Chapter 19
ISAK
Ithrew a sixty-yard touchdown in the second quarter and I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy it, but the truth is I spent most of that game watching the wrong part of the field.
I'd come off a series, helmet off, chest heaving, and before I found Coach or the bench or the headset, my eyes went to the sideline thirty yards down where a woman with her hands locked behind her back was running the best debut this franchise had ever seen and pretending her whole soul wasn't standing out in front of her in pom-poms and glitter.
I saw the pigs before she did.
I was on the bench, defense out there, and I watched them come over the railing in that ugly pink arc, and I was up and three steps toward the wall before Fox grabbed the back of my jersey and hauled me down like I weighed nothing, which, to him, I roughly do.
"Sit," Fox said.
"They're throwing things at her squad."
"They're throwing rubber pigs at the squad and if you go vault the wall on national television you become the story and she becomes the girl the QB defended, which is the one thing she would rather die than be.
" He didn't let go of my jersey. Fox reads defenses upside down and he reads me right side up and I hate it.
"Watch. Give her ten seconds before you decide she needs you. "
I gave her ten seconds because Fox had my jersey.
And in ten seconds a sixty-two-year-old woman picked a pig up off the turf and held it over her head like she was lighting an Olympic torch, and the whole crazy thing turned.
The whole stadium turned, and the whole Tigerettes squad caught flying pigs out of the air to a Kelsey Best beat, and I stood there with Fox's fist still in my jersey and understood that I had been about to rob her of the single best moment of her professional life because I couldn't sit still while she was uncomfortable for ten seconds.
"Yeah," Fox said, letting go. "She's good. Sit down, dummy."
I sat down. My hands were shaking. I made them stop.
This was a problem I was not going to be able to keep ignoring, the size of what I felt every time something happened to her. It had blown clean past the size that a fake relationship was supposed to come in.
We won by seventeen. Fox had nine catches and a hundred and forty yards and did a celebration in the end zone that I am contractually obligated to never describe. The locker room was loud in the good way.
I'd almost gotten my head back into being a quarterback who'd just won a game instead of a man who'd watched a woman conquer a stadium, when I came around the equipment cage and heard Monty Whyte's voice in the hall doing that alpha business man thing it does, which is sound reasonable while it ruins something.
"Just saying, Gabrielle, the engagement numbers are extraordinary. People are talking. So let's allow the people decide."
I stopped behind the cage. I was very careful not to be suspicious. Which was a well-worn skill of the youngest brother of seven.
Gabrielle's voice, careful stated more than asked, "Decide what, Monty?"
"The squad. The whole new direction. You've made it the franchise's signature this season, and that's bold, that's a real swing.
" He paused and I could practically hear him smile.
"So put it to a fan vote. Beginning of the regulation season.
Let the fans say whether the new Tigerettes are the direction they want the brand to go.
If you're right about how much they love it, you've got nothing to worry about. The numbers will back you, won't they?"
The best traps are ones built so the person walking into them thinks the door was their idea.
But Gabrielle was no caged Tiger.
Of course she couldn't say no to that. Saying no meant she didn't trust the fans, meant she didn't believe in the thing she'd staked her whole presidency on, meant she was protecting it because secretly she knew it was weak.
And saying yes handed Monty a deadline, a number, a finish line he could spend the next two pre-season games quietly poisoning.
A funded section of pig-throwers here. A cooled-off sponsor there.
A few writers asking weird questions. Tilt the field a degree at a time and then point at the scoreboard he rigged and say, well, the fans have spoken.
"Set it up," Gabrielle said, and I heard in two words that she heard the trap and stepped into it anyway because there was no version where she didn't. "End of season. A clean fan vote."
"Wonderful," Monty said, like a man who'd just been handed exactly what he came for, which he had.
I stood behind the equipment cage holding a win that had gone hollow in my hands.
Clover had thirty-one women out there who'd just turned an insult into the best moment of their lives, and Monty Whyte had just turned that same triumph into a noose with a date on it, and there was not one thing I could do about it from behind a cage in a towel.
I'm a quarterback. My entire job is doing something about it.
Reading the field, finding the answer, getting the ball where it needs to go.
And I stood there knowing this was a field I couldn't read and a ball I wasn't allowed to touch, because the second I touched it I became the story and she became the girl who needed rescuing, and Fox was right, that was the one thing she'd rather die than be.
Powerless is a word for guys who've never been good at anything. I'd never had to learn it.
What I had learned was how to be a fucking tattle tell. And I was definitely telling on Monty to Clover.
Just because I didn’t have the power and didn’t play the game, didn’t mean Clover couldn’t be the star player with a secret weapon in her pocket.
Jules was waiting outside the locker room with Fox, because my baby sister had driven up from KNU for the debut and was not going to be told the family box was a more appropriate place to wait than the players' hallway.
She had on a Tigers shirt she'd cut up herself and an expression I've been afraid of since she was six.
"You're doing a face," she said.
"Everybody keeps saying that."
"Because you keep doing it." She fell into step with me, Fox on my other side, the two of them boxing me in the way they do when they've already had a conversation about me that I wasn't invited to. "Fox and I figured something out."
This wasn’t good, whatever it was.
"When and why have you and Fox been talking? What are you teenagers in love? Can’t go a minute without being on the phone with each other?" I knew that would stop her in her tracks.
It did not.
She hit me in the arm. Hard. "We figured out the dating's fake."
I was the one who stopped in my tracks. The hallway kept going around me, guys in towels, a equipment kid with a cart, the whole loud aftermath, and I stood in the middle of it and tried to find the lie and could not, because Jules had said it flat the way you say what you're certain of, and certainty from Jules is a closed door.
"It's not…" I started, and didn't finish, because I didn't have the end of the sentence.
"Don't." She wasn't unkind about it. That's the thing about Jules. She does the family stuff, the kind that gets in under everything because it's ours, because Mom raised us on it. "We're not busting you. I don't care that it's fake. Fox doesn't care that it's fake."
She looked at me, and her voice dropped into the register that has out-stubborned me my whole life. "Here's what we figured out, and it's the part you're not going to like. It is not fake for you, Isak."
Fox put a hand on my shoulder, gentle, like he was defusing something. "You vaulted half a wall over rubber pigs, brother."
"I sat back down."
"I sat you back down."
I didn't have anything.
Maybe a fast mouth, but right now there was nothing in it. Because they were right, and the worst part of being right about someone is that they get to see your face tell before your mouth catches up.
Jules had watched my face since before I could talk.
"She doesn't know," Jules said. "She's running around with half the information, thinking this is a clean little arrangement, and you're standing here in love.”
“Jules. Shut up.”
She did not in fact shut up. I wasn’t even sure she knew what that phrase meant.
“You’d hate it if she was doing it to you.
It's the whole reason you've got a secret gaming empire, and a secret building you own, and a cat with an Instasnap, because people make choices about who you are and what they think you should want without asking you.
You'd cut off your arm before you did that to somebody. "
"Jules."
"Somebody you loved." She let it sit. Let the silence do the work. But not for very long. "So…"
"So what?"
"So, call Chris."
I looked at her like she’d suggested I eat a hippopotamus for Christmas.
Chris. My oldest brother. Mustangs quarterback, the actual one, the one I'd learned everything from and spent my whole life half a field behind.
Chris, who had married Trixie Moore, and who had, once upon a time, in a way everybody in the family somehow knew, started a fake relationship with the love of his life and ended up so far past the edge of it that he built his whole existence on the other side.
If anybody in the world had stood exactly where I was standing, in love and calling it a strategy, it was Chris.
"He'll be insufferable," I said.
"He'll be insufferable and right," Jules said, "which I believe is the family specialty." She kissed my cheek, somehow the oldest person in the hallway. "Dad wants to meet Clover up in the box, by the way. I already texted her. Keep up."
She and Fox peeled off toward the box and left me standing in the hall with a win, a noose with a date on it, a sister who'd cracked me open and Kinsugid me back together.
I got dressed. I did not call Chris.
I stood at my locker and looked at his name on the screen for longer than a grown man should, and then I put the phone in my pocket, because somewhere upstairs Clover was about to walk into a family box to meet my father, the one man in my life I'd spent twenty-five years certain didn't see me, and the only thing in the world I wanted to do more than not call my brother was be standing next to her when she did.
I'd call Chris.
Tomorrow. Probably.
That "probably" was going to cost me. I just didn't know the exchange rate yet.