Ten
The stadium lights were brighter on game night, or the noise made them seem that way. The student section of the bleachers went white as the pep committee came around pouring baby powder into cupped hands to be thrown into the air. It reflected the light back to us. It clung to Cella’s hair.
“Another rabbit down the hole!” she screamed as our kicker took yet another point. I knew what a kicker was because Cella had explained it on the drive here. She knew what a kicker was because she had rapid-researched football terminology while I did her face paint.
“Run, rabbit!” I shouted between my cup hands. “Don’t let that turtle catch you!”
A few nearby students gave us strange looks.
Cella’s face stretched with glee. She wiped sweat from her temple with the back of her wrist, and her hand came back orange.
As a way of sucking up to me for agreeing to spend my Friday night in a crowded stadium, she’d let me do whatever I wanted with her face paint.
Instead of dots and warrior lines, I had followed the Butterfly Princess design in a free face-painting book I found online, the kind sold to kids at fairs.
It was black and orange, Carrington school colors. Cella wore it fiercely.
“What are you doing?” she yelled when we lost the ball to the blue team, really putting her heart into it. “You don’t lead a horse into the sea!”
“What’s it gonna do, huh?” I backed her up. “Neigh? Underwater?”
More puzzled side-eyes.
Cella never acted this way in public, but she seemed emboldened by the clamor of the stands and by the face paint; together, they made her anonymous for the night.
We had lost track of time and made ourselves late to the game, Cella seated on the sink with her chin raised as I worked, standing between her legs to make the most of her tiny bathroom.
She hadn’t convinced me to let her paint my face, but since I was already wearing black, she’d tied an orange friendship bracelet from her weaving phase around my wrist and called it school spirit.
“Don’t let him!” she cried as a player built like an AC unit closed in on Mason. “Don’t let him T-bone ya!”
Mason went down. Cella sat heavily with her hands thrown up.
“Totaled,” she said gravely. I was pretty sure she was doing this for my sake.
She had started shouting nonsense early on in the game, maybe predicting that I would find fun in misbehaving.
She invented a new idiom every few minutes.
She heckled both sides. The stands were too loud and packed for anyone but our immediate neighbors to notice.
Their disgruntled looks made the whole thing less tortuous.
But truth be told—and it never would be, not out loud—I would have come without the nonsense, without the face paint, even without Cella’s begging.
It was a matter of principle, my being there. It was a matter of justice, because Mason had stolen my strategy. My Do Not Engage strategy.
After Tuesday, he had written me out. We had handed in the play, and I had ceased to exist. Poor Cella had to juggle her conversations with either of us in class, passing us from hand to hand.
Mason allowed no overlap, as if there could be me and Cella without overlap.
During halftime, he jogged to the student stands to accept Cella’s praise, gripped the rail and leaned over it to kiss her cheek, and ran off just like that.
I was standing right next to her. The black paint all over his mouth when he pulled away had come from my fingertips.
And, okay. I’d thought I would be thrilled to finish the project so early and be done with him.
And, okay, I had asked him to stay out of my business.
“Leave me the fuck alone” had been the exact words, if I recalled (I did.
Vividly). But I’d thought . . . that is, I’d felt a shift on Tuesday.
A small one, a scoot. We had laughed together.
It wasn’t like I’d been expecting to come back thick as thieves or wanted to.
But I hadn’t expected him to overcorrect like this, either.
I hadn’t thought it needed correcting at all.
Being ignored by Mason was fine, though.
It was swell. He wasn’t getting between me and Cella anymore. The peace and quiet were nice.
I just hated how easy he made it look.
Coming to tonight’s game had felt critical, even if I didn’t have an end goal yet. There was no way to get him alone, and I didn’t even know what I’d do with him if I did. Only that the weekend suddenly seemed very long.
Down on the field, he paid back that tackle with another touchdown.
Cella had told me he played running back.
I didn’t know what that meant, but watching him tear through opponents, I could understand well enough.
Mason was smaller than a lot of the other guys on the field, but he was a beast when he ran.
Like his mother, the way he moved reminded me of a cat, though not in her lithe way.
It was how he sprinted, corded muscles bunching and stretching with deadly precision.
Set against the rest of them, he was regal, a tiger among bears.
The coach hadn’t put him in until the second quarter, and Mason had come out like a monster, the orange 23 on his back mostly a blur. He reminded me of movies about imperial Rome, of a starved tiger let loose on a gladiator. In the movies, the beast always loses eventually.
Mason didn’t lose.
I found myself gripping the railing. The clock reached zero and the other faceless players swarmed number 23. The cheerleaders formed two circles and flung a pair of tiny girls into the air. More powder was thrown, so thick I never saw the girls land. The score was forty-two to thirty-one.
When the last of the powder cleared, Lara was running up from the sidelines, still bouncy despite hours in the October chill.
Cella started bouncing, too, on the balls of her feet, clapping her butterfly clap.
Lara jumped up and threw an arm around each of us, unshy about her cooling sweat.
Her feet left the ground, and I had to hold her around the waist; she kicked and laughed like a songbird.
She let go of Cella to wrap both arms around my neck so I could lower her to the ground.
Somehow she still smelled like cherry vanilla.
“Strong!” she said.
“Says the one who’s been throwing girls around all night.”
Lara closed her lips against a dirty smile.
“Not what I meant,” I sighed.
“Thanks for coming! Mason should be . . .” She checked over her shoulder. The team was all over the place, clustered near their bench and dispersed around the bleachers. I didn’t see 23 anywhere. “Did he already go back to the locker room? He did take some nasty tackles, maybe he’s grimy.”
“I don’t mind waiting,” Cella said, subtly tilting her head, looking for him.
“Divine. I’ve got some time before debrief, and I want to run costume ideas by you.”
“Catch me up after, okay?” I said to Cella. “I’ll wait in the car. I think there’s powder in my lungs.”
“Hope you saved some for me.”
“Not what I meant, Lara.”
I headed toward the parking lot, crossing behind the concession stand with its heavy stench of oil and the impossible line to the women’s restroom, then skirted toward the structure at the turn of the track.
The locker room. There was nobody around, the players still caught up celebrating.
I felt like an idiot as I waited at the door with no idea how to proceed or what I was even doing there.
The door opened, then shut as Mason jumped back with a yelp. A few seconds later, he opened it again, scowling.
“Lost again?” he asked.
Mason stood in a lavender and lemon haze. He’d changed into the team tracksuit, open over a cotton shirt that was well worn and gaping at the neck. I had him, and I didn’t know what to do with him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, for lack of anything else. Mason looked behind himself, then back at me.
“What am I, an athlete, doing in the locker room?”
“Why are you here instead of celebrating with your team or, I don’t know, with the girl that only came to this thing for you?”
“Now you have a problem with the order I do things in? Want to write me a schedule?”
“Cella has never watched a football game in her life before tonight, and you can’t even stop by on your way off the field?”
“Whatever, man,” Mason said and brushed past me with his hands in his pockets.
“Don’t whatever me!” I called after him. He was walking in the opposite direction of the field, toward the school. “Where are you going?”
“Wherever you aren’t.”
I matched his step. Mason hunched his shoulders. “That. What’s with that?” I said.
“Can you not do this where any of my teammates could walk past?”
“Frankly, I couldn’t care less where we do this.”
Mason turned sharply, cutting across the shadowed grass to stand beneath the awning that surrounded the school.
Spinning to face me, he said, “And what is it we’re doing?”
“Are you avoiding me?” I demanded.
“And you say I’ve got a big ego?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’d think you would be bathing in all the attention out there, but you’re lying low. And it’s not just now. You’ve been avoiding me since we finished Mick Betty.”
“Is that what this is about?” The light under the awning was flickering and yellow, drawing angry lines across Mason’s face. He looked even worse than he had on Tuesday. “Can you make up your mind?”
“Me?” I said. “After you just suddenly—”
“Yes, you!” he interrupted. Roared. “There’s no ‘suddenly’ about it.
You told me to leave you alone, now you’re upset that I did?
You list out everything you hate about me, then the next day you call me to—what, check that I’m okay?
I’m not okay, and it’s got everything to do with you.
Yes, I’m avoiding you. Of course I’m avoiding you.
I’m looking out for myself. You can’t just say whatever you want and expect nothing to change. ”
I latched on to the only part of what he’d said that I could argue with confidence.
“I don’t hate you.”