The Lateral

Chapter 4

M eadow was so excited that she forgot to hate me and sat in the front seat of my car. She also leaned forward as we drove, like that might get us to Woodsmen Stadium even faster. I did my part by pushing on the accelerator as much as I dared, but the roads looked slick to me. Plus, as we got closer, there was a ton of traffic.

“We should have left earlier!” she fretted. “You should have let me miss the last few periods of school.”

“Next time we come to a game, we’ll discuss it,” I agreed, hoping there would be a next time but already decided that no, she wouldn’t skip school for it. She had gone to every class today but I had to miss work tonight. I’d begged my boss for time off, telling him about sick relatives that needed me and imminent deaths. It was uncomfortable to lie like that, even to Travis, and I finally ran out of tragic stories (which he wasn’t believing, anyway).

I told the truth.

“I’m going to the Woodsmen game,” I admitted, and his mouth fell open and I swore he turned pale. Obviously, I wasn’t going to get paid for the night, but he stopped arguing about whether I needed to come in. And he’d told everyone else at the club, so they all looked at me like I’d found the Holy Grail. Apparently, tickets for this game were going for thousands and thousands of dollars, but we didn’t exactly have tickets ourselves.

“There are no more seats. You two are sitting in a special section,” Jake had written to me. He’d sent a parking pass and some instructions, and I hope it worked. I really, really hoped so, because Meadow would have been crushed if we weren’t able to get in and see them play after all this lead up.

“I told everyone at school,” she’d mentioned. “They didn’t believe me, but they’ll see!”

Jake Koval had come through when he got us into the stadium the first time. I gripped the steering wheel, watched for ice, and hoped he would again. I could only imagine how it would be for her tomorrow if…no, I didn’t have to imagine what would happen if they thought that she’d lied about the game. I had done something stupid when I was a little younger than Meadow, about ten years old and in the fifth grade. I had been embarrassed about not having a dad so I’d told everyone that he was a firefighter and that he was going to pick me up after school in his engine—

“Go there!” Meadow said now, pointing frantically at a space between two cars in the lane next to ours. “You can get ahead!”

“Nobody’s going to get too far ahead,” I told her, but I did nose my way over and we moved a little faster. Eventually, all the vehicles made it to Woodsmen Stadium, which looked different from the first time we’d been here. I realized how silly I’d sounded when I’d asked Meadow if there was a game happening that day…because this here, right now, was almost unbelievable. It was wall, to wall, to wall people, everyone in orange, everyone cheering and having so much fun even though it was so cold that I had a blanket draped over my lap as I drove (that was also because I had a little bit of a chill, one not related to the weather). Meadow started bouncing in her seat but it took even longer for us to drive to where we were parking. I kept showing the pass on my phone to all the security guards and they would scan it and then wave us along, until we were right up against the edge of the building.

“I think this is where the important people park,” Meadow whispered, because now she was just as awed as I was. I could only nod, having lost my ability to speak. We got out and walked to the closest door, where another security guard looked at the message that Jake had sent along with the parking pass.

“Ok, please step to the side,” she told us, and I got a sinking feeling.

“It’s fine!” I said to Meadow, who also looked nervous. All I could think about was standing in front of my school as the kids in my class wondered where the fire truck was and when my dad was going to show up.

“You’re a liar, Ember!” they’d told me eventually, and they’d been right. Since then, I’d tried not to be.

“Ember?Meadow?”

“Yes,” I answered the older guy in the suit and tie who approached us.

“Welcome to Woodsmen Stadium,” he said. “I’m Lyle, the head of security here. I’ll show you to your seats.”

“Thank you,” I breathed, so relieved that I felt lightheaded. He led us to an elevator that went up to a hallway full of people, but nothing on this floor was like what we’d seen when we’d been down on the field and had looked up at the rows of attached, plastic chairs for the fans. This area was carpeted, there was furniture (nice stuff), and pictures of old-time football players hung on the walls.

“This is one of our suite-levels,” Leon, the head of security, explained. “It’s where people have their luxury boxes.”

Boxes, right. They were the nice little rooms that very rich people could buy to separate themselves from the crowd. I wondered if we were going into one of those, but he kept moving.

“How did you get this job? Did you go to school specially for it?” I asked, and he told me his history as we walked. Then he stopped at a narrow door that seemed almost camouflaged in the wall.

“This is an old security perch,” he explained as he opened it. “They left some of these here after the big renovation in ninety-three.”

“It’s a perch?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Before we had cameras everywhere and drones flying around, it was on us to watch everything with our own eyeballs. You’d be surprised at the misbehavior I witnessed from this very spot.” He motioned us into a small cinderblock room that had a window open into the stadium. You could see directly down onto the field—it was an incredible view.

“Wow,” Meadow said softly, still totally awestruck.

“Koval asked me to help him find seats, and darned if every single one wasn’t sold out,” Larry said. “But I always keep this place in my back pocket. There’s room for two, if the two aren’t that big.” He smiled at us and remarked to Meadow, “I hear you’re a real fan.”

As the head of security, he must have been busy tonight, but he talked to her like he had all the time in the world. As the conversation went along, she got more confident, and she told him stuff that I didn’t know about her. For example, Woodsmen-lore wasn’t a class at her school, but there was a big Woodsmen Appreciation Club that met during lunch. She wasn’t an official member, she explained, but she went to the library during the meetings so that she could listen to them dissect the games as they rewatched them together. In Meadow’s case, this was how she watched the games for the first time.

“She doesn’t have a TV, so that’s how I get to see the team play,” she mentioned, pointing at me, and I felt terrible.

“We’ll get one tomorrow,” I said quickly.

“Who’s going to pay for cable or streaming or whatever?” she challenged, and I said even more quickly that I would.

“I’m doing my best to take care of her,” I explained to Leo.

“I can see that, and I’m sure you’re doing a great job,” he said, and I almost started to cry at how nice that sounded.

Eventually, he did have to go but he said he’d come back at the end of the game, and not to leave and let the door lock us out. Despite Meadow’s fears about arriving late, we’d actually gotten here plenty early. The stadium wasn’t even near capacity, which meant that those parking lots were going to get even more crowded…I had a hard time believing it, but it had to be true since every seat had been sold.

We pulled the two stools to the window and watched the players warming up on the field. “There’s Jake!” Meadow said, her voice high with excitement. “Do you see him or do you need your glasses?”

“I only need them to read stuff. There he is!” I sounded the same way she did, more like we were squealing than talking.

“Wow, I can see everybody!” She pointed them out to me, the wide receiver named Kellen Karma, the quarterback she’d talked about already (he was the one who threw), a big guy from the defense named Hatch something…there were a lot of those big guys. Mostly, she tried to drill the offensive players into my mind.

“You’re so bad with names,” she said after she’d gone through all the people on what she called the line. I’d had to recite it back to her, twice.

“I’m bad with names?” I considered the idea. “I learned everyone at work really quickly,” I told her, but then immediately wished that I could take back those words. She didn’t need to be reminded of my job when we were having fun.

But Meadow didn’t seem to notice my slip. “You called my principal ‘Mrs. Dragon.’ Her name is Dragnall ,” she reminded me.

“Maybe I did that on purpose,” I answered, and she looked at me for a second and then laughed. I had made her laugh! This whole night was a win, and she didn’t even notice when I dabbed off the blood from my lip. It had split open again when I’d smiled back at her.

We watched the warmup and cheered, we watched the Woodsmen dancers and cheered, we cheered for the guy who was trying to throw a football into a barrel to get a new car (it was from Whitmore Automotive, the place where I hadn’t won the raffle). We cheered for the Star-Spangled Banner, we screamed our heads off when the Woodsmen team ran out onto the field together…honestly, I didn’t think that either of us shut up once. It was so exciting! The Woodsmen got close to the line that Meadow had stood on when we’d visited here, then the quarterback (the thrower) heaved it and another guy (Corfu) caught it by jumping about ten feet in the air.

“Touchdown!” I screamed, along with everyone else. They scored two more points by running it over that line again, but then the other team scored on their end and kicked it through the large fork-structure that I’d taken a picture of when Meadow had posed with it. Suddenly, we (yeah, I was firmly on the orange side) were barely ahead.

“Do you have to win by a certain number?” I yelled to Meadow, and she hollered back that you only had to win by one.

Jeez Louise, I was losing my mind with excitement. No wonder all these people were so wild about the Woodsmen! I was also losing my voice, and when they took a short break at the halfway point, I told Meadow that I was going to look for a drinking fountain. She wanted to stay and watch the Specialwomen put on their show.

“Can you get me a pop while you’re out? And a hot dog?” she suggested, and I said I would look for the concessions, and to listen hard for me knocking when I got back.

“Just prop the door,” she said, but I didn’t want to do that.

“No, I don’t want to leave you alone here where anyone could get to you,” I answered.

“Why not? You do that every night when you go to the club,” she reminded me, and I wished that the stadium noise had been too loud for me to hear her remark. I worried when I left her at night, too.

“I’ll bring you something good,” I promised, but she was focused on the field as the dancers came out.

Unfortunately, our floor didn’t have anything like vendors, not that I could find. I wandered for a while past the various doors to the suites and watched people come in and out, and as I walked, I also looked at the pictures on the walls of old-fashioned Woodsmen. In one of them, the man had an incredibly handsome face and a million-watt smile that made me stop and stare.

“Warren Wilde is still getting attention from the ladies,” a male voice said over my shoulder. “That guy had moves.”

I turned to look at the person speaking. “You mean that he was a good player?”

“He was amazing on the field and a magnet for women,” he said, and smiled. “Wilde wrote a whole book about all his…relationships.”

“I guess not everyone has enough experience to fill a book.”

“That depends. It could have only a few pages,” he suggested. I smiled too but now he winced. “Your lip…”

“Oh, it’s ok,” I assured him. “It doesn’t bother me.”

“No, hold on. We have napkins right in here,” he said, and ducked into a luxury box. He returned with a stack of them, all with the Woodsmen logo in the corner. I used one and carefully put the rest in my pocket to give to Meadow.

“Thank you,” I told him. He probably knew how things worked around here since he had one of those suites, so I asked, “Do you know where the concession stand is?”

He shook his head. “There isn’t one, not on this floor. We get everything catered. What are you looking for?”

“Drinks and a hot dog.”

“Hold on,” he repeated and again, he ducked into the box. When he came out a few moments later, he had two bottles of pop and a big takeout container. “No hot dogs, but I put in hamburgers, chips, and dip. It’s good stuff,” he assured me.

“I can’t take this,” I said.

“No, go ahead. This is my dad’s box and he won’t even notice,” he assured me. “There’s more than enough to share. Take it.”

“Ok. Thank you,” I said, and tried not to smile to make my lip bleed.

“I’m Campbell,” he told me, and I introduced myself and said it was nice to meet him and thanks again. Meadow would be happy to see all the stuff I had brought with me.

“Hey,” he called, and I looked back at him. “Could I get your number?”

I found my way to our spy spot and pounded on the door with my foot, and fortunately, Meadow must have paid attention about listening for my return. She let me in and yes, she was very excited about the food. I got to see some of the dancing, which was amazing and far removed from what I did, and we both really enjoyed everything that Charles had given me.

No that wasn’t right. His name was…Campbell, that was it. The food from his luxury box was very tasty, and the drinks hit the spot. We were lucky we had them, because we screamed even more in the second half, enough that my ears rang due to the noise from my own mouth. The game was so close—but the Woodsmen held on, and at the end, all the players ran onto the field as the quarterback (thrower) knelt down and the big clock went to zero. Meadow and I jumped up and down and carried on just like everyone else in attendance.

“What does this mean?” I asked her hoarsely. “Do they go again or is the season over?”

She explained how playoffs worked and took some selfies with the stadium crowd behind her. While she was talking, someone knocked on the door and I opened it to find Luther, the nice security guard.

“Great game,” he said, and his voice also sounded hoarse. “Come on and I’ll walk you ladies down.”

He and Meadow discussed football again as he escorted us to the parking lot, right up to our car. “It’s going to take a while to get out of here,” he said. “When this stadium was built, it was in the middle of nowhere and traffic in the area was light, but now there’s a lot more around it.”

“We don’t mind how long it takes,” I said. “This was probably the best night of my life and I don’t care if it stretches out longer. I don’t want it to end.”

Meadow was nodding hard, and the head of security looked overjoyed. “I’m glad to hear that you had fun,” he said. “Go Woodsmen!” He patted the top of my car and we thanked him a lot before I drove out.

But it really did take forever, almost, to get back to our house, and it was very late when I pulled into the dirt patch of driveway. I had to wake Meadow up and I knew she’d be tired at school, but I also knew that it was worth it.

The next morning, I was sitting in my pajamas with the breakfast dishes around me, admiring the paper Woodsmen napkins that we’d decided we’d always save, when I started getting texts.

“Lyle said you had fun,” Jake wrote, and at almost the same moment, another message came in.

“Hi, this is Campbell. We met last night.”

I looked at the words on my phone, one bubble below the other, before I unlocked it and wrote back.

“It was the most amazing night ever,” I responded.

“Not bad.”

“You were the best player I ever saw!” I typed, and then added five more exclamation points.

“How much football have you watched?” Jake asked me.

I didn’t answer that. “I’ve never had so much fun in my entire life. I’m a real Woodsmen fan now. We got some team napkins and I’m going to make a frame for them so they don’t get messed up.”

“Are you at home?” he asked, and when I said yes, he told me to stay there. I didn’t listen exactly because I got up and ran to the shower, but he was pulling onto the dirt patch before I had done much besides combing out my hair and adding concealer over the bruises, which seemed a lot better today. The lip, not so much.

Jake looked tired, but the first thing he said when he came in was that he was going over to the stadium.

“You can’t have a day off?” I wondered.

“Not during the playoffs,” he answered, and checked the couch before he sat on it. I had vacuumed the glitter really well, though. “How were those seats?”

“Incredible,” I said, and held my mouth so that it didn’t stretch, because I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.

“Really? I stuck my head in there yesterday and it looked like a prison cell.”

“I didn’t even notice. We could see so much, the whole field!”

“That’s what people seem to like. Next time, I’ll start looking for tickets with more time to spare.”

Next time? “You would do that for Meadow again?” I asked.

“It makes no difference to me,” he said briefly, but it sure made a huge difference to us. I showed him the napkins and said how someone from one of the boxes had shared food with me, which he didn’t seem to appreciate as much as I had.

“All the people with those boxes are filthy fucking rich. A little charity food won’t hurt them,” he commented, which didn’t feel great.

“I’ll just look at it as someone being nice when he didn’t have to be,” I said, and we were silent for a moment.

“I take it that you didn’t grow up like the people in those boxes.”

“Me, on a luxury box level?” I asked, and laughed. “Heck, no. We didn’t have much besides past due notices for the utility bills and a line for the bathroom.”

“What?” he asked.

“Because there were so many people in the house,” I explained. “We were always standing outside and pounding on the door, telling someone to hurry.”

“Who were they?”

I blew out a breath, thinking back. “I mostly lived with my mom and a few brothers and sisters, cousins too. My siblings are all older, so we also had their kids around. My mom always had a boyfriend or husband and sometimes they brought along their own offspring. It was constantly busy and not very fun.” He was frowning, so I added, “I’m not saying it was all bad, but it isn’t how I want Meadow to grow up. How about you?”

“My parents split when I was little. They got married young and it didn’t work, but they got luckier the second time around.”

“Oh, they remarried each other? That’s romantic.”

“They remarried other people,” he corrected. “They both had second families and I moved between the houses.”

“Do you see them a lot now?”

“Almost never,” he answered, and I nodded.

“I don’t see my family, either. Once I left, I was gone. I only came back for…” My eyes slid to my phone. “Oh, son of a monkey. This is Meadow’s school,” I said as I took the call.

What they told me wasn’t good. “Ok,” I said, holding my voice steady. “Ok, that makes sense. Yes, I’ll come right now. Thank you.” We hung up and I shook my head, gathering my thoughts.

“Ember.”

I looked up at him. “That was Meadow’s school,” I explained again, and stood from the table. “I have to go for a meeting right now. She got into a fight. A fight! Can you believe that?” I picked up my purse and found my keys.

“I can easily believe it,” he said. “I don’t think you should go like that.”

He was pointing at my bare feet. “You’re right,” I said. “And I need to put more makeup on my face so they don’t think…”

We both knew what they would think: my bruises would indicate to the school authorities that I was raising Meadow in a violent home, and therefore she was also violent. I hurriedly layered on more concealer, found shoes, and brushed my drying hair. Then Jake and I rushed out of the house.

“Thanks again for the seats,” I said, but he shook his head.

“Where does she go to school, Madelon Stockwell Turner Middle? It’s on my way to the stadium. I’ll drive with you.”

“Why?”

“I want to watch your car on the road. Your tire looks flat to me,” he said, and I hoped that wasn’t right but I didn’t have time to deal with it at the moment. I went as fast as I legally could and Jake was behind me the whole way. He parked next to me, in fact, in the visitors’ lot at Stockwell Turner Middle School, and he got out.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” he remarked and I was glad for the support, although I didn’t understand it. We started the trek to the far-off building.

I had been trying to fix my hair a little more as I drove. “Do I look young?” I asked nervously. I needed to seem old and mature, ready to deal with any and all issues. I wished I’d worn my glasses and put my hair in a bun, and I wished I had on a cardigan rather than this sweatshirt with a cartoon heart on it.

“You are young,” he said, but then asked, “How old are you?”

“I’m plenty old to have a kid,” I said. “I’m twenty-two, and my mother had three by the time she was my age.”

“And Meadow is the daughter of one of your siblings,” he filled in.

“No, she’s the grandkid. I’m her great-aunt,” I explained, and Jake stopped walking.

“What? You’re her great -aunt?”

“Yes. Come on,” I said, tugging on his shirt sleeve. He wasn’t wearing a coat again, although I felt like knives of cold air were cutting into me. I wanted him to keep moving so that I could get to the office faster, but then I realized that I didn’t have to wait for him. I let go of his shirt and talked over my shoulder as I resumed the hike to the building.

“My oldest sister Alina and I are more than thirty years apart. I’m the youngest in the family,” I explained. “My mom had Alina in her teens and me in her forties. Then Alina had her daughter Christal young, too. Christal and I were like siblings. We were like siblings in that we were closer in age and didn’t get along at all,” I told him, in case he hadn’t understood. None of my brothers and sisters liked me or each other.

“Meadow is your niece Christal’s daughter,” he stated, and I saw that he was a quick study with our complicated family. He was also a quick walker, and had caught up while I explained how it was possible for me to have a grand-niece who was only nine years younger than I was. His one stride was equal to about three of mine, which explained why I was out of breath but he was fine. Or maybe it was that, holy cow, I needed some exercise.

“So where is Christal now?” he asked as we reached the school building.

“She lost custody and I have Meadow,” I said, my hand on the door handle. “Thanks for coming with me.” I still wasn’t exactly sure why he had.

“Sure.” He squinted at the school, like he was angry at it. “Don’t let them give you any shit.”

“Um, ok. I better go in.”

He didn’t walk away, though. “When you leave here, I’ll probably still be in meetings. Text me and tell me what they say.”

“Ok,” I repeated, still clueless. “Have a good day.”

“You, too,” he said, and I rushed inside.

I did not have a good day; it was awful. Meadow was at her absolute worst behavior and swore at me the moment I walked into the office. “I’m on your side,” I told her, and she’d responded that I could fuck off. She told the principal the same thing, and the meeting devolved into her screaming at all of us, to the point that they were ready to call the police. The police!

“No, no! Let me handle this,” I’d said desperately, and then I’d put my hands on her cheeks as she fought me. “Meadow, you have to stop. You have to stop! They’re going to put you back in foster care.”

Her scream caught in her throat and the silence in the room had made my ears ring. She was suspended and I had to take her home immediately.

Once we were there, I sent a message to the owner of B-Dzld. “I can’t come in tonight,” I told Travis, and he answered that I better get my ass to the club if I wanted to have a job. I did want a job, a real lot, but I didn’t think that I could leave Meadow alone. I was afraid she would set the house on fire, run away, or…there was really no limit on my fears.

I looked at where she’d thrown her new coat. Where was her backpack? I’d been worried about so many other things, like the home visit from Child Protective Services that I was sure was coming, like the fact that she would have to go back to that school with the same kids again, like how I was scared that I would lose her. But maybe I could deal with the backpack, I thought. We could drive to the school and a janitor could get it for us. That was a problem that was solvable.

I knocked again on her bedroom door. “Meadow?” I asked. I’d done this about ten times already, but she hadn’t answered. “If you’re going to be here instead of school, you’ll need your books. Did you leave your backpack in your homeroom?”

Her door flew open. “I don’t have it anymore!” she yelled into my face. “It’s gone! It’s ruined!”

“Is that why you were fighting with those girls in the bathroom? Did they do something to it?”

She started to cry so hard that she couldn’t speak but later, as we sat on the couch together, the full story came out. After a while, she cried herself into exhaustion and she fell asleep there, so I got a blanket off her bed and the pillow to make her more comfortable.

The moment I saw headlights outside in the darkness, I ran to the porch. The noise of the engine was loud and I closed the front door behind myself so that Meadow wouldn’t wake up, and then I ran over to the truck, to the driver’s side.

The window rolled down. “Hi,” I told Jake Koval.

“What happened?” he asked, and then noticed me shivering. “Get in and tell me.”

I ran around to the passenger side and climbed up. He wasn’t bothered by this cold, but I sure was. When he saw me holding my hands in front of the vent, he cranked the heat higher and hit a button that also turned on the seat warmer.

“What happened?” he repeated.

“I thought that going to your game would be a good thing for her, but she says it made everything even worse, and they ruined her backpack,” I said, and honestly? This day, following such an amazing night, was even harder to take. Except it was nice to be out of the house and sitting in a beautiful truck. I had to enjoy the good moments as they came—I had always tried to live that way. The thing was, you just didn’t know if what you thought was bad would actually get a whole lot worse.

So it was important to think about the little things, like my lip healing, like this heated seat, like how Jake had come over here again. I looked across the cab at him and was glad.