Sixteen
Eli
T he crowd erupted with cheers as the fans in the stands stood up and pumped their fits in excitement. Others yelled at the tops of their lungs, saying things like, 'That's right, boys!' and 'Hell yeah!’
Football was the highlight of the year for the adults of our small town in Texas.
It was such a big deal that they would tailgate the games regardless of whether or not they had children playing for the team.
Originally, I was under the impression that people only tailgated college football games.
I was wrong. The citizens of this town had nothing better to do with their lives than to get overly excited over high school football.
My friends and I decided to go to the game that Friday. We didn’t go to every football game because we found that we had a better time hanging at each other's houses over watching boys run into each other with full force. However, we needed to change the routine every now and again.
Justin came along too. I wasn't thrilled about it and I wasn't doing a great job at hiding it. "Why did he have to come?"
I spoke to Ricky while we made our way toward the bleachers. Kailey, Bella, and Justin were having their own conversation ahead of us.
"Who, Justin?" Ricky asked as if he didn’t already know the answer to his question.
"Yeah, I kinda thought he would have found other people to harass by now. I don’t like him."
Ricky glanced at me before focusing his gaze on the grass as we walked. He hesitated before speaking carefully. "No offense, but if we isolated ourselves from every person that you don’t like, we'd have no other friends."
"That's not true!" My voice rose a bit higher than I intended it to. Just because someone says 'no offense' doesn't mean that it isn't offensive.
It wasn't true. The only people I didn't like were Justin, Diane, my aunt, some of my teachers, a lot of my classmates, and the randoms who didn't like me. Oh, plus Javier. Though, I was starting to dislike him less than I disliked the others.
Okay, so maybe that was a lot of people.
"I think that you should try to be friendlier," Ricky suggested. "Sometimes you can be a little…what’s the word?”
He was waiting on me to fill in the blank, but I stayed silent.
“Never mind,” he said with a cautious chuckle. “You’re a cool person to be around, Eli. You should show other people that, including Justin."
I was about to break the news to him that it wouldn't happen anytime soon when a football collided with my head. The ball was one of the super soft ones that children play with so it didn’t hurt, but it did catch me off guard.
There was a group of kids playing in a patch of grass under the bleachers and one of them accidentally threw the ball too far.
Despite there being no pain, I rubbed my forehead with one hand as I picked up the ball with the other. The group of kids looked to be between ten and twelve years old. One of them raised his hand up for me to throw the ball back at them while the others stared idly.
Apparently none of the kids thought that it would be best to apologize to the stranger they hit in the head. If I had wanted to, I could have been petty and took the ball for myself. To the kids’ benefit I was in a decent mood.
I had a couple of beers before coming to the game.
It took a lot more than what I drank for me to feel anywhere near drunk, so no one could tell that I had drunk anything in the first place.
I was acting normal for the most part and I could think straight.
It wasn’t like I was doing anything wrong.
Plenty of people pre-gamed for football games.
I threw the ball to the kid with his hands raised, but because I couldn’t aim for shit, the ball went straight past him. The child gave me a nasty look. In my defense, I had never been good at throwing balls.
"Your aim is ass!" Justin shouted with a chuckle. Him, Bella, and Kailey were making their way over to. They hadn’t realized we had stopped walking and had gotten away from us.
"Aw, don’t be mean," Diane cooed as she came our way. When did she show up?
Diane waved eagerly at Justin and he returned it. Odd, I didn’t know that they knew each other. Just as I thought, Javier and his friend Paxton were following right behind Diane.
Justin and Diane started to chat about stuff. I didn't know what they were talking about because I didn't care. The rest of us stood awkwardly as we waited for Diane and Justin to finish their conversation.
Paxton was tired of it, though. He cleared his throat obnoxiously. "Are we going to stand here and stare at each other, or...?"
Everyone laughed while Paxton raised a brow. He wasn't joking, but everyone thought he was funny.
"I didn't know Diane and Justin were friends," Bella mentioned to the group, but she was more so speaking to Javier. "I've never seen them hang out."
Javier humphed. "It's a newfound friendship."
Screams of excitement erupted from the stands again. Our team must have scored another point. While I wasn't paying attention to the game, other people were. My friends, Javier, and Paxton were trying to see what had the crowd so hyped.
Bella stood on her tiptoes, trying to see above the people standing in her way. "Someone scored a touchdown?"
"I think so," Ricky said as he tried to get a better view.
"Someone did,” Javier added. "Number twenty-four. That's Easton, right?"
I nodded since his question was clearly directed to me.
Another reason why I didn't care for going to the games was that I had to hear about how great Easton was doing and how many points he scored. Or, I had to hear about how pretty Emerson looked as she cheered and flipped with the cheerleading squad for everyone. Not from the people I knew, but from random adults in the stands. It shouldn’t have bothered me as much as it did, but I was tired of constantly living in their shadow.
"Are you all going trick or treating this year?" Paxton changed the subject.
"Trick or treating?" Justin asked, him and Diane having finished their side conversation. "How old are we?”
"Never too old for trick or treating," Paxton said cheerfully, his teeth shining as he smiled. "Going to look for costumes, getting dressed up, getting free candy from strangers and then eating yourself into a coma, it's dope! How could you possibly put an age limit on that?"
Obviously Paxton was very passionate about trick or treating. I personally enjoyed it. Something about free candy had always made me happy.
Plus, dressing up let me not be me for one night. Instead of Elias Richardson, I was a superhero who saved all sorts of people and got praised for it. I was someone that everyone loved. Just for that night.
Two years ago, Ricky and I went trick or treating together just as we always did.
Bella and Kailey were with us at first, but as the night progressed they grew tired and eventually went home.
We continued trick or treating until we had hit every single house in his neighborhood, which took until eleven o’clock at night.
His neighborhood was great because the candy-givers stayed out late unlike other neighborhoods where they were finished by eight o’clock.
We had starved ourselves that day because we wanted to be able to eat as much candy as possible once we got it.
The moment we got back to Ricky's house we ate over half of the treats we collected combined.
It was amazing. Well, until it wasn't. We were so sick afterwards that we swore to never have sweets again. It was totally worth it, in my opinion.
I had hoped that we'd never grow too old for trick or treating, but that was unrealistic. We made that year our last year because of all of the dirty looks we got from the adults giving out the candy.
"The last time we trick or treated was two years ago," Bella said. "Now we only go to Poppy's parties."
Poppy was not fond of me and I wasn’t fond of her, but she wanted as many people as possible at her yearly Halloween party. That meant that I got an invite.
"Yeah, I remember seeing you guys last year," Javier spoke over the cheers from the crowd.
"Come on, we're missing the game!" Diane pouted as she tugged on Javier's arm like a child.
Javier gave her a blank stare before subtly shaking Diane off of his arm. She rolled her eyes and then turned to Justin. "Come sit with us?"
Justin agreed without a second thought and he and Diane skipped off toward the bleachers. Diane, remembering her boyfriend and his friend were still with her, spun and beckoned for Javier and Paxton to follow.
"See you guys at the party, then?" Javier asked us all, but his focus was on me.
No one had to ask me twice about going to a party. “Of course.”
With that, Javier and Paxton went along with Diane and Justin. I was so grateful that Diane had taken Justin out of my vicinity. It was funny how much nicer the world was when I didn't have any imbeciles around me.
The rest of us found a spot in the middle row of the bleachers.
We had to step over multiple people to get into the spot and people were not kind enough to make room to let us in.
Bella knocked over some kid's plate of nachos and the child’s father was not happy.
Bella apologized, though it wasn't her fault that whoever designed the bleachers made them so narrow.
The rest of the game went by uneventfully. Our school won, so yay us. According to the people around us, we won by a landslide. If I had been paying enough attention or decided to look at the scoreboard I could have seen for myself.
All I could do for the whole game was watch Javier out of the corner of my eye. He was sitting a little farther down the bleachers than us. He was next to his girlfriend, but she was doing more talking with Justin than her boyfriend. I wasn’t sure why, but that made me feel a bit better.
And sometimes when I would glance at him, he'd already be looking back at me.
***
"Sexy gorilla?" Bella asked as she held up a gorilla costume and posed for the imaginary camera.
Kailey picked up a lion costume next to the bear one and held it up. "Sexy gorilla and sexy lion. What do you think, boys?"
Her question was directed to Ricky, Justin, and I. Justin merely shrugged at them which earned an eye roll from Bella at his unhelpful response.
Ricky leaned close to my ear and whispered, "I think this is a trick question."
I chuckled. The costumes were anything but sexy. They were bulky and unflattering animal impersonations that I didn’t believe should have made it onto the shelves.
“What do you think?” I challenged with a wiggle of my eyebrows.
Bella and Kailey shared a look before bursting into giggles and hanging the costumes back in their rightful places.
We were at the costume store to find outfits for the Halloween party because it was in a few days and we had nothing to wear.
I would have worn my costume from last year, but it was unfortunately set on fire a couple months ago.
That night things between the family got heated and my aunt needed to prove a point.
She burned it out of spite toward Easton, since he was the one who bought the costume for me. It was an ordeal.
Since it was our last high school Halloween party at Poppy's we needed to have the best costumes possible. It was a mission, and we were determined to complete it.
I heard a loud gasp and everyone's heads whipped to see who it came from. Kailey was standing in front of an assortment of costumes, so I couldn't tell exactly which one she was gasping at.
Kailey whispered something to Bella, then Bella immediately agreed to whatever Kailey was saying. They both looked at me with a mischievous look in their eyes.
" Eliiii ," Kailey sang my name. "We found the perfect costume for you!"
I was nervous to see what they had picked up. Sometimes the things that they would choose were...questionable.
Kailey turned to pick up the costume. Her back was facing me so I could not see what it was, but Justin was on the other side of her so he had his eyes on it. His eyes went wide before he burst into laughter. He wiped tears from his eyes dramatically as he nodded.
"Yeah," he managed between laughter. "That's the one."
I didn't like his tone, but I was biased because I never liked his tone. The way he was laughing made it seem like the costume was horrid. However, I trusted Bella and Kailey.
Ricky walked around to see it. "Show me it.”
Kailey presented it to him and he had little to no reaction. The only thing I caught was the flare of his nostrils, which gave no indications to what the costume was whatsoever. Then, his lips curled into a smile. "If you like it, I love it."
My arms hit my sides. "Okay, what is it?"
"I want you to know that I think you'd look so hot in it, but it could also be an acquired taste, alright?" Bella disclaimed. “And I will totally buy it for you.”
I impatiently nodded. "Yeah, yeah, show me it."
Kailey spun on her heels with the costume in her hands. When I finally caught a glimpse of the tiny picture of the costume on the front of the package it was in, my nose scrunched up. I had no idea how to feel about it.