21 - Ethan
Ethan
Our never-ending losing streak wasn’t so loud anymore.
And that was actually the worst part, because it was taking its toll on us all.
At first, there was a lot of noise. The guys expressed their frustration, and we all yelled at each other to get our points across.
Then we had the film sessions that felt like FBI interrogations.
But now it was quiet and heavy. A constant weight that followed us onto the field and settled on our shoulders as if it belonged there.
Our practice sessions started tense and never loosened.
I could feel it in our huddles. In each hesitation and in the half-second delays before our routes sharpened.
In the way the guys looked at me instead of each other, and I hated it.
That look and the way it made me feel. Like I was their only salvation.
“Run it again,” I said after the first botched drive.
None of them had the motivation to continue, so I clapped my hands sharply, refusing to acknowledge the defensive cheer coming from the other side of the field.
“Run it again!”
“That’s not the play,” Malik said, his voice as steady as ever.
“It should be,” I shot back, my annoyance clear in my tone of voice. “If it was just executed in the right way.”
“It was executed,” Dylan scoffed. “But you didn’t throw it.”
I replayed the last practice in my head, trying to find all the mistakes and see if he was telling the truth or not.
I turned slowly, heat rising within my body. “You weren’t open.”
He threw his hands up. “Yes, I was.”
“You mean for that half a second?”
“It would’ve been enough.”
Oh, there it was. This had nothing to do with what happened during the practice. He was just as fed up as the rest of us were, and he wanted to take it out on someone. I happened to be his target; whether that was intentional or not was still a mystery.
“It wouldn’t have been enough if you got picked.”
The air shifted, and suddenly all attention was on us. Our teammates had stopped what they were doing and were watching us like they expected something to happen.
Malik stepped forward, and he was so calm that it felt judgmental. “Let’s face it. You're trying to force things. You have been since we started out, but it isn’t working and eventually we have to accept that.”
“I’m trying to help us win.“
“And what do you think the rest of us are doing here?”
“If that’s the case, then play like you mean it.”
And that was the line I was never supposed to cross until I just trampled right over it.
I stood there like an idiot watching it land.
I saw the way Dylan’s jaw tightened, and then there was the flicker in Malik’s eyes.
It wasn’t sadness or anger. No, it was a lot worse than that. What he showed me was disappointment.
“There’s no point to any of this,” Malik said quietly. “If you don’t trust the guys next to you, you’ll never succeed as a team.”
I let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “I’ll start trusting them when they give me a valid reason to do so.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I shouldn’t have said them, but I was tired of carrying the weight of the team by myself. I was tired of scrambling when the protection broke down. But most of all, I was tired of watching plays die in the hands of other people.
The punch landed before I even thought it would come. Dylan’s fist cracked against my mouth, and for a split second everything was consumed by a bright white light. The taste of blood flooded in, and then my instincts just took over.
I hit back harder than I meant to, but I only realized it when I felt my knuckles connect with his cheekbone.
I heard someone shout in the distance and then felt a body slam into my side.
Someone else shoved me from behind, and suddenly it wasn’t about the play anymore.
It was weeks’ worth of frustration boiling over, and it detonated in the most epic way.
Helmets hit the turf as the guys jumped into a full-blown saloon-style brawl.
Someone swung wildly and caught me across the eye.
The sting was bright and hot, but I kept standing my ground and taking out my own frustration.
I lunged forward again, adrenaline drowning out any reasoning that might’ve come to mind.
Drowning out the only part of me that understood that the situation was spiraling.
I wasn’t just fighting Dylan. I was fighting all of our losses and doubts. I was fighting the whisper that maybe I wasn’t enough to carry the team after all. Hands grabbed me from behind, but I shoved them off. Someone drove a shoulder into my ribs, but I barely felt it.
“Enough,” Harris roared.
It took a moment for the word to press through the rage, but when it finally did, we pulled bodies apart.
My chest was heaving, my vision was slightly blurred on one side, my lip throbbed, and my eye was already swelling.
Malik avoided eye contact with me, and that hurt even more than all the punches I took.
Of course practice ended early because none of us would go onto that field without causing another fight.
But there were no speeches or running drills.
Just silence and the echo of cleats against the pavement.
The quiet stretched into the locker room and hovered over us while we changed.
The tension could still be felt in the air, but no one said anything.
I sat in front of my locker and took in my reflection.
Blood trickled out of my split lip, and my eye got hurt so badly that it had already started bruising.
Then I had someone else’s blood covering my knuckles.
It wasn’t all that bad, but it wasn’t really good either.
I looked unhinged, and I felt even worse because underneath all that anger there was something colder. Fear…
What if Malik was right? What if I didn’t trust them because trusting them would mean admitting that I couldn’t do it all on my own?
Bile rose in my throat, so I quickly pushed the thought away and stood up.
As if the universe were trying to rub the day in, I still had a test to take.
So I had a quick shower and changed before heading to my class.
The campus air that hit my face was sharp and cold, but it didn’t clear anything.
My head was still buzzing with what happened and replaying the fight in fractured flashes.
The punch, the shove, and that look in Malik’s eyes.
I was so wrapped up in the details that I almost didn’t hear her calling my name.
“Ethan?” she said again.
I stopped mid-step. Elizabeth was standing near the science building steps. The sunlight was catching in her hair, and for a moment, something in my chest eased. Then she saw my face, and things took a turn.
Her expression fell, and she gasped. “Oh, my God. What happened?”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“And you need to let it go.”
She stepped closer anyway. Her fingers hovered near my mouth, warm but cautious. Then she touched me, and the softness made my heart tighten painfully.
“Who did this to you?” She finally asked.
“I just got out of practice and things were a little intense. It’s nothing serious.”
“That doesn’t really answer the question, now does it?”
I stepped back before I could stop myself. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to be close to her. It was the complete opposite. I wanted her too much.
“Please don’t,” I groaned.
“Don’t what?” she asked, looking clearly confused.
“Don’t look at me like I’m broken.”
Her eyes sharpened. “You are but unlike the team, this is only temporary. All you need is a little TLC.”
Her words hit a lot deeper than they should’ve but I couldn’t let anything like that affect me right now. If I let her see the truth, the doubts, the scars and the cracks, then it became real. And I was nowhere near ready to deal with that.
“I need to get to my test,” I mumbled.
“Ethan—”
“I’m fine, I promise, but I really gotta go. I’m already late.”
I wasn’t fine at all. I knew that, and so did she, but I didn’t know how to stand there and admit that I was losing control of everything that I held dear. So I just turned around and started walking before she could say another word.
The classroom felt small and suffocating, as if it were ready to swallow me whole. I dropped my bag in front of the room before collapsing into my chair. My mind was racing, and my knuckles throbbed in rhythm with the clock ticking overhead.
The test landed on my head, and everything I had carefully been holding up came crashing down.
The first question came like a punch to the gut: Define the role of NADH in cellular respiration.
I stared at the words as if they were written in a foreign language.
They didn’t want to connect with anything, even though I knew the answer.
Elizabeth and I had gone over it multiple times.
It was one of the easiest things I had learned.
She was so proud of me for getting it. But at that exact moment, I couldn’t remember anything at all.
Was it an election carrier? An inner mitochondrial membrane?
Or maybe a proton gradient? I had no fucking idea.
The phrases were floating just out of reach because instead of focusing on the test, my mind was replaying the fight: Malik’s voice and Dylan’s punch.
Then, without permission, my thoughts shifted entirely.
I felt Elizabeth’s fingers tangled in my hair and her hot breath against my neck.
Or perhaps the best part, her warmth as she curled up against me and rested her hand over my heart.
Panic overwhelmed me, and I squeezed my eyes shut in the hope that it would pass.
This test was super important, and I needed to focus or I was going to fail.
I moved on to the next question, hoping it would be easier: Explain the gradient formed in the inner mitochondrial membrane.
“Oh, come on,” I hissed.
There, where the answer was supposed to be stored, was emptiness.
My chest tightened. I had never blanked out like that before, not even on the field.
My muscle memory had always taken over, even in the worst of cases, but there was no muscle memory for this.
The ticking of the clock grew louder, and my vision tunneled slightly.
I was failing miserably, but not only at the test. At practice, at leading, at studying, and even at dating.
I pressed my fingers to my temples, trying to force the information forward, but every time I reached for it, it slipped away.
It was replaced by Elizabeth’s voice saying I’m not something that disappears.
Temporary… The word echoed. What if that’s exactly what I was?
What if I were just a quarterback on a losing team with a busted face and no backup plan?
My breathing became shallow. I couldn’t do this.
I couldn’t sit there and pretend everything was okay while it was unraveling thread by thread.
My chair squeaked back so loudly that it got everyone’s attention.
The teacher tried to stop me, but I pressed the paper to his chest and walked out.
In the hallway, I dragged my hand down my face, bursting my lip yet again.
I was slipping, and I didn’t know how to stop it. Then, as I rounded the corner, my body collided with hers. Elizabeth stood against the wall outside the classroom with her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes fixed on me.
“You left?” she asked quietly.
“So did you,” I snapped.
Her jaw tightened. “Don’t you dare.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but then I realized that I didn’t have the energy for that. She stepped forward and grabbed my wrist, and her grip wasn’t gentle.
“Come with me.”
“Elizabeth—”
“Now!”
There was something in her voice that I hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t fear or anger. It was resolve. She pulled me down the hallway, toward the stairwell and away from the curious glances.
I didn’t protest.
Because for the first time that day I wasn’t sure if I could trust myself to stand still.