“Showtime!” I said, smiling too quickly after a bite of chicken. It slipped out of my mouth. I looked up at Coach and the laughter made it feel, for the moment, like nothing had changed from September. I knew it had, but I loved the feeling of being back in tight with Coach.
30
“I don’t know, scared shitless?” I told Dr. Blassingame, when he asked me how I felt to be back at school.
He laughed. It was Monday and we were in his office at the start of the school day. It was time to return to the real world, and football, and I felt a little woozy, like you feel when you’ve had the flu and go back to school too soon.
“You’ll be just fine,” he said.
I was definitely feeling more comfortable with Blassingame these days. He had visited me at the house twice during the week and we had talked. It was cool, even though it was a little weird having a teacher invade the private space of your room.
“Do you think there will ever come a time when I’ll be glad this happened?” I asked, picking up a stray rubber band from his desk.
Blassingame laughed. “I’m already glad.”
I looked at him like he was crazy. “You’re nuts.” I stretched the rubber band and it snapped, biting me lightly on the fleshy area between my thumb and index finger.
“True as that is, you learned a lot through this adversity, Bobby.”
I massaged my rubber-band sting. “So if I hadn’t been gay, and Finch hadn’t written that story, and my dad hadn’t gotten sick, I wouldn’t have grown?”
Blassingame shook his head. “You’re one tough customer, aren’t you?” he said. I shrugged and stretched the rubber band as wide as it would go, testing whether I could pull it apart. “It looks to me, my friend, like you’re ready.”
“We’ll see,” I said. And with a firm handshake, I was off to face the world of high school again.
At lunch I found out what happens when people feel like they know you better than they really do. Obviously word had gotten out about my breakdown, because complete strangers were coming up to me and confiding in me their secrets.
“I actually have two moms,” said this guy with a Mohawk as we stood in the checkout line.
Carrie heard this one as she walked up. Her eyes were like saucers. I gave the Mohawk kid an understanding nod and we watched him put his tray down and pay the lady at the register.
“My sister’s best friend had a nervous breakdown,” this pimply-faced girl, probably a freshman, told me after I finished paying.
I nodded solemnly and waited for Carrie to pay for her lunch. “Are you a confessional now?” Carrie asked.
“Apparently,” I said.
“Cool,” she said. “I’m having impure thoughts about the dishwasher guy.”
That made me laugh, and I felt better.
“Glad to be back?” Bardello, our third-string quarterback, asked me as we started the first of five laps around the football field. I nodded. The day had gone well, but the locker room had been strange. I thought we had solved the “Bobby’s gay” problem when we had all been laughing in the shower. But now I was back after missing a game and a week of practice, and there was this awkward silence, like they thought I was going to snap at any moment. I didn’t hear one joke, and that’s what I wanted to hear: Laughter. It would tell me that everything was fine again.
My legs felt tight, my hamstrings like creaky wires in need of oil. But after missing a week, I savored it all, especially how good the cool breeze felt on my skin.
“You think I could catch Haskins if I tried?” I asked Bardello. As usual, Haskins had sped off to a big lead, while Bardello and I did our usual jog.
He looked over at me and laughed. “Sure thing, Crazy,” he said.
My one-week hiatus had gained me a new nickname. I sped off, leaving Bardello in my dust.
With Haskins at the helm, we’d beaten Westminster La Quinta 31-0, mostly on the strength of Mendez and our running game. Haskins had done well, but I was the starter again, and it felt good. Haskins was even pretty cool about it, telling me in the locker room before practice that it was good to have me back.
As I was rounding the final curve of the second lap, my pace felt good, my legs felt loose, and I was enjoying the slow burn in my chest. I was also slowly catching up on Haskins, who wasn’t aware we were racing yet.
“Watch out, Haskins, I’m gonna pass you,” I yelled, still a good fifteen yards behind him. Haskins looked back, keeping his pace effortless while searching for me with his eyes. I saw him laugh and turn back, picking up his pace a step.
“You keep dreaming, Crazy,” he shouted.
“Crazy is coming to get you,” I yelled, and I saw Coach just ahead of me, working with the linebackers on a drill near the thirty-yard line. He looked up as I said that and grinned.
I saw Austin running routes with the receivers. He glanced up at me and gave me the finger just as I whizzed past him on lap three. I laughed and felt a tingling in my chest.
Lap four was always the tough one, but it was especially hard today, after having missed a week of conditioning. I got within ten yards of Haskins as I hit the final lap. Bardello was a good half lap behind us. I had something to prove today. To hell with everyone telling me I was slow. I was whatever I chose to be, and at that moment I chose to be faster than Haskins. I pumped my legs harder and felt myself accelerate. I enjoyed the feeling of speed, whooshing through the wind and knowing that as this race picked up steam, the rest of the team had stopped to watch. I could feel their eyes on me, could feel them as I closed the gap between Haskins and me, could feel him begin to panic about losing out in a race to the slow and crazy gay guy who was about to take his job. Who is this masked man who comes back from a weeklong hiatus stronger than ever, and faster, and—
As I turned the third of four corners, my legs moving faster than my body usually moves, my head narrating the race, I lost the rhythm in my legs. Like a steady drumbeat and then the drummer misses the snare, there I was, my torso too far ahead of my lower body, and I knew it was inevitable. The stumbling began, and I heard the collective gasp of the players, who were just ahead, standing in the near end zone to my left. My left leg hit the turf of the track awkwardly and soon I was toppling, top-heavy, down onto the track, a huge one-man crash followed by a dramatic rollover. Trying to control the fall made it worse, and as I struggled to my feet again, I fell a second time. The gravel showered into my face as a dust cloud enveloped me.
For a few moments it was pure silence out there. Splayed out on the track, I felt like a freak, and then it began: the applause. I don’t know who started it, but soon the entire team and coaching staff were clapping for my spectacular fall, and I flipped over onto my back, looking up at the blue sky until I burst out laughing, as hard as I’d laughed in a long time. Soon there were hoots and whistles and catcalls, and whether it was what they meant or not, I felt the love in my bones. I rose up, a huge smile on my face, and bowed. I finished my final lap, a slight burning where I’d scraped my left knee, but I didn’t care. I was now trailing even Bardello, to a rising chant. “Crazy Legs! Crazy Legs!” they yelled in unison.
“C’mon, Bobby,” Austin yelled. “Shake an arm . . . I mean a leg!”
I’m back in the game.
31
“Is this normal?” Carrie asked, using a tiny white toy shovel to fill her neon-green plastic pail with wet sand. “I get the feeling this is not at all normal behavior for high school seniors.”
I looked up from where I was sitting, at the foot of our sand castle, and addressed the question to Bryan. “I don’t know. Is it normal for us to be doing this now that we’re almost out of high school?”
“Totally not normal. Not at all. Once you’re in college, you can do this stuff, but face it, you two are freaks,” he said, meticulously carving bricks into one of the towers.
“I thought that was possible,” said Carrie, throwing a full pail high into the air and watching the sand fall out in clumps. The wind
blew some of it onto the castle. She then twirled in circles like a four-year-old. “Weee!” she screamed. The group to our right, a bunch of middle-aged men with major beer guts, looked at her and frowned.
“Carrie,” Bryan said, mock stern. “Do I need to put you in time-out?”I loved that they’d known each other for thirty minutes and were already acting like old friends.
Carrie stamped into the sand right in front of Bryan and crossed her arms tightly across her chest. “No fair!”
“Life isn’t fair,” Bryan said. “Now get to work. We’re falling way behind. If we lose this contest, it’ll be your fault, young lady.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Carrie agreed. “I’m at the beach with two adorable gay guys.” She said this really loud as well, and I blushed as the folks next to us looked over at us again. They didn’t care. They went back to work and ignored our little area of dysfunction.
Bryan looked at me and offered me an exaggerated grin. I offered him a toothy grin back, and shrugged. “We are adorable, aren’t we?” I asked him.
“Totally,” Bryan responded. Carrie stuck her finger down her throat as if to vomit, and then coughed violently, because her finger had been covered in sand.
At Bryan’s request, we’d entered into the annual Seal Beach sand-castle contest. I’d never even heard of it, but then again, I was a somewhat-normal human being. For Bryan, sand sculpture was like a religion.
We’d set up close to a concrete wall, which had seemed like a good idea at first—an actual wall to play off of, Bryan explained— but now that the other contestants had all claimed their spots, it was a bit of a struggle to step around groups to get to the prime wet sand. And without wet sand, our castle had nothing to stand on.
Literally.
The night before, I’d returned to the football field against Bolsa Grande, a team that had just one win. We’d won big, 54-7. I didn’t play the best game ever, but I threw the ball well. Coach was happy with me, anyway.
It was playoff time. We’d won our league and were 9-1 overall. On Monday we’d find out who we were playing first, but based on our record, we knew we’d be a high seed and get to play at home.
When Bryan had called and asked if I’d want to go to the contest, at first I wasn’t sure, because it wasn’t the kind of thing I’d normally do. I asked if I could bring Carrie along, and was glad when he didn’t even hesitate in saying yes. Carrie thought it was a great idea.
“Where else can you build a sand castle and have people look at it?” she said enthusiastically, over the phone.
“Any beach,” I said.
“True,” she replied. “But where else can we do it this weekend where it’s a contest and I can meet Bryan?”
“That’s true,” I admitted.
I looked around at our competition. We were building a castle, but others were working on sand elephants, cars, even a SpongeBob. Bryan had wanted to do something more creative, but I insisted on a castle when we began that morning. Ours was the only castle in the area. Even though it was mostly Bryan’s work, I really wanted us to win.
Carrie came around to the front and took a careful look at our handiwork. Bryan had been the main architect and had done all of the intricate work, since Carrie and I proved to be deficient at sand-castle building in general. She was best at filling up buckets and either throwing them up in the air or pouring them out randomly. I was good at digging and hopeless at designing.
“I think this needs a veranda,” Carrie said, observing Bryan’s circular towers.
Bryan looked up at her, grimaced, and asked the appropriate question. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. I’m not actually sure what a veranda is, but I’m sure this would be better with one,” Carrie responded, quite sure of herself.
“It’s a porch, silly girl,” Bryan said.
Carrie put her hands on her hips and stomped for emphasis. “I’m a woman, damn it! I’m part of this sand-castle building team, and I’m a silly woman. In fact, after that chauvinistic comment, I’m considering changing that to W-O-M-Y-N, okay? Bobby, stick up for me!”
“You’re a W-O-M-Y-N,” I said, not looking up. “Stand up for yourself.”
Carrie laughed, probably not having realized she was contradicting herself, as she often did. “Still, kick his butt. He hurt my feelings.”
“I will if you want me to,” I said quickly, driven by the urge to tackle Bryan.
“Don’t you dare, Bobby,” Bryan said, bracing himself as I leaped to my feet. He started to step backward, away from me. I smiled and decided to let him be. He tentatively sat down again, content to work on the castle.
Bryan was a great designer. Even with Carrie and me messing things up, the castle was awesome. He’d created two perfect circular towers, above a multilevel base with flawless squared-off walls. He had me digging, I realized, to keep me busy and out of his way, sort of like how Carrie’s multiple personalities had kept her occupied.
Currently, she was carving elongated phalluses into the sand in the corner of our little lot. “Sand carrots,” she said with a proud smile, presenting them to us. The fact that one had a scrotum at its base made it clear that this was no carrot. I raised an eyebrow at her. “If you thought it was something else . . .” she said. “That says a lot more about you than it does about me, Bobby Framingham.” Bryan laughed.
The judges came around at about 1 P.M. By then, I had gotten excited about the fact that our castle was really good. We’d filled in the hole I’d dug, and demolished Carrie’s carrots. It looked professional to me.
“We’re actually going to win,” I said. Bryan and Carrie just looked at each other and shrugged. Apparently I was the only one who was concerned about winning.
The judge, a fiftysomething man with a white ponytail and a really skinny build, was walking around with his pad, taking notes on each sculpture. I was trying to gauge his reactions.
What could I say? I loved winning.
“Shaundra is now a full-fledged prostitute,” Carrie said to my back. Bryan laughed, not knowing the history of Carrie’s neighbor and former best friend.
“No, she isn’t,” I said, my attention on the judge. He was smiling in front of SpongeBob, and had his hand on his chin.
“Well, all I know is that at her house there’s a turnstile where a door should be, and grown men line up in front of it every morning,” Carrie said. Again, Bryan laughed.
“Uh-huh, sure,” I said, distracted.
“What are you doing, Bobby?” Bryan said.
“Waiting for the judge.”
They both laughed. “Why?” Carrie asked. “Do you have a crush on him?”
I glanced back at them. “It’s a contest, isn’t it?”
Bryan stood up and came over to where I was standing. He dropped a kind hand on my shoulder and rubbed gently. “We’re not gonna win, B,” he said.
I looked at him. “But you did such a great job! You deserve—” He smiled and interrupted me. “Yes, we did,” he said. “But the more creative ones always win. SpongeBob will win, or that cruise ship.”
I looked at our castle. “Why didn’t you say so? We could have done something else.”
“Oh, Bobby,” Bryan said, mussing my hair. “We did it for fun, not to win.”
I took a deep breath. What was it with me and winning? I looked over at Carrie, who seemed to be creating some new pornographic sand design, and looked back at Bryan, who was smiling and looking directly in my eyes.
I laughed. He laughed back, and I laughed some more and it felt really good.