Chapter 23 Isak
ISAK
Igot the text in film study and couldn't answer it for forty minutes because Coach was installing a new red-zone package and you do not look at your phone while Theo Roper is drawing on the board, not because he'd yell, he never yells, but because he'd go quiet and disappointed, and that quiet made grown men want to run laps to make it stop.
Cheerleader in a Tree: I need you.
Clover did not say I need you. In fourty-some days I had watched that woman handle a vandalized parking lot, a section of organized hecklers, and her own father's table-for-four without once needing anybody.
I need you was not in her operating system.
I need you was the check-engine light coming on in a car an spaceship.
I called her the second Coach capped his marker. She told me about the office, the ambush, the video. The kiss and the rules.
I did not in that moment do anything useful.
What I actually did was go very still in a hallway outside the film room and feel the precise horror of watching a thing you caused arrive on schedule, because she'd warned me.
In that back hallway with the chair carts she'd laid it out like a structural engineer reading a load-bearing flaw, and I'd said nobody's going to know, how would they know, nobody’s gonna know and she'd said They’re gonna know, and she'd been right, and I'd been a man telling a woman her fear was unreasonable approximately one nanosecond before it came true.
"I'm coming over," I said.
"You can't. Game tomorrow. You not staying at the hotel with the team tonight to be with me is gasoline."
"Clover."
"Isak." She used my name the way I use jokes, to put something between us and the big bad.
"Listen to me. They built it so that anything you do makes it worse.
You defend me, it's the QB protecting his girlfriend, proves we're a couple.
You stay away, it's the QB distancing himself, proves there's something to distance from.
You can't touch this without making it heavier.
That's the design. I recognize good design. "
She would. She built it.
"So what do I do?" I hadn’t not known what to do all on my own since I was three and my mom didn’t come home from Christmas shopping.
"You let me handle the part that's mine," she said. "And you stay the quarterback. That's the only move on the board that doesn't help them."
I hated it. I hated it with my whole body. Every instinct I had was to read the field and get the ball where it needs to go, and she was telling me the play was to stand in the pocket and do nothing while the people I—
While the people I loved got hit.
"Okay," I said, and it was the hardest okay of my life. Because that’s what Clover wanted, and if I wanted to do anything else, I needed her consent.
The machine started Thursday and it did not have my fingerprints on it anywhere, which is how I knew exactly whose fingerprints it had.
Monty didn't say a word publicly. He didn't have to. By Thursday afternoon two beat writers who'd never once cared about cheerleading had questions about "governance" around the squad.
By Friday a sports-talk show I used to watch and respect had a segment with a graphic, an actual graphic, with three boxes and arrows, mapping the conflict of interest. President.
Sorority sister. Cheer director. Quarterback.
The kiss photo. They didn't have the party video yet.
That was Tiki's ace and she was holding it.
Because Tiki understood drama the way I understand a two-minute drill, which is that you don't throw deep until they've committed to stopping the run.
And here's the part that made me want to put my fist through the Den's drywall.
It landed on Clover and Gabrielle. Both women.
The president who'd staked her franchise on a vision and the director who'd built it.
The story was about them, their judgment, their relationships, whether they'd earned their chairs or been handed them.
Whether the whole body-positive squad was real or was cover for a girl who got close to the boss's quarterback.
It did not land on me. Not one stinking piece.
I was the quarterback having a great preseason. I threw for three hundred yards Sunday and the same writers who were running governance graphics about Clover wrote that I was "putting it together in a contract year."
I was the talent. I was a man’s man. The worst thing anybody implied about me was that I had good taste in girlfriends. The exact same set of facts, the exact same relationship, and it cost the two women everything and cost me a flattering adjective.
I'd known the world worked like this the way you know a fact. I'd never had to watch it work like this on somebody I loved while I stood in the pocket doing nothing because doing something made it worse.
Powerless. I was learning that word so thoroughly I could've taught a film session on it.
It was Clover who noticed the thing I should have, because she notices everything, it's the engineer, she reads a situation for its loads.
We were on the phone Saturday night, both of us pretending we were calm, and she went quiet mid-sentence, the bad quiet.
"My dad hasn't said anything," she said.
"What?"
"My dad. The Brick Yard show. Two hours a day, four days a week, where he says things about football and the people in it.
" Her voice was carrying across eggshells.
"It's been four days. The whole sports world is running a conflict-of-interest story about his daughter and a starting quarterback and a League owner.
And he hasn't said one word. Not on the show.
Not defending me. Not weighing in. Nothing.
Brick Freeman has an opinion about the coin toss. He has gone silent about his own kid."
I didn't understand it the way she did, not at first. My read was that her dad had abandoned her, gone quiet because he was embarrassed or because he believed it, and I felt a flash of pure rage at a man I'd had risotto with.
"He believes it," I said. "That's why he's—"
"No." She said it fast, and then slower, working it out as she said it, and I heard the exact moment she got there.
"No. Think about it. He's the one person with a national platform who could weigh in.
If he defends me, every word he says is 'her father, the biased pundit, ran cover for his own daughter.
' He'd make it worse. He'd hand them the headline.
The only way he can help me is to say nothing and let them not have that headline. "
Her voice cracked, just once, the genuine feeling breaking through the analysis.
"He's not abandoning me. He's eating four days of every colleague he has thinking he's a coward who won't defend his own kid, and he's doing it on purpose, because his silence is the only thing he can give me that doesn't cost me. "
The phone was quiet.
"Clover," I said.
"My whole life I thought my dad's world didn't have a place for me in it.
" She wasn't quite crying. She was past crying, into the place underneath it.
"And he's sitting in that world right now taking hits for me where I can't even see them, and the only way I found out is that I know him well enough to read a silence. "
I thought about my own father, who I'd spent twenty-five years certain didn't see me, reading at the head of a Catan table, winning nothing, losing nothing, seeing everything.
"That's love," I said. "The kind that costs the person something and they pay it anyway and don't tell you."
"Yeah."
"You should tell him you noticed."
"I will." A breath. "Not yet. If I call him now, my phone records are evidence in the conflict-of-interest story. I can't even thank my dad for protecting me without it becoming proof. That's how good the design is."
I sat in the dark of the Broasis with the whole lit-up river out the window and a woman on the phone who'd just figured out her father loved her through the shape of his silence, and I had never in my life wanted so badly to fix something I was structurally forbidden from touching.
There was one thing I could touch. One field I could read.
I just couldn't do it yet, because the timing was everything, and the only thing more dangerous than me staying silent was me opening my mouth one beat too early.
So I waited. I'm a quarterback. Waiting for the exact half-second the lane opens is the entire job.
The lane was going to open. I could feel it the way you feel a blitz coming.
When it opened, I was ready to throw the ball straight through my own season to do it.