And that’s when she felt something brush against her. Thought nothing of it until the smell of motor oil flooded her nostrils and left her looking at the man who’d forced himself into the seat behind her sliding toward the aisles holding—Sam’s gaze dipped downward, to the open empty pocket of her backpack—her iPad in his grasp.
“Hey, somebody stop him! Stop him!” she cried.
But the crowd was roaring too loud for her to be heard and Sam pushed her way after him, past the students crowded into the front row.
“Hey!” she yelled again. “Stop!”
He started up the aisle toward the exit, not turning to regard her.
“Somebody, stop him!”
But the crowd was so loud now Sam couldn’t hear her own words. She reached the aisle to find her way blocked by students positioning themselves to rush the field in celebratory fashion. Sam did her best to fight through them, nobody giving an inch and seeming to form an impenetrable wall between her and the guy who’d stolen her iPad.
He was getting away!
She glimpsed him descending the ramp that would free him from the stands, the distance between them continuing to grow with Sam still fighting to follow, when she heard a sickening crunch and the crowd went quiet.
* * *
The moment before impact, Alex Chin saw the blur of two onrushing forms aglow in the light cast by the halogen bulbs towering overhead. Tommy Banks never heard them coming over the crowd noise, clueless to the bone-rattling crunch he was about to suffer as he veered away from the sideline with the end zone in sight.
Alex excelled at all things football with the exception of blocking, since he was never asked to do it. So when he threw himself airborne in the last instant before Tommy got sandwiched, it felt awkward and wrong. The last sight he remembered was a glimpse of Tom Banks in the wheelchair—upside down because of the way Alex’s body had canted.
* * *
Sam felt the air go out of the stadium, the crowd seeming to hold its collective breath. She stopped fighting against the swell of humanity to turn in the direction everyone else was already staring, a single focused gaze aimed straight at a form down on his back in a Wildcats uniform, lying so that his body straddled the sideline. Motionless.
It couldn’t be, Sam thought.
But it was.
Alex.
* * *
He’d slammed into both Granite Bay tacklers a mere instant before they reached Tommy, bent in half at impact until it felt like his lower body was separated from his upper. Alex felt his spine rattle, seeming to crack low and high at the same time and sounding like a gunshot inside his head. The field felt spongy beneath him and he didn’t realize he’d hit it until he heard the blaring echo of the referee’s whistle blowing.
That was all Alex heard because the crowd had gone totally quiet, so quiet he could actually hear the air seeming to whistle inside his helmet.
Why aren’t I getting up? Somebody, help me up.
Then Alex realized it wasn’t just that he couldn’t get up, he couldn’t even move. Started to suck in a deep breath when he realized he couldn’t breathe, either. It felt like his helmet was a plastic bag fastened over his face to shut out the air. He heard the referee’s whistle blowing louder, figured it was drowning out his cries for help and then realized he hadn’t uttered any.
Somebody, help me!
Alex thought the words but couldn’t speak them. Around him, the jam-packed stands were nothing but a soft blur, the blackness of the night sky descending until it swallowed him.
6
FROZEN
SAM HAD FORGOTTEN ALL about the man who smelled of motor oil and her stolen iPad. She’d heard about moments when time seemed to freeze solid, but had never experienced one until now. That’s what watching Alex lying still on the sideline felt like, a snapshot instead of a video. The crowd remained dead silent, standing as if still preparing to celebrate while assuming a position more like a prayer service.
Whomp!
That’s what the collision sounded like. She’d heard it, even though she’d been facing away from the field trying to follow the path of the thief.
Sam watched trainers from both teams and the Wildcats’ team doctor sprinting onto the field toward Alex. An ambulance parked off the far sideline of the field at every game spun its flashing lights to life in anticipation of a hospital ride, needing no signal to head out to the downed player.
“Cara!” she called out to the blond-haired shape with pom-poms dangling by her hips on the sideline, then louder, “Cara!”
Cara didn’t turn, as transfixed by what was taking place on the field as she was. Alex down on the ground, engulfed by kneeling and crouching forms. The kid for whom he’d thrown the block standing in the end zone, no one acknowledging the score. He looked lost, as frozen as she felt.
Sam returned her gaze to the sideline, saw Cara talking on her cell phone. To her mom, maybe, or someone else who’d been watching the game on television. Sam waved, trying to get her attention but to no avail, Cara jabbering away, managing a smile.
A smile? Her boyfriend was lying broken on the field. So where’d the smile come from?
“Who is it?” a teacher named Danika Tomkins asked, suddenly alongside her. “Is it Alex?”
“Yes,” Sam managed, even though the downed form was now blocked from view by a sea of figures hovering over him. “I think so.”
In fact, she didn’t think, she knew, but couldn’t bring herself to say it, hoping against hope she was wrong. Her whole world was about being right all the time, every answer on every test, and now she desperately wanted to be wrong.
“Oh,” Ms. Tomkins managed. “I hope he’s…”
Her voice trailed off, drifting away with the breeze. Lost along with everything else besides the ambulance backing into position near Alex beneath the spill of the lights breaking the night.
Sam remembered her iPad in that moment and swung again for the area she’d last seen the foul-smelling thief. But he was gone, long gone, and Alex still wasn’t going anywhere.
7
AMBULANCE RIDE
“THIS BOY NEEDS SOME help now!”
Alex dimly thought he recognized the referee’s voice in the same moment he heard the steady beeping of the ambulance as it reversed. He could breathe again, he realized, but each contraction of his chest felt labored and wrong.
His vision misted over and when it cleared he looked up to see Tom Banks hovering over him. Only, he wasn’t in the wheelchair anymore; he was standing up.
You want your ball back? the football star who’d been injured in this very same stadium asked, extending it toward Alex.
“Can you move your fingers?”
But it wasn’t Tom Banks asking him that question now, it was a man wearing the blue uniform of a paramedic as he squeezed on a pair of exam gloves he’d plucked from a cargo pocket on his pants.
“Can you move your fingers?” the paramedic asked him again.
Alex didn’t have the strength to try.
“Can you feel your legs?”
The world felt too soft and cushiony for him to bother. He felt warm hands feeling about his neck and upper back and then easing his helmet off to let his long sweat-tangled hair dangle free. He’d seen so many scenes like this unfold, mostly on television but also live, never for one moment considering it could be him.
And now it was, following literally in the footsteps of the legendary Tom Banks. That thought spurred him to look to see if he still had the ball Banks had given back to him while again standing up on working legs. There was no ball or Banks, of course.
There was nothing at all.
The paramedics and ambulance were gone, the stands that had turned dead quiet were gone, even the field was gone. In their place were machines, vast tentacled steel monsters moving about with surprising agility. The field seemed to tremble under their weight, impressions that looked like miniature sinkholes left in their wake as their clanking steps kicked
up swarms of the black pellets lending the artificial turf its cushion.
Alex looked up and saw one of the machines looming over him in place of the EMT, retractable arms extending from slots in what might have been shoulders and positioning themselves beneath him.
Don’t touch me! Get away from me!
Alex tried to cry out but couldn’t find the breath he needed. The machines were everywhere, just like in the pictures he drew in his sketchbook, currently tucked between the mattress and box spring in his bedroom, its pages full of black ink and pencil drawings of things his mind showed him. Alex never knew when one of the spells would overtake him. Usually it was when he was listening to music or trying to do homework. He’d go into a weird state that felt like daydreaming and when he snapped alert again, another page had somehow been filled by hands so lacking in talent that he’d nearly failed art.
“The hospital’s been alerted to have a neuro team standing by,” he heard a voice he didn’t recognize say.
The field, the stands, and everything else were back, the machines gone.
“Can you hear me, son? Just nod if you can.”
Alex could but didn’t. The activity around him settled into a restive frenzy, teammates kneeling in a semicircle with some praying, the world gone hazy and captured in soft focus in the spill of the bright light pouring downward. He felt himself being strapped to a board, then lifted onto a gurney and hoisted into the ambulance’s rear.
Alex felt a clog in his throat and for a moment, just a moment, thought his breath was being choked off for good this time. Then he realized it was fear, a cold dread arising from the reality just beginning to dawn on him through the haze.
Alex started to choke up, felt the tears first welling in his eyes and then spilling downward. From the ambulance’s rear, his gaze locked on the scoreboard, frozen with two seconds left in the game, the Cats with the ball and just one victory-formation kneel-down from winning the Central Coast sectionals. And they’d be moving on to the Division 3 state championship round after an undefeated season, thanks to their All-American quarterback, now lying broken in the back of an ambulance.
Just before the ambulance doors closed, Alex spotted Cara Clarkson, his girlfriend—most of the time, anyway—standing frozen on the Wildcat head emblazoned on the fifty-yard line. She used the sleeve of her cheerleader uniform to wipe away her tears, her pom-poms shed halfway between the sideline and midfield.
Alex, she mouthed. Alex …
“My parents,” Alex heard himself say, as the ambulance tore off with siren wailing once it reached the street fronting the high school.
“Take it easy, son,” a paramedic said, hooking up an intravenous line to his arm.
“My parents,” he repeated, thinking how they’d never wanted him to play football in the first place, how he’d started practice freshman year without telling them, that work parlayed now into a host of scholarship offers.
And suddenly that’s what Alex was thinking about—all those scholarship offers, including the one he’d settled upon. Alex’s father, Li Chin, taught mathematics at San Francisco City College, where he’d recently been awarded tenure. His mom, An, had some fancy title but was little more than a glorified cleaning lady where she worked. Money was tight and had only gotten tighter in the wake of the economic downturn that had seen both of them suffer, first, wage freezes and then a modest reduction. Alex needed football to pay for college, and now who knew if football would still be there for him?
That thought started the tears flowing again, his stomach twisting into knots. Alex couldn’t just lie here helpless. He had to know, had to try.
He willed life into his feet, pictured them moving. At first it felt like his brain was disconnected from his body but then he felt them wiggling. Imagined he knew the feeling a baby gets when it takes its first step.
Recharged, he willed the same life into his fingers, then his hands. Watched them spasm briefly before beginning to obey his commands.
“Easy there, son,” the paramedic warned. “Stay still now.”
But he could move. He wasn’t paralyzed.
“Alex Chin,” the paramedic was saying now, reading off a clipboard as if surprised by what it said.
I’m adopted, you idiot, Alex almost said, used to the double takes people gave him when they saw his name before they saw him.
* * *
The Chins had adopted him as an infant, never once making him feel different or out of place in their home. If anything, as a young boy he thought there was something wrong with him. Why else would he have sandy blond hair and blue eyes? He’d stand in front of the mirror and pull his eyes to the side, hoping to train them to stay that way so he could look like he was supposed to, like his mother and father. As a result, he’d learned tolerance early and never judged anyone based on anything other than who they were as people, just like he hoped people would judge him. The only time he ever got into fights was in elementary and middle school when somebody made fun of his parents.
It was the one thing he couldn’t tolerate, the one thing he’d never grown thick-skinned about. He didn’t mind when somebody called him Alex Chink. But once they made fun of his mother or father, all bets were off and somebody was going down.
That thought brought a slight smile to his face, though his eyes were still wet with tears. At six-foot-one, he towered over Li and An Chin, both naturalized American citizens who nonetheless bore the brunt of prejudice and wrath against China. Alex had long grown used to the caustic stares cast his family’s way, like they were doing something wrong by being together. So when he first started playing football, he’d launch himself at opponents with a fury bred of the anger left over from those looks, those stares, those lingering glances. He couldn’t hit bigots and the small-minded, but opposing players on a football field were something else again.
* * *
The siren had stopped sounding. The ambulance bucked to a halt and the rear doors thrust open to reveal the familiar California Pacific Medical Center sign. Alex closed his eyes and when he opened them again, figures draped in light blue medical scrubs were walking on either side of the wheeled dolly into the hospital.
I’m all right, he wanted to tell them through the clog in his throat, I’m okay.
One of the figures walking alongside the gurney was a woman with long hair the same color as his and he wanted to tell her how pretty she was. But a dark figure standing at the head of the hall leading to the emergency room’s exam area claimed his attention before he could grope for the words. The figure was crazy tall and ridiculously thin, draped in black everywhere except his flesh, which was sallow and sickly pale. A patient, surely, the pallor of his skin due perhaps to the effects of chemotherapy or treatment for some other lingering disease.
The gurney squeaked against the tile and spun round the corner at the head of the hall, seeming to pass straight through the tall man. Alex tried to raise his head to see if he was still standing there, forgetting all about the headboard strapping him in place. That point of the hallway came into view again when they turned the gurney toward an empty examination room and eased Alex toward it.
But the tall man was gone.
8
WAITING
“YOU DON’T HAVE TO stay,” Cara said in the hospital waiting room.
Sam kept the biology textbook cradled in her lap. “I want to.”
She felt Cara reach over and squeeze her arm.
“You’re a good friend, Sam, I don’t deserve you.”
You don’t deserve Alex, either.
“What was that?”
“Huh?”
“I thought you said something.”
Sam shuffled her legs and tucked the textbook under her arm. “Nah. Just clearing my throat.”
“’Cause the thing is, I feel really bad.”
Sam hoped Cara was going to tell her to forget about supplying answers for the science exam still tucked inside her backpack, that it had been a mistake and she should sh
red the pages, burn them, maybe.
“I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be dating Alex,” Cara said instead.
“What?”
Cara gazed about the hospital waiting room, as if to make sure nobody had heard the exchange. “Shhhhhh! And don’t you say a word. Swear you won’t say a word. I haven’t decided yet,” Cara said.
“What do you mean you haven’t decided?”
“You know Ian Sandler, right?” Cara asked.
Ian had graduated the year before them. Sam wasn’t sure what he was doing now.
“What about him?” she asked Cara.
“His dad has an in with the Warriors.”
“With who?”
“The Golden State Warriors. You know, local pro basketball team.”
“No, I don’t. You’re kidding, right?”
“Kidding about watching my dream come true? No way, girl. Hey, we’re seniors now and things change. Alex is going off to do his thing and I’ve got to do mine.” Then, after a pause, “You’ll see.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know.”
“I do?”
Cara frowned, as if it were obvious. “Things will get better. As soon as you get to college. High school’s not worth the stuff that gets stuck to the bottom of my boots. That’s why Ian’s so important to me.”
“You mean his dad is.”
Cara rolled her eyes. “Whatever, girl, whatever.” Her stare tightened. “So can you keep it secret?”
“Haven’t I always kept your secrets?”
“I thought it might be different with Alex.”
“Why?”
“You know.”
“There you go again telling me what I know.”
“Well, I know you’re crushing mad on the boy. I can see it every time you look at him. Hey, I don’t blame you. All those tutoring sessions, all those hours spent looking at him. How can you help yourself? The kid’s totally gorgeous.”
“Not gorgeous enough, apparently.”
Cara shook her head, as if Sam were just a dumb kid who didn’t understand. “Grow up, girl. Graduation is all about change. I’m just starting the process earlier.”