15 - Ethan
Ethan
It wasn’t morning yet. It wasn’t even close. The sky was a thick, unbroken black, and my eyes were refusing to answer Harris’s call. I just needed a couple more hours, not too much.
“Come on, man,” Lucas said, literally rolling out of his bed.
I huffed out my best attempt at a protest, but someone grabbed my blanket and ripped it off. There was no way I could start Hell Week late. The guys wouldn’t allow it. So I rolled out of bed and pulled my shirt over my head.
“Where’s Coach?” I asked as I stumbled into the hallway.
“Field,” Malik mumbled, wiping the sleep out of his eyes.
We dragged our asses out of the building and suddenly the stadium lights creaked to life.
Their reluctant hum flooded the bleachers with a harsh white glare that gave me an instant headache.
The air was icy enough to sting my lungs with the first breath I inhaled, but none of that helped my mind come to life.
It was another one of those nights where I tried and failed to fall asleep because my mind had been preoccupied. I got maybe an hour, if I was lucky two, before that whistle interrupted. It was more of a nap than a good night’s rest.
“Start with the stairs,” Harris shouted as the last of the guys arrived.
There was no greeting, or speech to get us motivated. He didn’t even tell us what we could expect to be doing that day. It was as if he wanted nothing more than to punish us until we begged for mercy. Most of us had already reached that point.
We lined up at the base of the concrete steps. Our cleats scraped and our shoulder pads shifted. None of us was ready for it. Our breaths were coming out in short white bursts of semi-frozen air while goosebumps had broken out across quite a few skins.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lucas whispered under his breath.
“You’ll go all the way to the top and come back again,” Harris said, looking like the devil reincarnated. “You’ll do it five times and you have ninety seconds for each set.”
Dylan stared up at the looming wall of concrete. “You want us to run up and down all these stairs in ninety seconds? And you want us to do it five times?”
“Yes,” Coach said, looking overly confident.
“Have you lost your mind somewhere in the last few hours?” Dylan said, looking as if someone had punched him in the face.
Harris shrugged and blew the whistle. At first, nobody moved, but then we remembered that we only had ninety seconds. My feet moved of their own accord, and before I knew it, I was standing at the top of the stairs. Adrenaline pumped through my system, and I used it to my advantage.
I sprinted down and started back up, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
I was about halfway through when my legs felt like they were on fire.
By the third ascend I felt like I was going to die.
My calves were screaming from the pressure, and my lungs felt like they were too small for the amount of air my body required.
The concrete blurred beneath my feet, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it much longer.
By the fourth climb, things took a drastic turn.
It was no longer an exercise session. It had become about survival, and I wasn’t sure if I was up to the task.
I always knew that I wasn’t the fittest person in school, but I never imagined that I was that unfit.
My legs were shaking, my vision had narrowed, and it felt like my heart was pounding against my skull.
I stood there for a moment, hands on my knees as I tried to regain my composure. Lucas reached the top as well, and I did my best to grab him before he crashed into the railing.
“You know,” Lucas grasped. “I’m starting to think he doesn’t like us.”
“Move,” I forced out, grabbing onto the railing to steady myself before heading down as well.
On the fifth run, Dylan’s foot slipped, and he stumbled. Malik grabbed him by the arm and pulled him upright without breaking his stride.
“Eyes up,” Malik mumbled as he moved past Dylan.
It wasn’t a tease or a bite. He was hyper-focused on what he was doing, and he wanted the rest of us to be in the same mindset. He was clearly used to that type of grueling exercise.
We hit the bottom stair with two seconds to spare, but no one celebrated.
We were so exhausted and broken that we didn’t even speak.
We just stood there with our hands resting on our thighs and our lungs dragging in ragged breaths.
Coach paced in front of us. His movements were slow and calculated so that he could see the expressions on our faces.
“Are you embarrassed?” he asked calmly.
No one responded. We didn’t even look in his general direction.
“You should be,” he added.
His words were like a blow to my gut. I thought we’d done okay. We finished before time, and even though we suffered through it, all of us made it to the end.
“Get to the field,” Coach ordered. “It’s time for sled pushes.”
His comment was met with a few groans, but no one really protested. We just did as we were told, hoping this nightmare would end sooner rather than later.
We found a few sleds waiting for us, with their weighted metal biting into the dewy grass.
I lowered my shoulder into the moist pad and dove.
My cleats dug deep and my legs churned, but the sled barely moved.
I tried again; this time my thighs trembled violently, but the result was the same. I stopped, trying to catch my breath.
“Lower,” Harris shouted as he walked past me.
I looked at the piece of equipment to see where my mistake was, and then I thought I saw what he meant.
I adjusted, leaned harder, and as I struck it, I felt the pressure grind into the tender line of muscle behind my shoulder.
Pain flared through my back, but I ignored it, thinking it was part of the process.
Next to me, Cam pushed his sled as if he had something personal to prove. His face was set, jaw rigid, and eyes fixed on the line of grass in front of him. Sweat dripped from his chin, as if we needed more evidence that he was trying his absolute best.
“I didn’t know the kickers trained with the real men,” Dylan wheezed as he came up behind him.
Cam didn’t respond. He just pushed harder.
My sled finally lurched forward, tearing the grass beneath it.
My vision blurred at the edges, and my quads were shaking so badly that I wasn’t sure they’d hold.
I released my pressure when someone threw up behind us halfway through the next rep, but they didn’t even get Coach’s attention.
He just kept walking like nothing had happened.
“You think they’re tired?” He called. “Do you think the noise dies down if you fold?”
Harris seemed to have changed overnight, and I didn’t want to get on the bad side of this new version.
Who knew what would happen if I did? So I grabbed my sled again before he could tell me to.
Malik fell in on the other side, and Lucas slid behind us to add some weight.
We didn’t exchange words. The task was about grit, and that was exactly what we were trying to achieve.
The sun was barely rising when we transitioned to sprint intervals, and my body already felt hollowed out.
We ran suicides until our cleats dragged.
Then we used our dead legs to run routes.
And every time the spacing was off, even if it was just by a couple of inches, we reset and ran them again.
We were exhausted and temperatures were starting to crack.
A freshman receiver missed his break, causing us to reset yet again, and I lost it.
“Are you guessing or running the play?” I snapped.
The kid flinched as if I had struck him, and I instantly regretted my decision.
Lucas stepped in quietly. “Your angles need to be tighter. I know it doesn’t make sense to you right now, but just trust it. It will work.”
I exhaled through my teeth. This whole training session was taking a toll on the entire team, but it wasn’t the physical work that was frustrating me.
It was the reason we had started the day like this that had me seething.
It was Penny with her articles and that pathetic site with its memes.
The way our own stadium felt hostile instead of supportive.
It was the way Elizabeth stood there and defended us while I couldn’t bear to look.
Contact drills came next, and our short-tempered exhaustion made everything worse. The hits sounded louder. The pads cracked harder, and our bodies collided with enough force to rattle teeth
“Again!” Harris barked.
We were busy with the red-zone reps. We had tight windows and zero margin.
I took the snap and rolled right. The defensive pressure moved in fast, and Lucas broke across the middle.
I planted hard to evade a rush and felt it.
A sharp dragging pull shot through the back of my shoulder.
It wasn’t catastrophic, but it was wrong.
I threw the ball anyway, knowing it was a mistake.
It sailed higher than it was supposed to.
Lucas caught it and shot me a look. “You’re off.”
“I know,” I said, pushing at my shoulder.
We reset. I rotated my arm once and tried to be subtle, but heat radiated all the way down toward my elbow.
That couldn’t be good, but I couldn’t be the one to walk off with an injury either.
I pushed through the snap and the roll, and then I planted.
My eyes shot wide as the pain flared sharper.
It was almost electric, and because of that my release lagged for a fraction too long.
Harris’s whistle pierced the air. “You’re late!”
“He’s injured,” Lucas said as he ran up to the coach.
“I’m fine,” I scoffed. “Let’s just go again.”
“Are you hurt?” Harris asked, stepping closer.
I swallowed hard. Actually, I needed to tell him Lucas was right, but I didn’t want to be that guy. Malik said that the guys looked up to me, so how would they react if I got sent to the medic station during the first few hours of hell week?
“No,” the lie came out automatically.
“Then throw like you aren’t,” Harris snapped before blowing his whistle.
With the next rep, I forced myself to push through the pain. Instead of getting anywhere useful, I over-corrected and the ball hit the turf. Frustration exploded in my chest.
“Again,” Harris shouted before I could.
We ran it until the timing hit, until the route landed clean and the pass snapped into Lucas’s hands like it was meant to. My shoulder started throbbing, and a red-hot ball of pain settled deep beneath my skin. I didn’t allow the practice to slow down though.
Conditioning came back around like it was a punishment for existing. There were bear crawls, panther carries, and even sled pulls with resistance bands. My muscles trembled violently under the strain. Sweat blurred my vision, and my lungs were scraped raw.
We were busy with a carry drill when someone shoved me from behind.
“Stay up,” Dylan barked, even though he could barely breathe.
“I am up,” I responded, shoving him much harder than I needed to.
The reaction lingered between us, causing tension and possibly a fracture. Dylan lunged for me, but Malik stepped between us before he could make it all the way. He said nothing, but he reset the drill.
When the final whistle blew a few hours later, my shirt was soaked through, stained with grass and clinging to my spine. My legs felt unstable beneath me, and Tara was waiting for me at the tunnel entrance.
“You’re compensating,” she said before I could get a word of protest out.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re favoring your right, which is unusual for you.”
I tried to argue, but as she pointed to the physio room, the burn returned.
The second we stepped inside, everything became sharper.
It was as if the lights were controlling what was happening inside my body.
Then she pressed along the muscle, and I lost all control over my body.
I locked my jaw, simply refusing to give her any kind of reaction.
“It’s just a mild strain,” she finally said. “But if you keep pushing it like you did today, it won’t stay mild.”
“We have a road game coming up. It’s not like I can afford to take it easy.”
“And what will happen if you tear it?”
I didn’t answer. She rolled her eyes at me and hooked me up to the stim machine. Ice followed in her terrible routine of torture. The cold bit deep into the muscle, numbing the pain temporarily but not erasing it.
“Rest tonight,” she said as she started packing up her things.
I gave her a noncommittal grunt. There was no way I could guarantee something like that. Heck, I didn’t even know what the morning had in store for me, not to mention the evening.
When I stepped back outside, dusk had settled.
The field was nearly empty, and Elizabeth was sitting alone on the lowest bleacher.
She wasn’t with her squad, and she didn’t have her usual relaxed attitude.
She just sat there watching the field like it held some kind of secret.
But the minute she saw me, she stood up.
And if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that there was a hint of relief that crossed her face, but she quickly masked it.
“Is it bad?” she asked, touching my shoulder.
Suddenly, I felt exposed. The sweat had dried into salt lines, and exhaustion was carved into every single one of my features.
“It’s nothing,” I mumbled, but she didn’t buy it.
“You look like you were hit by a train,” she said softly.
“So do you,” I replied.
She gave me a faint smile. “We’re trying to keep up.”
I smiled back. We might’ve been super busy and fighting incredibly hard, but her presence was something that could never escape me.
“I noticed. It’s very hard not to.”
She bit her lip slightly, but then silence stretched between us. It was heavy and charged, almost electric.
“You looked different today,” she said carefully.
“In what way?”
“Like you weren’t carrying the entire team on your own.”
Those words hit harder than any tackle ever could. My shoulder pulsed, and I rubbed it unconsciously.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, stepping closer.
She was so close that I could smell the lingering scent of her shampoo over the sweat and grass.
“Yeah,” I admitted, voice rough.
The word felt like a surrender, but her expression didn’t shift into pity. It softened into something steadier.
“I was wondering.” She hesitated for just a moment. “If you’d like to sit with me on the bus this weekend?”
It was simple. All she wanted to do was save me the seat next to her.
Yet it felt more dangerous than anything we had gone through during the day.