arm.
“Okay,” I said, my eyes on the television.
“He’s going to be fine,” she said, and I nodded, translating in my head from mom-speak to what was real. I had no idea, and I had the feeling she didn’t either.
“He’s just been so tired, and I couldn’t get him to go to the doctor. Now we’ll know why, and then we can fix it,” she said, and I knew she was basically talking to herself. I nodded and gripped my mom’s hand.
We sat in silence for a few moments.
“Mom?”
“What, honey?”
“Am I an awful person?”
She rubbed my arm. “You’re one of the best people I know. Why would you ask that?”
“He hasn’t been well, has he?” I asked.
She paused for a moment. “No, he hasn’t,” she said.
“I didn’t notice,” I said. “That makes me a bad person.”
My mother hugged me tight. “We didn’t want to worry you. You’re very preoccupied and you have every right to be,” she said.
I felt my jaw heat up. They don’t want to worry me? How could they keep something this important from me?
“We didn’t really know that much,” she said, as if reading my mind. She reached up and stroked the back of my neck. “If he’d have gone to the doctor and there was something to know, I would have told you. We would have.”
“Huh,” I said, trying to take this all in and wondering how I could be so clueless.
“Don’t ever think you’re a bad person,” she said. “Your father and I can’t believe how well you turned out.”
She kissed me hard on the head and I smiled as she mashed my face into her shoulder. “Especially given the crazy parents you have.”
I didn’t want to ever let go. My mom was one of those totally normal people who talked about how zany she was all the time. I usually got irked when she did that, but right then, I just wanted to hold on forever and never pull my face away.
At ten-fifteen, an hour and a half into our stay at Durango Medical Center, a doctor came out. My mother stood up, so I did, too.
“He’s alert and he’ll be fine to sleep at home tonight,” the doctor said, and my mother exhaled deeply. I shut my eyes and thanked God. “You can see him in a moment.”
“Do we know what this is? He hasn’t been right for months,” my mother said.
“We ran a whole battery of tests,” the doctor said. “He fainted because his blood pressure is so low. Why that happened we don’t know. Some people just run low.”
“He’s been so tired,” my mother repeated. “Could that be related?”
The doctor smiled. “Most definitely. We’re giving him fluids by IV right now, and we’ll want him to rest for a bit, but there’s no reason he can’t go home tonight.”
The tears streamed down my mother’s face, and I could feel the sense of relief in her body, could feel it in my shoulders and chest. I allowed myself to breathe, and it felt good. Good like it hadn’t felt in a long time.
My dad was going to be okay.
17
I was in bed, studying calculus, when my dad appeared in my doorway, wearing a Dodgers cap, an old ragged-looking tan baseball glove hanging off his left hand.
“Knock, knock,” he said.
It was like looking at a stranger. I hadn’t seen my dad with a baseball glove in years, and he was smiling, full of life. I hadn’t seen that in a while either.
“Hey,” I said, sitting up.
“You up for a catch with your old man?” he asked.
It didn’t matter that I was still sore from the game against Laguna Hills, two days earlier. Was I up for a catch with my father? Nothing could have sounded better.
As I rifled through my closet, looking for my own glove, I could hear my dad snapping his mitt repeatedly.
“Still nice and broken in,” he muttered.
“I don’t think ‘broken in’ goes away, Dad,” I said. A beat-up purple Frisbee, a jump rope I hadn’t used since I was a freshman, a red dodgeball. I flung these things aside as I dug through my sporting equipment. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used my baseball glove. My dad and I used to throw the ball around, but that was like eighth grade, maybe. Maybe once with Austin for kicks, a couple years back.