Chapter 39 #2
His lips part, his tongue darting out to wet them, but no sound leaves his mouth. Instead, he raises his hand helplessly, palm up, a silent confession: I have nothing to tell you.
Coach stares at him for another moment before letting out a disgusted snort. “Right,” he says, then points over to the end zone. “Well, since you’re here now, you might as well take a seat.”
Seb blinks in confusion, his head tilting to one side. “Coach?”
“You heard me. Sit down where you’ll have a good view. Make yourself comfortable. Your teammates will be handling your drills today.”
For a short second, Seb’s face cracks open, pure horror shining in his wide eyes before he gets a grip on his composure again, his features smoothing over into a blank mask. The guys take a little longer to understand what’s happening.
“Suicides, ten rounds,” Wagner announces, and when the first guys groan, he snaps out a sharp, “Make it fifteen then!”
The drills are brutal.
Wagner isn’t going light on Seb, which, in turn, means he's not going light on us either. We’re the tools of his punishment, groaning and panting through the exercises, while Seb sits in the end zone, helmet in his lap, hands curled into fists, watching.
Every time he takes his eyes off us, Wagner adds an extra round for us, forcing Seb’s sight back on us.
The suicides are followed by fifty rounds of bear crawl, then fifty burpees in full gear.
Then we start over again.
My lungs burn, my calves cramp. Next to me, Evander is heaving.
Three sophomores break formation to empty their stomachs on the sidelines; another doesn’t even make it that far.
He throws up right onto the grass, little bits and pieces of his breakfast landing on his jersey.
When I try to get to him, Wagner snaps at me, “Keep moving, Mahoney! Or do you want to join Davenport?”
So I duck my head and crawl, sweat running down my forehead, burning in my eyes, and making my vision blurry.
Still, I seek out Seb’s figure whenever I’m facing the end zone, but he’s looking right through me, his lips moving silently.
It takes me a while to figure out what he’s repeating all over again: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
By the third repetition, there’s no color left on his face. He’s started to scratch his lower arms, both sides at once, blunt nails digging into the fully inked skin.
Don’t, I think. Don’t spiral now. This will end. It will end.
But he’s trapped in place, forced to watch the full roster suffer because of his failure.
“Again,” Wagner announces across the field, and I turn for another round.
By the time I’m bear-crawling back to the end zone again, Seb’s chest is rising and falling in too-fast, too-shallow breaths. I can see him desperately trying to even them out, tears glistening in his eyes.
My heart sinks as I pick myself off the ground in a last attempt to appeal to Wagner’s reason.
“Coach—”
“Mahoney, did I tell you to get up?”
“No, but—”
“STOP!”
I flinch at the sound of Felix’s voice echoing across the field—loud and sharp and incredibly angry.
The guys around us drop to their knees like puppets with severed strings, some of them falling onto their backs, arms stretched out on either side.
But not Felix. He’s a force of wrath, blond hair sticking to his damp forehead as he moves toward Wagner in large strides, shouting in German now.
“Was zur Holle stimmt nicht mit Ihnen?!”
“Zimmermann, if you have something to say, say it in English and then get back into position,” Coach barks at him. He doesn’t tell us to get back up, though; he just stands there with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Einen Schei? werd’ ich tun! Was soll das hier werden?! Wollen Sie uns umbringen? Oder sind Sie einfach nur blind? Seb leidet.”
I don’t understand a single word he’s saying, but I’m pretty sure I get the gist of it. Felix’s flashing eyes translate the meaning well enough.
“Wer sich nicht an die Regeln h?lt, muss lernen—” Coach switches to German, and I’m taken off guard by how different his voice sounds in his native language.
“Das hier ist kein Lernen, das ist Schikane. Sie schikanieren einen Spieler, der, by the way, sowieso schon struggelt, auf grausamste Art und Weise. Schauen Sie hin, Coach—er ist zwei Sekunden von einer verdammten Panikattacke entfernt!” Felix isn’t talking anymore; he’s yelling again, his voice climbing higher and higher as he gestures at Seb.
From the sideline, Assistant Coach Novák steps onto the field, his hands stretched out to Felix and Wagner, as if trying to keep them apart. “Mo,” he says quietly. “It’s enough.”
Wagner doesn’t turn his head in Novák’s direction.
His jaw is working again, his eyes fixed on Seb, who’s still sitting in his place.
I don’t even give a fuck about anything anymore, as I push off the ground and drag myself over to Seb, then wrap my arms around him as he presses his face against my stomach.
He doesn’t make a sound, but his shoulders are shaking.
Wagner’s office smells like cold coffee and stale crackers.
There’s also something vaguely chemical underneath it—a cleaning agent, probably.
I’ve been in here several times before, and each occasion felt like being called to the principal’s office.
Today is different, but I still haven’t decided if it’s better or worse.
We occupy the chairs in front of Wagner’s desk—Seb in the middle, Felix to his left, me to his right, all of us still fully suited up, our shoulder pads and knees touching with every shift.
Novák is sitting off to the side in Wagner’s chair because there weren’t enough seats for this impromptu emergency meeting.
Wagner himself is sitting on his desk in front of us, legs dangling an inch above the ground, his aviators gone.
He looks younger like this, less certain, less edged.
Silence fills the room. Not filled with tension, just a severely needed break after thirty minutes of hard conversation.
Seb finally talked.
Quietly and hesitantly at first, his fingers restlessly twist the cap of the water bottle in his hands. He didn’t tell Wagner everything, but enough to paint a rough picture.
The anxiety. The nights when sleep evades him, even when he’s dead on his feet.
The mornings when leaving the house seems like an impossible task, every step toward the door like wading through mud.
The days on which his own brain locks him into the apartment, caught in an endless loop of checking whether he turned off the stove, whether he switched off the lights, whether he really turned off the stove, going back to take a picture for proof, then going back for a second and third, then checking the lights again—and by the time he’s finally through the door, he’s exhausted and ashamed and also running late, no matter when he set the alarm.
Felix made a soft sound at that, somewhere between a strangled gasp and a word, his hand reaching for Seb at the same time as mine.
We knew, technically, all of that, but we didn’t know just how bad it was or how well we'd covered it up for him over the past years.
What once felt like solidarity seems wrong now.
We should’ve done this earlier, I realize. We should’ve talked earlier; gotten help.
Wagner is pressing the palms of his hands together as if he’s praying, his eyes staring at a point beyond this room or the present day.
I shift in my chair, uncomfortably aware of the cold sweat acting like glue between my skin and undershirt.
Wagner straightens up when he catches my movement out of the corner of his eye.
“Sebastian,” he says. I’ve never heard him use Seb’s first name before. It sounds strange coming out of his mouth—way less threatening.
Seb must have caught it, too. He looks up from where his fingers are still screwing and unscrewing the cap of his water bottle.
“What happened on the field today—” Wagner starts, then stops abruptly again to reorganize his thoughts. “What I did was wrong. I want to say that very clearly so there’s no ambiguity. I fucked up, and I owe you an apology. All of you, in fact.”
Seb doesn’t say anything to that, but his fingers have finally gone still around the bottle cap.
“I’ve been watching you run late for months now.
I’ve been watching you retreat into your own world or doze off in the tape room,” he continues.
“And I’ve built a story around it in my head.
I decided what it meant, and I stopped looking for other explanations.
That was a failure of judgment on my part, and I will have to make that right again. ”
“It’s okay,” Seb mumbles, his words barely audible, eyes downcast. He probably already regrets fessing up to all of this.
“It’s really not, but I want you to understand how I arrived at my conclusion,” Wagner tells him softly, his head ducking in an attempt to make eye contact.
“As you’re probably aware, I know your brothers.
Roman, Leo, and I came up around the same time.
I played with them and against them. Roman, in particular.
” Something passes over his face when he says that.
I can’t name it, it moves through too quickly—there and gone again in the blink of an eye.
“You might not want to hear this, but there’s a lot of him in how you play, so I thought I knew how you looked on the inside, too. I didn’t know just how wrong I was.”