Chapter 6 #2
“They’re not interested in sitting in the snow to watch an awful game,” he said. “I’ll tell them later. I don’t feel like talking.”
“Oh, I’ll—”
“I don’t mean you,” he told me. “Sit down.”
I found out that the armchairs in his house were really comfortable, too. “It’s so beautiful here,” I told him again. “Will you have to move?”
“It’s only a rental, but I’ll keep it for a while. It’s a pain in the ass to move and I see myself playing for the Woodsmen for at least a few seasons.”
If he made the team again. I was convinced that he was the best player who had ever gone out on that cruddy Junior Woodsmen field, but how would he do if he returned to real, professional football?
I wondered if he had developed a strategy, like Sarah Pauker liked to prepare when there were behavioral issues in her first-grade class.
She would sit with a student and they wrote down ideas for what to do if that kid got frustrated or angry, good words to use to explain emotions, and other smart stuff like that.
I had tried her method in my search for better housing, but the only thing I had come up with for my plan was “get more money,” which wasn’t so helpful.
But maybe now wasn’t the time to start quizzing Everett about his own strategies, not since he was still so pale and sick-looking. As his friend, I would wait until he was feeling better.
He dozed off there on the couch and I removed the bowl of soup before something unfortunate could happen to the nice rug and he might have lost part of his security deposit.
Although, he didn’t seem to be all that concerned about the rent, so maybe he’d earned a lot before, when he was with the real Woodsmen.
I glanced back toward his bedroom and wondered what he had in there.
A big wardrobe of beautiful clothes? I had never really noticed what he wore, except that he looked nice and wasn’t half-naked like the first time we’d met, but my sister had been pointing out how some of the pro-players liked to wear jewelry and super fancy outfits—head-to-toe designer clothes made by people that I had never heard of.
Maybe he also had pictures of his family and of his wife, too.
Ex-wife. But I prevented myself from going to look, and took my former seat again so that I could watch him.
A few times, when I wasn’t seeing enough up-and-down movement in his chest, I went over and investigated more closely.
I was doing that when he opened his eyes.
“Damn! Jesus!”
“Sorry,” I apologized, and moved away. “I couldn’t see you breathing and I was checking.”
“You thought I had died?”
“I just couldn’t see you breathing,” I corrected. If he had really stopped doing that, then I would have done CPR and revived him, so it wouldn’t have counted as dead.
“How long have I been asleep?”
It hadn’t been that long, but enough time had passed for my sister to send me several more angry texts about leaving the game where I was supposed to be making friends with Boyd and resolving all the conflict between us.
I had explained that someone needed to be with Everett and, since he and I were friends, it was me.
“You’re friends? That’s why you practically fainted when he got a little boo-boo?” she’d written back, and I had responded by sending a scientific article about concussions that she’d left on read.
Everett sat up slowly, swinging his long legs to the floor and then stretching gingerly. He huffed out an angry breath as he did. “I forgot how this feels.”
“Have you had many head injuries?”
“A bad one in high school. That was when my grandmother wanted me to quit playing.” He smiled slightly. “She made a big speech at Thanksgiving and said that football wasn’t worth losing my brain cells, but my brother reminded her that I didn’t have too many of those to begin with.”
“That wasn’t very nice. Did he get consequences for that behavior, like writing an apology letter to you or losing out on a privilege?”
“He was twenty-four when it happened, so no, he didn’t. But I also can’t remember him ever getting consequences, at any age.”
“At the least, someone should have reminded him not to hurt your feelings,” I said, and he huffed again.
“I didn’t care what he said. I never have,” he told me. “When I was a kid, we really used to get into it.”
“My sister and I bicker, too.”
“No, not bickering.” He shook his head carefully. “We used to fight. Physical, bloody fistfights. He beat the living crap out of me, weekly if not daily.”
“If you were in high school when he was twenty-four—”
“Jasper is seven years older,” he said. “My sister is in the middle of us, but she’s only thirteen months younger than he is.”
“With a seven-year age gap between you and your brother, you got whaled on and your parents didn’t do anything about it?” Even I, who struggled so much with classroom management and student behavior, could never have let that go.
“It wasn’t that bad. I toughened up enough to play football,” he told me. “You just said that you and your sister fight.”
“We bicker,” I reminded him. “I may have wanted to slap her sometimes and I’ve realized that she probably felt the same way toward me, but we’ve never laid hands on each other.”
“How did she get hurt?”
I shook my head. “I never—”
“No, I mean that you told me that she was injured somehow, and that’s why she limps.”
I nodded. “It was Boyd’s fault.”
“He did something to her?”
“Not directly,” I answered, “but she got hurt because of the whole situation, which was all his fault. She was really in love with him and he pretended to love her, too.” I sighed, remembering how she’d practically floated around the halls at school.
“She was telling everyone that he was it. She thought that they were going to get married and be together forever.”
“That sounds like a little kid talking.”
“She was,” I agreed. “Willow was fifteen and Boyd was a year older. But I agreed that it was so romantic.” I had also been sixteen and apparently, just as dumb.
“My big relationship at that age lasted two days. How about them?”
“A few months. They broke up at Homecoming.” I thought about her pink dress and how beautiful she’d looked, how I’d watched her and her friends do their hair and makeup and I’d thought that they were all like princesses.
Queens. “She was very upset. I mean, not just crying and eating a lot of ice cream, but totally broken up. She tried to get him back but the more she pushed for it, the more he ran away. And his friends were all making fun of her. It felt like the whole school was, even my bandmates. She was so upset that it caused her accident.”
“And you blame him for that.”
“Yes, because it was his fault. And now, I’m supposed to sit in the bleachers and pretend that it’s all fine when obviously, it’s not.
Willow had to drop out of school for the rest of the year, and after that, she refused to go back.
I didn’t blame her because it was hard enough there for me, just being her sister.
But she did graduate. The district has some alternative programs which I can describe for you in detail, if you want that for your custody case. ”
He shook his head. “What happened to her? Did she drive too fast and wreck her car?”
“No.” I swallowed. “She went to the end of a dock and said that she was going to swim out into the lake until she sank. But she dove in and the water was too shallow.”
“Damn. Jesus!” Everett stared at me. “She did that on purpose?”
“She was distraught. I don’t think she was really trying to hurt herself,” I explained.
“She only wanted to get his attention and nothing was working. Boyd acted like she didn’t exist.” I didn’t really want to get into all the other things that my sister had done to try to lure him back (the hundreds of messages, the campouts in his driveway, the pursuit of his friends).
Nothing had worked—it had only pushed him further away.
“He could have talked to her and tried to be decent about it,” I said.
Everett just looked at me, but his expression was exactly the same as when Mrs. Pauker had tried to convince one of her first graders that his heart, the organ in his chest, didn’t look like a red, two-humped cartoon that ended in a point. He hadn’t believed her in the least.
“It was emotional and it’s hard to understand now, so many years later,” I told him.
“She ended up getting very lucky to only have the injuries that she did, but it was still awful. She was in the hospital and then a rehab center, and my mom was furious and Dad was freaking out, and everyone at school was making a huge thing about it. Now you can understand why I think that it’s a bad idea for her to be with Boyd. ”
“Yeah, I get it. Damn,” he said. “I never dealt with anything like that mess. I thought that I had it was bad when Eris sent me the video of her with…I think it was the assistant director.”
“Having sex?”
“No, just the two of them riding bikes together,” he answered, but then shook his head and grimaced at the movement. “Yeah, they were having sex.”
“But that’s good for your custody case. If you’re still pursuing it,” I added.
“I am. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, and then told myself not to be a coward.
Sometimes it was hard to hear things but they needed to be said.
Like when Phil, my cooperating teacher, had started (another) discussion with me about my classroom management when I was supposed to be teaching on my own.
In order to keep the kids in line, he always jumped in—before I could even act, he was already on top of the issue.
It wasn’t like I had failed to notice that, but it had been important for me to hear directly from him that I needed to improve.
I had reminded myself of that as I’d sat in my car that day in the parking lot, not quite ready to drive. It had been worthwhile for me to hear.