Pregame #2
“Let’s get to it,” the agent said. He swung his client’s arm over his shoulders and started to move toward the door, but he bent under the weight of the Woodsmen player.
Some of those guys were built like freighters and Everett Ford wasn’t part of that crowd, but he was in no way small, either.
In his half-naked state, I’d noticed how broad and strong he was, the sculpted muscles of his arms and shoulders, and the—ugh, the alcohol and unwashed smell was even worse as they got closer.
“Hold on,” I said, and I stepped in front of the door. “You can’t go out there like this. Those are children waiting for him.”
“He’s required to do it,” the agent stated. “Move.”
“No, this is ridiculous,” I told them. My heart pounded but I’d been in the classroom for almost two months already, since the school year had started at the beginning of September. I knew those kids and I already cared about them. Who knew what he might do in their presence?
“Move,” the agent stated again, but Everett had something else to say.
“I’m going to…”
We waited, but he didn’t complete the thought. He just went ahead and did it: he puked. It mostly went onto the floor but he’d managed to direct some of it forward, which meant that it also landed on me.
“Oh, geez!” I stared down at myself, at the top that was probably my nicest and that I’d chosen specifically because we were coming here to Woodsmen Stadium today.
Like the football players would have noticed it?
It hadn’t worked as we’d walked through the building, and this one particular player didn’t even seem to notice that he’d vomited on me.
He looked at the floor and swore a lot, and then the closet door was suddenly pushed open.
It pushed directly into me. I fell forward onto the agent and onto Everett Ford, and they hadn’t been stable to begin with.
We all went down to the carpet which, I discovered, was not well-padded.
I had landed on the Woodsmen player but I also crashed on my elbow, and it hurt.
The result was confusion, because we were on the ground, the agent was trying to talk, the man who’d opened the door was also talking, Everett was groaning and swearing, and then I heard the sound of many other voices as well.
They were very young voices all speaking at once.
“Miss Harmon?” one asked. “What are you doing with those guys?”
“Why are you doing it with two guys?”
“Why are you on the ground? Are you wrestling?”
“It smells like my car after I left yogurt in there last summer. Only do that if you want your mom to get real mad at you. She will.”
“Is that the Woodsmen quarterback?”
“He’s as old as Mrs. Pauker! Like my grandpa!”
“Not that one! The other one, the one with soup on his face. Why is there soup on his face? Chunky soup!”
“One, two, three, eyes on me!” Mrs. Pauker demanded, but she sounded desperate and it didn’t work. As I untangled myself, I heard parents, too. The one who’d been almost incapacitated by the “bus fumes” now said that she was weak due to the smell of vomit and the other one said he was recording.
I got up just as the door closed in all their faces.
The man who’d entered, pushing me out of the way and causing the disaster, had taken charge.
“Are you all right?” he asked me. His eyes were on my shirt, which was not all right.
It had throw-up on it, and interestingly—no, it wasn’t actually interesting that this was the second time someone had puked on me recently.
It wasn’t interesting but it was accurate, because Mya had stomach flu earlier this month but her parents had sent her to school thinking that she was just a little queasy. It had been more than that.
“I’m fine,” I said, although I was also disgusting. “What about him?”
We both looked at the Woodsmen player, and the newest addition to our party shook his head.
“Mr. Whitaker,” the agent started to say as he also stood, but the new man held up his hand to signal a halt.
I recognized that name, of course. The Whitakers owned much of everything in this part of northern Michigan, like property and businesses, and I was pretty sure that they also owned part of the Woodsmen football organization.
It didn’t seem like great news for Everett Ford or his agent that an actual team owner had come here right now.
“A crowd of children just witnessed this,” Mr. Whitaker said to the agent, whose features tightened into an expression I’d seen before.
He got the face of someone who wanted to argue but who also understood that it was in his best interest to zip it.
It was a face that I probably made a lot when I was talking to my mom and my sister.
Everett Ford didn’t have that understanding. “It’s no big deal,” he told the man who was one of his bosses. For someone so obviously inebriated, he didn’t sound terrible, not slurred or stumbling in his speech. He smelled terrible, though, and now…so did I.
“It’s a very big deal,” Mr. Whitaker corrected sharply.
He frowned at all of us, but then tried to modulate that expression as his eyes settled on me.
“Miss, you’re free to go clean up. No, hold on.
” He took out his phone and made a call, issuing polite but direct orders to have someone bring Woodsmen gear so that I could change out of the throw-up shirt.
“Thank you,” I told him. And now, I had to go back through the door, to the kids that I helped in my job as their student teacher and to the parents, who might still have been recording.
I nodded at the agent and then couldn’t help wincing slightly at Everett Ford, who was still on the floor and looking miserable.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend and the caterer,” I told him.
“My wife,” he stated, and that was worse.
“Sorry,” I said again, but Mr. Whitaker had opened the door and then I stepped through it.
It was a word that was repeated a lot that day.
“Sorry. Zoey, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Pauker told me a few hours later when we were back at Mitigomin Elementary School.
It had to have been the tenth time she’d said it, but there was no reason for that.
Despite the problems with Everett Ford, the rest of the experience had actually been great and she didn’t need to apologize.
The Woodsmen people had come through and given gear to all of us, not just me who had needed a new shirt.
The students received little footballs and hats, and so did the chaperones.
They’d had one of the coaches, Knox Lynch, come and talk to us, and he’d been a popular player in his time on the team so the kids had known about him and were excited to meet him instead.
We’d also taken a behind-the-scenes tour with the very nice head of security, and they’d even given out snacks.
Everyone knew that the way to a first grader’s heart was through his or her stomach, and it worked pretty well on us adults, too.
“I’m fine,” I said again to Sarah Pauker.
I thought that she might have been worried that I’d tell on her, like to the coordinators of the student teaching program at the college I attended, so that she’d get in trouble somehow.
I tried at assuage her fears when I continued, “I’m not interested in sharing this story. ”
Instead, I sat down on the top of one of the little desks, tired.
The field trip had been fun but I’d been glad to get back to the school and now, I was very glad that the day was over.
I still wasn’t sure how the other teachers did stuff like have a normal life, because when the final bell rang?
I wanted to drop to the ground and nap. But I had class to attend tonight and I had a part-time job, too.
Maybe those things also contributed to my fatigue.
We had made it back here for lunch and that was my time alone with the kids, which was fun but a little terrifying (still, even after two months).
I mostly walked around to open yogurt tubes and water bottle lids that were screwed on too tightly but I also dealt with problems. Today, Teague and Vonn had wanted to swap halves of their sandwiches because “that’s what friends do, Miss Harmon!
” I hated to break up the brotherhood and I didn’t enjoy discipline, but the school had rules about sharing food.
Now Sarah picked up a tiny football that she’d confiscated after telling the kids that they absolutely could not throw them in class anymore, and then one student hadn’t been able to resist. She was serious about limits and consequences and I was trying to be, too: no sharing sandwiches!
“I’m glad you’re ok, but I can’t believe what happened with Everett Ford,” she said. “What a mess.”
He really had been. And now that we’d seen off the last student and straightened up the classroom, she’d sat down at her laptop to find out more about him.
Sarah was a huge football fan (like everyone else in this part of the state).
She had already known a little about Ford, but I…
well, I was too busy right now to devote myself to the team.
And to be honest, I hadn’t ever been a huge Woodsmen fan.
I had attended my high school football games as part of the marching band, but I’d never paid much attention to the professional team in our area.
That was something I kept to myself. When I was a kid, I had read a history book about what had happened to the unfortunate people who’d contracted leprosy.
They’d been sent to lonely colonies and been forced to live in isolation, and that was what might have happened to me if I’d admitted the truth about my disinterest in the Woodsmen team.