Chapter 7 #3
That wasn’t the important part of the story.
“Kayden fell and tore his meniscus. He needs surgery and he’ll be out for the season, but I think he’s going to announce tomorrow that he’s done for good.
He’ll be glad to do it. All he did at away games was talk about missing his wife and kids.
They’re very…loving.” He seemed slightly puzzled by that.
“So Dallas Laforet will be the starter?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Everett stopped walking and looked down at me. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s mine for the taking.”
Oh, geez. His eyes were literally sparkling in anticipation. No, not literally, but I could see all the excitement there. I hoped he would get it—I really, really hoped he would get it.
“We should go out and celebrate,” he said.
I glanced behind myself, because this had happened before, in high school, when I had mistakenly believed that an invitation to our senior prom was real.
When I’d said that I was sorry but I couldn’t go with him (although I was really grateful that he’d thought of me), it had turned out that I’d misinterpreted the situation.
“I wasn’t actually asking you out, Zoey,” he’d written back.
“It was a joke. Don’t flatter yourself.” It had been a social media trend that people were trying, a prank.
Anyway, I couldn’t have gone even if it had been real.
It would have killed my sister to see me attend when she never would, and I wouldn’t have done that to her.
“Zoey.” Everett waved his hand in front of my face, calling me back to the present. “Did you hear me?”
It seemed like right now, though, the invitation was real. “We would celebrate the opportunity, not that Matthews got hurt,” I said, and he nodded. "Sure, I’d like to go out.” I started to smile again but then reminded myself: friends. “Sure, I’d like to go in a platonic way.”
“Uh, great. First come inside. I heard a secret about the stadium that you wouldn’t have seen on your tour with the first graders.”
I nodded happily and we went together.
Willow was flabbergasted when she saw me later. “How did you get so filthy?” she asked incredulously. “Were you mining?”
“No, there are no mines at Woodsmen Stadium. There are hidden tunnels due to all the renovations and we were exploring,” I started to explain, but she really didn’t care.
“Get in the shower, now!” she ordered. When I had texted that Everett and I were going out tonight, my sister had Boyd drop her back at our apartment so that she could help me again.
Once I was clean, she started yanking a comb through my hair.
“Crawling around in the dirt before a date…” she muttered.
“Not a date. We’re friends,” I reminded her, and she told me to stop talking so that she could focus on my hair, which needed it.
I watched as she worked because I thought (for the first time) that it might have been a good thing for me to learn how to do this myself.
And I didn’t make any remarks about how long it took to get it dry, like she did about our laundry.
Willow had calmed down a lot by the time she started on my makeup. “Where are you going tonight?” she asked me.
I shrugged, which made her flick my shoulder and tell me not to move any muscles at all. That included my face, so I sat in the chair in silence.
“It better be somewhere nice.” She studied me. “You’re done. It’s good.”
It was lucky that she had finished because Everett texted to say that he was in front of our building. I said thank you to my sister and hurried to the door.
“Zoey!”
I paused. “What?”
“Just…be careful, ok? Be careful,” she repeated.
“We’re friends,” I reminded her, and tried not to do that weird running thing again as I rushed to meet him.
We didn’t go anywhere “nice,” but I didn’t care. I was very happy to sit and talk for a while, because there was a lot to go over. First, football: “Tell me what’s going to happen with the Woodsmen,” I said. “Explain in detail.”
“No, first you tell me about your job. Where will you be next year?”
“I’ll be back at Silver Leaf Elementary, where I student-taught fourth grade. But I didn’t exactly get the job that I was after,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll be working at the school, but in the cafeteria,” I explained. “I’ll serve food to the kids.”
“Like one of the lunch ladies? In a hair net?”
“I won’t actually cook anything.” I hesitated. “But yes, I have to wear a hair net.”
He seemed very confused, but at least he wasn’t laughing like my sister had. “Why won’t you be teaching?”
“There weren’t a lot of people leaving for other jobs or retiring at the end of the last school year.
I looked around the area, as far as I could conceivably drive myself every day.
” There had been a position three hours away, but I didn’t think my car could handle it.
“I applied for everything that made sense but I don’t have any experience and my last cooperating teacher didn’t do me any favors.
He didn’t think…anyway, at least I have something.
” It was part-time and not what I’d wanted, but it was something.
Everett looked less than convinced. “Why can’t you go somewhere else? Michigan’s a big place and you got your BA in Elementary Education, so you should use it.”
“What did you get your degree in?” I asked.
“Sociology.”
“And now you’re a quarterback rather than a sociologist. Is that what would you have done?”
He shrugged. “The plan was always football. I didn’t ever do well at anything else and I don’t have other options.”
“You do,” I disagreed. “I bet you’d be great at sales, for example.” I would have bought anything he was selling.
“Luckily, I won’t need to try that, since I’ll be the Woodsmen QB. I had a great offseason and I talked to the quarterbacks coach today. He’s aware of what went on when I played for the Juniors and he said he was impressed. I can do it again,” he promised me.
The waiter brought our plates then, my BLT and his quinoa with grilled chicken and extra vegetables. He had explained that he was eating carefully.
“I’ll find a teaching job,” I said. “Sometimes people leave mid-year, but I can wait until next fall, too.” It seemed very, very far away from this summer, though. ‘I was lucky to get something. Lucky.”
“Right. It just sounded like you put in a lot of work and effort if you’re not going to teach—”
“Mostly, people don’t get what they want,” I interrupted. “That could even turn out for the best, even if it’s not what you were expecting.” I really hoped that he would end up as the Woodsmen starting quarterback, though, and that he wouldn’t have to try to come to terms with something less.
He interpreted my words differently. “Are you talking about my custody suit? I know you didn’t want me to win that.”
“I was concerned, but I think I told you that you were the person who knew best about it, not me. What’s happening?”
“Not much right now. Eris filed a ton of shit and we have to work through it all. Her problem is going to be money.”
“Isn’t that everyone’s problem?”
“She’s not going to be able to keep paying her lawyer,” Everett explained.
“Her career has stalled. She asked for emergency support from me.” He stopped.
“I don’t really want to get into this.” He looked both frustrated and angry when before, we’d been having such a nice time.
Well, I definitely had, and one of the things that my sister had recommended was to make sure that he also enjoyed our dinner so that when he thought about me, I would be a happy memory.
“You’ll be the Fun Girl in his mind. Everyone wants to be with the Fun Girl,” she had explained while fixing my lashes.
Fun. I needed to be fun. What did that look like?
“They’re running new sewer lines to my apartment building,” I commented. “For a few days, we won’t be able to use…never mind.”
At least he didn’t look angry anymore. Just perplexed.
I tried again, this time aiming to be a Normal Girl. “Did you see your family while you were home?”
“My parents and I went out to dinner.”
“Just once? You were there for months.”
“We’re not a very close-knit group,” he said.
“I used to see my grandmother a lot, but she passed away last July, a year ago.” He had been gathering a bite of small grains on his fork but he put it down.
“I spent a lot of time with her when I was a kid, too. My parents were busy running their company. Both my brother and my sister work there now.”
“So that’s something else you could do,” I pointed out. “You could help run the family business.”
He didn’t respond to that. “My sister was into school, always really academic, and my brother also played football. My parents were either at the office or with them or traveling. They liked to vacation. So I was with my grandma, which I loved.”
“I didn’t know my grandparents,” I said. “My dad’s parents died before I was born, and my mom never talked to hers. She always said that they were assholes.” I’d wondered if that was true, because my mom wasn’t the easiest to get along with. I imagined her in Florida, arguing with people.
“Zoey?”
I looked up.
“Why are you frowning like that? Is your sandwich bad?”
I was not being a Fun Girl at all. ‘It’s delicious,” I said, and took a big bite to prove it.
“What’s happening with your mom? Is she back yet?” he asked, but I needed to turn the course of this date—a friend-date, between friends.
“It’s ok. Tell me all about Arizona,” I requested. “Everything you did.”
“I was busy,” Everett stated, and he explained a lot of it. There was still nothing fun in our conversation, though. It seemed that, almost from morning until night, he had prepared for the Woodsmen tryout. Conditioning, lifting, nutrition, film study, and everything else.
“That wasn’t much of a vacation,” I commented.
“It wasn’t supposed to be. Did you take one?”
“Me? No!” I laughed because it seemed so silly. How could I have done that? “I’m not a traveler. Well, we went to Alabama once. It was a family vacation to the beach there, which is beautiful. Where’s the farthest you’ve ever gone?”
He had been to a lot of places. He told me about Europe and South America. “I’m the worst Spanish-speaker ever. In the world,” he said, and he finally smiled again. “I’m good with ‘sí” and ‘gracias,’ and that’s it.”
“I took Spanish all through high school and last semester, there was a native speaker in the fourth grade. I tried to talk to her and I humiliated myself with how bad I was,” I said.
“We should learn together. We could do it.”
“Yes!” I got extremely excited, because that was one thing I was good at. I had gotten good grades in high school, good enough that I could have gone to college in Ann Arbor. I’d even gotten a scholarship but of course I couldn’t have left. I was needed here.
He held out his knuckles and I bumped them, but then the relaxed expression on his face tightened.
“Jesus. Damn,” he muttered. “Why the hell would those guys have come here?”
I followed his gaze over to where a giant group had just entered the restaurant. It wasn’t that there were a lot of them: they were, themselves, giants. “Who are those guys?” I asked.
“Most of the Woodsmen offensive line,” he said. “We don’t really get along.”
“Aren’t they supposed to protect you?” I asked.
Was it smart to be adversarial with them?
Because he was still frowning in their direction and not making any effort to go say hello.
And now they were staring back, also unsmiling.
“I’m not an expert on friends, but I did learn a few things from the first and fourth graders,” I mentioned.
“You have to be nice, so you should stop scowling. Sharing and generosity also make people like you. Maybe you could buy them dinner.”
“Do you have any idea how much those guys can eat?”
“I imagine that they’re like pandas. Those animals can eat fifty pounds of bamboo every day and poop just as much.
” I’d also learned that from a fourth grader in the form of a book report.
“It would be very expensive, but maybe it’s worth it?
” I shrugged, because I wasn’t clear on his financial situation.
“You’re right.”
“I am?”
He nodded. “You’re right about buying them dinner. But you’re wrong about making friends. You do that well.” He held out his knuckles again and this time, he smiled, too.