Chapter Thirty-Two
Cade
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The night before the last game, Jaxon Holt came to find me, which is how the whole thing had started, two of us and a gas station coffee on my steps, and I think he knew it, I think he closed the loop on purpose.
He found me in the empty stadium. I'd gone there to walk it one more time before the lights, the way you visit a place you're about to leave for good, and he came up the tunnel and stood next to me at the edge of the field, the two of us looking at all that empty green under the work lights, and he didn't say anything for a while.
"You scared about tomorrow?" he asked finally.
"No," I said, and meant it. "First time in my life I'm not scared of a football game. Funny. The one that doesn't matter is the only one I've never been scared of."
"That's because it's the only one you're playing for the right reason.
" Jaxon leaned on the wall. "I've been thinking about what comes next.
For me, I mean. They're saying I could transfer, play somewhere clean, somewhere that didn't do this to its guys.
I've got another year." He was quiet a second.
"Part of me wants to. Part of me wants to take everything I learned in the wreckage of this place and go be the guy who makes sure it doesn't happen wherever I land.
Be the keystone on purpose, you know? Not the way you were—forced into it, alone—but on purpose, out loud, from the jump.
Somebody who knows where the bodies get buried because he watched it happen, walking into a clean building, making sure it stays clean.
" He looked at me. "You think that's naive? "
"I think," I said slowly, "that you spent four years being the golden boy who was secretly terrified, and you just found out that the scared part and the brave part were the same part the whole time.
And I think a guy who learns that at twenty-two and decides to spend the rest of his career protecting the next room full of scared kids—" I shook my head.
"That's not naive, Jaxon. That's the most useful thing a person can be.
You see it now. Most people never see it.
You can't unsee it. So go be the guy who sees it, wherever they'll have you. "
He nodded, slow, and I watched something settle in him, a decision, and I had the strange feeling I was looking at the start of a whole other story—Jaxon Holt walking into some clean program with his eyes open and his whistle ready, the keystone who chose it, and I thought, somebody should follow that guy around for a year.
There's a hell of a story in where he goes next.
I didn't know the half of it yet. None of us did. That's a different book.
"You know the wild thing?" Jaxon said, pushing off the wall.
"None of this happens without your girl.
A girl with a recorder bought Theo a coffee and asked how he actually was, and four months later a coach is gone and a dozen guys are free and I'm standing in an empty stadium deciding to spend my life making sure it doesn't happen again.
One person. One question. How are you actually.
" He grinned. "Marry her, man. Genuinely.
That's not a joke. People who ask that question and mean it are the rarest thing there is.
Don't be the idiot who had one and let her get away because he was scared of being seen. "
"Already got seen," I said. "In the rain. On those steps. You were there. You hollered something undignified."
"I did," he admitted, delighted. "You keystone son of a bitch. I stand by it." He clapped my shoulder, the equal kind, the between-brothers kind. "See you tomorrow, twenty-seven. Last one. Let's play it like we get to."
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I went to see Theo after, because I'd gotten in the habit, and because the family you choose is the one you show up for.
He was out of the hospital now, home, leg in a walking boot, crutch by the couch, his apartment full of cards and a stupid amount of flowers from people who'd never sent him anything in four years of him playing hurt for them.
He was watching film—not game film, real film, a documentary about something, a thing he'd never had time for when the season owned every hour—and he muted it when I came in.
"The man of the hour," he said. "Last game tomorrow. You nervous?"
"Jaxon already did this bit. I'm not nervous."
"Good. Because I need you to do something for me, and I need you to not make it weird.
" He shifted, winced, waved off my move to help, the old reflex, except now the reflex was followed by, "—okay, actually, hand me that pillow, the leg's killing me," which was new, which was Theo asking for a thing, which two months ago would not have happened, and I handed him the pillow and didn't make it weird.
"Tomorrow. The last game. I can't play it.
Obviously." He gestured at the boot. "So I need you to play it for both of us.
Not angry. Not for them. The way we always should've gotten to.
I'll be on the sideline on this stupid crutch and I need to watch one of us finally play a game like it's a game, like we're kids again, like it's fun, because I never got to and you never got to and somebody from our draft class should get to feel that one time before it's over.
" His voice did a thing. "Play it like it's fun, Cade.
For both of us. That's all I want. I don't need you to win.
I need you to have fun. I've never once seen you have fun out there. Let me see it. Before it's done."
"Yeah," I said, when I could. "Yeah, Theo. I'll have fun. For both of us."
"And point at your girl," he added, grinning, wrecking the moment on purpose the way he did.
"If you make a play. Point at her in the stands.
The whole state's gonna be watching and I want to see seventy thousand people lose their minds when the enforcer points at the reporter.
Give me that. I've got a rod in my leg, I deserve a little theater. "
"I'm not gonna point at—"
"Point at the girl, Cade."
"I'll think about pointing at the girl."
He pointed at me, both of us laughing, and I left my brother's apartment the night before the last football game I'd ever play, full of a feeling I'd spent twenty-two years being told I didn't get to have, and which I now understood was just the ordinary birthright of every person who has people: I was happy.
Simply, unremarkably, in-the-daylight happy.
Brothers and a girl and a game tomorrow I got to play for fun.
The sky, I kept noticing, had still not fallen.
I was starting to believe it never would.
That it had never been up there at all. That the roof I'd spent my whole life bracing under was one my father built out of his own fear and handed to me, and I'd walked out from under it on a set of steps in the rain, and the actual sky—the real one—was just sky, enormous and indifferent and not coming for me at all.
I drove home to the girl who'd taught me how to make a sound, and I slept the night before the last game like a person, shoulders down, and in the morning I went and played football one time in my life like it was the thing it was always supposed to be.
But she should tell you about the game. She was in the stands. She's the one with the words.
She always was.
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