He hugged me back for a moment before pulling away. “What a game! Other than the one play, you were perfect.”
“Can you believe Rahim?” I said, pointing to where the other guys were hoisting him up and carrying him around the field.
“You almost lost it there. What you should have done,” he said, “is tried a pump fake on him. If he bit, you could have gone right around him.”
My father was a great guy, but he had lots of stupid ideas. He was wrong. No way could I have done that. I just stared at him.
“All’s well that ends well,” he said as he started walking toward the car. “See you back at the house.” And with that he was off.
My mother turned around and offered a subtle, silent apology for my father—a shoulder bob and a certain way of creasing her eyes that says, Don’t Take It Personal, Bobby Lee. He’s Just Like That.
Carrie was there. She hated football but sometimes she came to my games. She came up behind me and placed her chin on my neck. “That was one of the finest basketball games I’ve ever seen,” she said. I turned to her and smirked.
“Hockey,” I corrected.
“Look, I may be white, but the name-calling is totally out of place,” she said, kissing me on the cheek and heading out toward her car. She’s so weird. I love her.
“What were you thinking when you threw the pick?” The usual suspect reporters had come to form their circle around me. I was a little relieved to see them flock to Rahim this time. But sure enough, they found me, too.
There were about seven of them looming in front of me, including Finch who was waving a tape recorder in my face along with the rest of them.
What kind of questions are these? What do you think I was thinking? What would you think if a six-foot-six mammoth in a helmet was running at you, full speed, with a look somewhere between homicidal and maniacal in his eye?
“I was thinking, ‘Holy crap, I’m about to be mauled,’ ” I said, and the laughs came pouring out, as if from a comedy faucet.
That’s me. Just turn my crank and I’ll gush stupid jokes at you all night.
“Did you throw to the right place, and Mendez got messed up, or was it your fault?” asked a short guy, new to me.
“Just a miscommunication,” I said, echoing Coach. “It happens sometimes.” They all nodded, as if this answered, rather than restated, their question.
“Did their guy, Levy, get in your face today?” asked a tall, skinny guy, maybe fifty, who was standing to the right of Finch.
“I have no idea who that is,” I answered.
He rifled through his notes. “Number fifty-five,” he said. “Line-backer?”
“Well, I got knocked down a bunch, so probably,” I said. “Mostly it was number ninety-nine. I saw his number a lot from the ground.” A couple of them laughed.
The man smiled thinly. “I’m doing a feature article about Gus Levy. He’s one of their linebackers, and he’s Jewish.”
I laughed, feeling a little high from the adrenaline still. “A Jew in Southern California? Stop the presses!” I said. A huge laugh.
I should do stand-up. Or more truthfully, when I’m punch-drunk on adrenaline and dealing with pesky reporters, I should do stand-up.
“A Jewish football player who’s being recruited all over the country,” the man said patiently, his thin smile barely remaining.
“Oh, okay,” I answered. “Cool. But there are some Jewish players in the NFL. That quarterback for Houston. Sage Rosenfels? He’s gay, isn’t he?”
It took about two seconds for the sirens to start going off in my head.
I meant Jewish, of course, but I don’t think in my whole life I’d had a conversation with anyone about Jewish athletes, let alone thought about it. Gay ones, though, I’d thought a lot about that. It just slipped out, and there was no way to slip it back in.
“Pardon me?” the older reporter said, his ears seeming to dance as they perked up.
“Jewish,” I said. “Did I say? Wow. I don’t know why that was in my . . .”
I looked at Finch. I didn’t mean to, but subconsciously I thought of our interview and I just looked at him. He had this expression on his face, like he was deep in thought, and I wanted to yell out, No! No! Stop thinking that. But I was already looking strange enough to the group of reporters.
I looked away, and that’s when I found myself, once again, staring deep into the eyes of the goateed stranger whom I’d seen after our first game, at Huntington Beach.
He had this glint in his eye that made me blush. He smiled big, a flawless row of white teeth showing, and I lost my train of thought completely.
“You think you have a shot at a perfect season?” said Finch, and I came to, thankful for the question.
“I think if we win all our games, we have a good shot,” I said, and more laughs.
“You’re Yogi Berra!” shouted one of the old-timers, a guy with chronic bad breath and even more chronic bad suits. He shouted as if he were threatening me, though in a happy sort of way.
Totally demented.
I smiled, fielded more inane questions, and headed to the showers.
11
I took my time showering and changing, and when I left the locker room, all my buddies were already gone. There was some party at Colby’s, and I just didn’t feel like dealing with it. I was glad to escape to my car, alone.
But once I got outside, I realized I wasn’t quite by myself yet. There was Finch Gozman, standing alone under a streetlight in the parking lot, his head hung low.
He was standing right in my way, and I was like, great. There was no way I could get to my car without walking near him, unless I took some insane circular route that only a person with OCD would take.
So I exhaled, counted to ten in my head, and approached him.
“Hey, Finch,” I said.
“Hey, Bobby Framingham,” he answered, looking at his cell phone. He stared at it for a few seconds, shook his head, and put it in his pocket. He looked sad.
“You okay?”
He looked off in the distance. “Define okay,” he said.
Finch wasn’t a friend, obviously, but I had sort of a soft spot for people like that, who didn’t fit in. That’s probably why Carrie was my—whatever she was. We stood silently under the streetlight for a few moments while I debated with myself whether I had enough energy to take on someone else’s problems.
It surprised me a little that I was very okay with it. The game had left me in a pretty good mood, and Finch’s issues seemed like a welcome break from my own.
“What happened?” I asked.
Finch looked into my eyes and it was like he was searching to see if it was okay to talk to me. Sometimes I was reminded that I was not just another guy to a lot of people at school. People, especially ones like Finch, looked up to me. He studied me for a while, like he was trying to psych out my motive, before he finally spoke.
“My mom, she just won’t stop,” he said.
I nodded.
“It’s Friday night. And I didn’t even go to the game for fun. I went because it’s my job. She just picks and picks. ‘Will you have enough time to study over the weekend? How do you expect to get into Stanford if you waste your time going to football games?’ ”
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s like, if I don’t get into Stanford . . .” He closed his eyes and for a second I panicked because I thought he was going to cry.
But he didn’t cry. He just looked beat-up, so I put my hand on his shoulder.
“There’s just a lot of pressure,” he said, regarding my hand as if I’d just put an exotic parrot on his shoulder.
“But you have, like, perfect grades, right?” I asked, removing my hand. “And you write for the school paper and your SATs are probably, like, insane.”
He half smiled. “They’re pretty good,” he said. “But you never know with a place like Stanford. You never know.”
“That’s true,” I said. “It sucks that your
folks put all that pressure on you.”
Finch sat down on the concrete, and for a moment I wondered if we were done. But I knew the right thing to do was sit down, too, so I did. We faced out toward the mostly empty parking lot, and it was sort of nice.
“You probably want to be out with your friends,” he said.
I shook my head. I needed several hours to decompress after games. Guys like Austin and Dennis and Rahim always went out afterward, and I didn’t get it.
“This is kinda nice,” I said.
Finch smiled and turned a little red, and for just brief second I looked at him and realized that under the nerd he was not a terrible-looking guy. And then I blushed.
“So who cares?” I said. “So you don’t get into Stanford and you go to another really good school. What’s the big deal?”
He crossed his thin, slightly hairy legs Indian style. “I’m sure it seems stupid to you,” he said. “But it’s more than that. I’m just so tired of being me, you know?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know. I mean, I had lots of stuff going on, but I never really felt like I didn’t want to be me. I just sometimes wanted to be me with fewer problems.
“I just feel like I’m stuck being me,” he said. “And I don’t want to be.”
I chuckled a little and shrugged again. “Come on, it’s not that bad.”
Finch turned to me, his face very serious.
“She checks my homework,” he said.
I snorted. You know how some people snort when they laugh, and it’s cute? This wasn’t that. It was totally involuntary and real, because I had just played an exhausting football game, and I was secretly gay, and this nice, nerdy kid I’d known since we were like twelve had just told me that, at seventeen, his mom still checked his homework. The snort was about as appropriate an answer as I could come up with.
Finch frowned. “She does. She makes a photocopy of it, and marks my homework up with a red pen, and makes me redo it. Every night, I do my homework twice.” He was gripping his knees with his hands.
I took a deep breath so that I didn’t snort again. But this time I laughed. I wasn’t trying to be mean, but I couldn’t help laughing.
He frowned again and I could tell he was sorry he had confided in me.
“Thanks,” he said, and he was about to stand up, so I put my hand on his shoulder and held him down.
“Finch,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh.”
“Yeah, well,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “We all have weird things. About a year ago my mom asked me if I had a playdate with Austin. And she totally didn’t get it when I laughed at her. She’s a mom. That’s what they do.”
Finch closed his eyes and I could see his cheeks puff out a little in amusement. But he composed himself.
“Come on, Finch. It’s a little bit funny.”
I watched the smile slowly pour over his face, and then he laughed, and I laughed, too, and there we were, the weird duo of Finch Gozman and Bobby Framingham, cracking up while sitting on the concrete of the parking lot on a late Friday night.
“Playdate,” he repeated, laughing in that spastic way he has.
“Mommy, my homework’s done,” I said, doubling over.
When we finally stopped laughing, Finch looked like a different person.
“Thanks,” he said. “You really cheered me up. I didn’t think you’d be the kind of person who would waste your time with me.”
“Nice self-esteem,” I said, and he laughed, and I did, too, and it crossed my mind that Finch and I were sort of friends now. I imagined what Austin would think if he were watching this. His head would like totally explode.
I softly punched his shoulder as a good-bye and walked toward my car. It was dark now, the only illumination coming from sporadic streetlights, every ten yards or so.
I was thinking about after the game, how we’d gone nuts in the locker room, with music blaring and stuff flying around the room: water bottles, chairs . . . Coach was right there with us. It was so cool to see him joking around for once. He had gone up to Rahim at his locker and said, “Hey, Bell! I’m takin’ you out of the starting offense. You’re a full-time kick blocker now,” and Rahim had looked at him like he was crazy for a second before realizing that this was Coach’s idea of a funny joke.
“Good thing, ’cause I’m done with this offense anyway. Got a QB can’t throw, and a coach can’t even call plays right. Never givin’ me the damn ball!” and the room was silent for a split second before everyone exploded with laughter.
It was the most unlikely sentence for Rahim to say, ever. I was walking in the dark parking lot, thinking about that, when I realized that I was going to tell Coach. What harm could it do? I mean, I’d be telling him the truth, right? And I knew he cared about me, so he’d try to help me out. I thought about timing, and decided to do it soon, maybe that coming week.
For once, elation overcame my fear, and I felt like sprinting to my car, and driving really fast.
Austin, Dennis, and Rahim were basically fine with me being gay. Why wouldn’t Coach be fine, too? Telling the world, maybe that was a bit much, but Coach was smart and maybe he’d help me figure out the right thing to do.
Every squeak of my sneakers along the concrete parking lot told me that if I played this right, it was all going to be okay.
“I’ll take Jewish ballplayers for one hundred, Alex . . .”
The voice came softly from my left, maybe ten feet away, so I turned slightly and saw that there was a figure leaning against the bed of a silver truck. I’d been daydreaming and hadn’t seen anyone around, so hearing a voice startled me. There were fewer than thirty cars remaining in the entire parking lot. My car was ahead, about forty feet on the right.
I squinted, but couldn’t quite see who it was.
“Hi?” I said tentatively, not breaking my pace.
The voice laughed, not a nasty laugh at all, more amused and playful. “Okay, here’s your clue,” he said. “He was a premiere southpaw before arthritis took him out of baseball in the mid- 1960s.”
“Huh?” I slowed my walking. He laughed again, and slowly his face came into view for me through the shadows.
It was the mystery reporter whom I’d first seen at our game at Huntington Beach, the dark-haired guy with the goatee.
I’d forgotten momentarily that I’d seen him again earlier that night. “Oh, it’s you,” I said, realizing that meant nothing. I might as well have said, Oh, it’s a homicidal maniac.
“We’re playing Jeopardy!,” he advised me, smirking. “As I said, he was a great lefty before arthritis ended his baseball career. Mid- 1960s.”
I felt somewhat safe with this strange stranger. “Sandy Koufax?” I asked.
He buzzed at me. “Zzz. Wrong answer,” he said.
“Huh?”
“The correct answer is, ‘Who is Sandy Koufax?’ ”
I raised an eyebrow at this strange guy. “The correct question is who are you?”