Right then the college football games started so we had to sit down and watch them, and for long stretches I could even forget what just happened. I'd remember whenever they did one of those annoying athlete profiles that don't tell you anything because those things don't even say as much as People, but otherwise I'd just root for Bill, who got two good sacks in and a couple seconds of footage of him with his helmet off, showing what a good-looking guy he is even without earrings. And Win started again too.
That night I called Brian, but he was out with some friends so I couldn't tell him about People, which was probably for the best since I didn't think the news would make him any happier than it did me. Because I wasn't the only one who said things to those two reporters, and did things in front of them, that I wouldn't be too keen on my friends and neighbors learning about. It's not such a good idea to go around kissing rival linebackers, at least not in high school football. I wouldn't know about the pros.
7. A Whole Herd of Trouble Coming My Way
WORD STARTED GETTING AROUND SCHOOL about Amber and Dale. They weren't doing a whole lot to hide it, what with Dale practically living in Amber's driveway because her real apartment was an hour away. Amber's mom, Lori, was too caught up in her job and her latest boyfriend to notice, but not everyone was, and Amber started getting garbage about it. It wasn't as bad as it could have been because Amber has a reputation for being tough, but she was getting called things in the halls and bumped by accident on purpose, and stuff got written on her locker. She didn't complain about it, not once, but she started cutting school a lot. Which totally sucked for me. Kari Jorgensen, who I'd hung around with a bit over the summer, now had a hot new boyfriend herself who took all her time, and I couldn't hang out with the volleyball players seeing as I'd basically abandoned them to play football, and even though I really liked some of the guys on the football team, it wasn't the same.
Then there was that freshman Paul Zorn. He'd stare at me whenever we were at our lockers, and ask me how I was, or tell me how good I'd played. He kind of reminded me of Curtis although he has it a lot worse than Curtis because he's short and kind of soft, and just looks like a target. So I'd chat with him sometimes because I didn't have anyone else to talk to. Or walk with him, even if I ended up late for class, just to protect him a little bit.
Anyway, one day Amber skipped school again, and so I ended up eating alone in the cafeteria, feeling like every single person was watching me eat my sloppy joes, which are hard to eat in the best of circumstances, and then I got sloppy joe sauce on the health class homework I was doing, which made me even more upset, especially because it's this dumb form on why caffeine is so bad for you that we shouldn't even have to fill out considering our health teacher comes to class every day with a three-quart cup of coffee just so she can stay awake. Then on the way to class, feeling just peachy, I saw Paul Zorn get body-slammed by a couple sophomores. Just a few yards in front of me. Paul's backpack fell open, and he started crawling around trying to pick stuff up as the two sophomores stood there laughing, and then right as I got there one of them gave him a shove and said, "Faggot."
I have no recollection of thinking, even for a second. Next thing I knew, I had that kid up against the lockers with his feet a good eighteen inches off the floor and his T-shirt balled up under his chin where I was holding him. One-handed too, which means I was extra mad, because this kid had some meat on him. Donny Donovan, his name was. He'd tried out for football but hadn't even managed a day of practice. He had a little barrel chest and mean little eyes. Only his eyes weren't mean now, they were really wide, and you could hear him breathing because his head had made such a bang when it hit the lockers that everyone in the entire hallway had gone dead quiet.
He looked like he was waiting for me to say something, and everyone in the entire hallway waited for me to say something, and for the eight millionth time I couldn't think of a single thing. I mean, I wanted to say that I hate that word because of everything it means for people like Amber, but I knew if I said this I'd bring even more attention to her and I didn't want to do that. Instead I just stood there glaring at him until Mr. Slutsky showed up out of nowhere and made us both come to his office, and Paul Zorn was left to pick up all his papers.
The meeting was about as much fun as anyone could ever have short of being run over by a tiller. Mom showed up in her elementary school principal clothes looking just furious, hissing that she'd never once had to do this with Win or Bill. Donny Donovan's parents showed up too, both of them, just as short and barrel-chested as he was, so packed into their clothes that it was a wonder the seams didn't pop. They were like human sausages, with sausage fingers and sausage arms and tiny piggy eyes. Mom spent the whole time glaring at me, and the sausage people glared at me too, and Mr. Slutsky gave this long speech that he could probably recite in his sleep about how violence never solves anything and students should find a teacher or him to resolve their conflicts.
Yeah right, I thought.
Then Donny got to explain his side, which was basically that he'd been walking down the hall minding his own business, nothing to do with Paul Zorn, when I attacked him and gave him a huge lump on his head and probably whiplash. On the plus side, no one except his parents seemed to believe him. Then Mr. Slutsky asked me to tell my side, and all I could do was stare at the table, wishing I had a week to come up with an answer.
"Are you going to allow this?" Mr. Sausage Donovan asked. "Football players bullying students?" He said "football players" like it was a disease.
"We do not tolerate bullying in this school," Mr. Slutsky said. "D.J. will be benched following school policy."
"Benched?" I interrupted. "But—"
Mr. Slutsky shot me a look and I shut right up, glad to be sitting out of reach of Mom. He continued: "We do not tolerate bullying in this school, Donald."
"I wasn't bullying!" he whined.
"Your reputation precedes you," said Mr. Slutsky, which sounded pretty tough to me but it went right over the heads of the Sausages. Then he sighed and let us all go.
Out in the corridor Mom came right up to me. "Are you satisfied? Have you learned your lesson?"
"I didn't—it wasn't my fault—"
"Whose fault was it?" she snapped with that Mom logic I hate. "Certainly not Curtis's."
"Curtis? What's he have to do with this?"
Mom looked at me like I was dim. "Sarah? Sarah Zorn?"
"Wait—Paul Zorn is Sarah's brother? Curtis's girlfriend, Sarah?"
"I'll pick you up after practice. You can break this news to your father."
I also got to break the news to Jeff Peterson, who made me tell the whole team even though most of them had already heard. Beaner Halstaad, who's probably my closest friend on the team and who always has something to say, said that Donny Donovan deserved it, but Jeff cut him off with that same old lecture about violence not solving anything, and how we as football-player role models had to control our tempers, and then he made me apologize to the team for letting them down. Which was swell.
Last summer before football started, I'd been nervous about whether the guys on the team would accept me. Well, I hadn't realized how much they had until now, when instead they were all disgusted that a Schwenk had gotten herself benched for our next game, and with our huge Hawley match coming up in two weeks. God, I felt terrible. Plus I couldn't explain to Beaner, not even to Amber, why it had happened, and that made me feel ten times worse.
The only person more upset than me was Paul Zorn. When I got back to my locker finally after getting chewed out by Mom, he was sitting there—cutting class and everything. "I'm so sorry—it's all my fault—I went to tell Mr. Slutsky, I tried—"
"Don't worry about it," I said. The last thing I needed was some freshman making things worse.
"Your brother always talks about you, you're so nice—"
"My brother says I'm nice?"
"Sometimes," Paul managed, which was pretty smooth of him, considering.
&nbs
p; "Yeah, well, it's not that big a deal." What was I supposed to do, tell Paul that I didn't even know my brother and his sister were dating? At least him thinking that, and other people too, made me look a little bit better, like I cared about someone besides myself. A couple weeks later a Vikings defender and an Eagles lineman got thrown out of a game for fighting, and everyone said they were fighting because the game was so rough, but I sat there thinking that they could have been fighting about something no one else understood because you just can't ever know what's going on inside someone else's head.
The only good news was that People came out without one single mention of me. I read it in the drugstore like it was a dirty magazine or something, hiding behind the nail polish display, but it was all celebrities having babies just like the non-camera guy had said. Which was such a huge relief, because can you even imagine how much it would suck to have an article about you playing football appear the same week you can't even play because you got busted for defending some freshman from the kind of name your best friend is being called? Although I bet stories like that never get printed in People anyway. Plus it was a huge relief not to have to break the truth to Brian about the turkey farmers—that was a conversation I'd been dreading, and now I didn't have to have it, thank God.
So that was the one nice thing I could think about when people would cluck about me getting benched and how it never happened to my brothers, which it wouldn't because Win was absolutely perfect at everything related to football and at being perfect, and Bill could always talk his way out of stuff, ever since he was little.
Friday night I had to go to the high school and suit up so I could sit on the bench for the West Lake game with everyone looking at me. But the game got called for lightning. Which was great for about two seconds until Jeff informed me that I still had to be benched, which meant benched for the next game, which was Hawley.
Just so you know, I was not the only one a tiny bit bummed about this. At least Beaner was nice enough to invite me out to Taco Bell with him and a couple other players to cheer me up some.
Beaner was in a great mood actually, like he always is, and in no time he had us cracking up. He was talking a mile a minute—which is about as fast as he can run—I guess because he was still so pumped from getting ready for the game that didn't happen. He went off on this bit about the four of us forming a band, doing imitations of all of us, especially me, acting out what I'd be like as lead singer, which of course is the very worst job in the world for me. I couldn't imagine being in front of a crowd of people like that, which Beaner of course knew, and he pretended to be me with a microphone barely able to get out one word at all. I guess it could have been mean of him to make fun of me like that, all my bad talking skills, but I was laughing too hard to care. Beaner never even cracked a smile, just faked a big scared gulp, his pretend microphone in front of him. "Um—ah ... we're, um, here ... to um, rock ... you..."
All of sudden, I did a double take because walking in the side door of Taco Bell was Brian, shaking the rain off his Hawley jacket and laughing with some other Hawley football players. I gasped, seeing him across the room like that, looking so handsome with his hair all glittery wet and a huge smile on his face.
I tried not to watch him too much because that's not so cool, and also I had a feeling that it wouldn't be so great for Hawley and Red Bend to meet the week before their big game, even in a fast food restaurant. But I could see Brian checking the room out, looking around for anyone he knew. His eyes worked in my direction and then all of sudden he saw me and—you know how a person looks when they see someone they know, how their face lights up? Well, at that moment his face did exactly the opposite. You'd have thought I was the person he knew least in the world. And he right away turned his back and said something to his friends and in five seconds they walked out.
Maybe I'd made an I-don't-know-you face at him too. But I don't think so. And it wasn't like Brian was trying to avoid a Red Bend–Hawley confrontation or anything, because I didn't get the sense he even recognized who I was sitting with. No, he just saw me and he left.
"Hey, rock star, what's up?" Beaner asked.
"Nothing," I said.
"You see those Hawley guys just now? Chickens! They see us and they fly away."
Which led into a long discussion of the upcoming Hawley game, although I didn't join in because I too busy was trying to figure out what had just happened and why it made me feel so bad.
***
Saturday morning I got to play plumber with Dad even though he's not the world's best plumber and always ends up losing his temper. Which he did this time too, up on a ladder cursing away with me standing ready with the blowtorch, which you'd think would be fun but actually isn't, not after the first couple times, when Brian ambled in.
"Hey," he said.
"You know anything about plumbing?" Dad snapped at him.
"My dad's got a great plumber. Want me to get his number?"
Dad snorted like the idea of spending money on a plumber was the stupidest idea he'd ever heard in his life. He started banging away on the pipe with his big wrench.
Brian grinned. "That's right, Mr. Schwenk, you show that pipe who's boss."
I couldn't help grinning too. Here I was still all churned up about Taco Bell, and now churned up at the thought that some people out there had cash to drop on luxuries like plumbers, and even so Brian could make me smile. Then when he saw that I was grinning, he grinned back so it was all we could do not to laugh out loud.
He stuck around for a couple hours helping out Dad and me, long enough that everything felt kind of back to normal, and he even said how sorry he was that I'd be benched for the Hawley game. Dad grunted that the Hawley folks must be thrilled.
Brian grinned at me. "Oh, they are. Everyone's pretty scared of D.J."
Which cheered Dad up, hearing that.
Plus Brian—I've got to hand it to him for not shying from tough conversations—as soon as Dad went in to finish lunch, he right away apologized for not saying hello last night.
"That's okay," I lied, because even though it wasn't okay that he'd ignored me, it was way more than okay that he was acknowledging it now.
"No, it's not. I just—I was real surprised to see you there. It was like this one galaxy I know suddenly colliding with another galaxy I know. Know what I mean?"
"What are you, an astronaut?" I asked so that Brian had to elbow me, and then we stayed stuck together for a while, long enough that Dad had to holler twice to come in for lunch.
Dad had enough food for an army because Jimmy and Kathy were coming over for Bill's game that was about to start, and Jimmy was so glad to see Brian—seeing that he's Brian's coach and all—that Brian stuck around, all of us with big yummy bowls of this beef stew Dad had made, and Jimmy and Dad with beers. Dad probably would have offered Brian a beer too if Jimmy hadn't been there. It was all pretty perfect until Brian's cell phone rang and he said he had to take off.
I walked him out to his Cherokee and asked if everything was okay, not knowing how else to ask about that phone call that had dragged him away. I must have sounded so serious that he checked to see if anyone was looking, then put his arms around me and gave me a kiss. He grinned. "Just remember that when you're sitting on the bench next Friday watching us win."
"You wish." I gave him a shove. "You better get to the gym, get some training in yet."
"I don't need training, just a big old ice pack, because my arm will be on fire." He gave me one of his tornado smiles and drove off grinning.
I grinned back, but then my happiness faded away, like pop bubbles do when you leave the cap off. I sure didn't have any interest in returning to Taco Bell anytime soon, I can tell you that, not if it was going to make Brian's galaxies collide or whatever it was he'd said. To tell you the truth, I felt a little sick. Things had been going so well for a while there with football and Brian, and school even, and now ... Being benched for stupid Donny Donovan, Brian ignoring me, that scare wi
th People that almost got me talked about all over the country, Amber getting so harassed just for having a girlfriend, even the milk house roof collapsing and Dad so freaked about money—none of this was good. Not one bit. It seemed like after that nice quiet spell, a whole herd of trouble was coming my way.
8. Bad News on All Fronts
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, classes were canceled for a huge pep rally for the big Hawley game, and all the football players had to come out including me, which totally sucked because some of the kids booed. Although it was hard to tell whether they booed because I was a girl or because I got benched or because I shouldn't have been. I noticed that Donny Donovan was booing pretty loudly, and I decided if I ever met him in a dark alley he would end up one sorry little sausage.
The game was a complete disaster. Jeff Peterson made me put on my uniform again, and go out as an example of Why We Shouldn't Fight, even though if people were so concerned about fighting they should never have invented football. Hawley ended up winning by eighteen points, which is an awful lot different than us winning by seven like we did in the scrimmage back in August. Which I had played in, which only about four hundred people reminded me of just in case that little fact had slipped my mind, in case I didn't feel bad enough already. A bunch of Hawley scumbag players spent every moment they weren't playing just rubbing in their victory, which made the experience about that much worse. So the fact that Brian ignored me the whole game didn't bother me all that much.
Dad made Curtis get up for breakfast with us on Saturday morning, which was weird. Usually they let him sleep in. I'd sleep in too, but most of the time I can't. I guess my farmer ancestors have me hard-wired to wake up at the crack of dawn.
"So what'd you think of the game?" Dad asked Curtis, serving up a mess of scrambled eggs with cheese and little chopped peppers.