Chapter 11 #2
It was good for me, although not in the way she meant.
I got to go home to a clean, non-smokey house tonight, and there would be a nice person there waiting for me.
Despite what I’d promised him about never having to see me, we’d actually spent plenty of time together in the brief period since I’d moved in.
We’d eaten two dinners at his big table, one which I had cooked (and he had liked) and one which he’d brought home from a vegan restaurant.
I had been prepared to choke that down but it was delicious.
We’d seen each other in the mornings and he’d shown me around his gym, which was great because I had been officially cut off from the one at my former college.
It had all been wonderful, and as I’d told my sister, I was being very careful about his rugs and other belongings in order to keep it that way.
I’d never be able to pay to replace them.
I tried to convince Jannie (and also the guy still slurping his 7 and 7) that nothing was happening, but she shook her head and told me about a lady who had protested too much in a complicated story about a king’s murder.
That was from Shakespeare and I knew that he was right about an overuse of denials.
Then the 7 and 7 guy ordered another and winked at me, so I saw that I had convinced no one.
But I knew the truth: Everett and I were friends, and thank goodness I had one. I still felt very, very lucky.
I hoped that he felt the same way, and I hoped for luck for him in general.
“You’re going to be the starter,” I’d said this morning before he’d headed to the stadium.
The team would sleep in a hotel tonight and then ride together to the game tomorrow, so it was the last time I would see him until he came out for warm-ups.
“I don’t know,” he had told me. He’d been asked about the issue the day before, when he’d left a meeting with the offense and had run into a reporter. He’d smiled at her and said that the coaches would make the decision and he’d leave it to them, and he’d looked calm and confident.
He hadn’t looked anything like confident this morning when we’d said goodbye.
“I don’t know,” he’d repeated, frowning. “It seems that way but I never heard of something so ass-backwards like this. Waiting until the day before the home opener? That’s lunacy. There’s something wrong.”
“Maybe they want to build suspense,” I had suggested. “Maybe it’s a marketing thing.”
“Fine, keep it from the public, but it’s not right to keep it from us,” he’d said. “Dallas threw up in the bathroom yesterday and he told me it was a stomach bug. It was nerves.”
So now, both Woodsmen quarterbacks had puked at the stadium, which was interesting—no, it wasn’t really.
I felt sorry for Dallas Laforet and I felt angry about the situation the coaches had created.
“I bet it’s because of the mean guy, the one who yelled at you,” I’d told Everett, and that had made him smile.
“You’ll never forgive him. Coach Nour made an enemy in you.”
He had, and I would see that coach tomorrow when I saw Everett—because I was going to the game.
He’d gotten me a seat (just one) that was much closer to the action, since I didn’t need to worry about my sister going up and down the steep stadium stairs.
I worried about her doing other things, though.
Without the ability to withdraw my money from our joint account, how would she get by?
She still got assistance from the state but it wasn’t enough without a job, unless Boyd was taking over all her expenses.
My phone rang and interrupted those worries, but then I also got concerned when I saw the name on my screen. Concerned and excited. “Hello,” I told Everett.
“Hi, Zoey.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to have your phone,” I said. “I thought they took them, like they do in the middle and high schools.”
“I have until ten o’clock, and then we start the digital lockdown. How’s the bar?”
I looked around. “There’s a customer.”
“Just the one? Are you bored?”
“I brought my laptop so I can look for more jobs.” There might have been a teaching position open anywhere, like Virginia, Florida, or Texas. I could be like my mom and move around.
“No bookkeeping tonight?”
“No, thank goodness.” I hesitated. “I didn’t want to bother you, but have you heard…”
“I’m the starter tomorrow against Portland.”
“Oh, good! I’m very, very glad,” I breathed out as relief flooded me. But he hadn’t sounded as happy as I might have expected.
“Yeah, it’s great.”
That didn’t sound happy at all.
“We had a meeting about it, me, the head coach, the QBs coach, and the offensive coordinator, the one you don’t like. They gave me a list of reasons about why I shouldn’t have the job.”
“What?” I sounded breathy again, this time due to my shock.
“Anyone who knows anything will tell you that they approached that completely wrong. You should never tell someone that they suck, even if you really believe it! They’re saying, ‘Well, we don’t have any faith in you and we hate you, but go ahead and try to lead our team to a victory. ’ It doesn’t make any sense at all!”
Everett was silent for a moment. “No one said that they hated me. They also didn’t say that I sucked and that they had no faith in me,” he stated.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“They did say that they had expected to give the job to Dallas, but that I had shown potential to do great shit in our league. No, Coach Roberts didn’t actually swear,” he corrected himself.
“That all sounds really good,” I said. “Very promising. When did they get to the bad part?”
“Right after that, they started in on the same stuff I’d heard before from Coach Nour. They’re worried about my consistency, my fitness, my attitude, my…Jesus. Damn. The only thing they didn’t complain about was my haircut.”
He did have great hair. “I still don’t understand the point of all that,” I said. “They didn’t exactly express that you sucked, not in so many words—”
“Zoey! Don’t say ‘sucked’ again,” he told me.
“I think they were trying to make sure that I take this seriously. That was one of the things that came up when I was getting drafted.” He changed his voice, making it kind of oily and nasal.
“How much can we trust Ford? Is he going to come through, or is he going to hang his teammates out to dry?’”
“You wouldn’t leave anyone out to dry,” I said confidently, and he didn’t answer. “Everett?”
“One of the guys on the Portland team, their best receiver, was my teammate in college,” he said.
“Jarron would say that I screwed him several times by tossing hospital balls while he was in the slot.” He paused the story to explain.
“I threw to him when he was in the middle of the field, and I threw high and slow. That left him open to getting crushed by the defense. He didn’t play his sophomore season due to one of those passes and he hates my ass to this day. ”
“After the game I went to, everyone walked around shaking hands and acting very professional, so I bet he’s over it by now. And you didn’t mean to throw like that,” I said. “You had good intentions.”
“We’re professionals but we’re still people. There are a lot of guys that I hate out there.”
I still wanted to argue and defend him. “But—”
“Also, the implant he had to get to stabilize his ankle makes him not give a crap about my good intentions.” He sighed. “And they weren’t good back then because I didn’t care how hard he got hit. I just wanted him to catch it.”
“But now you do care,” I said. “Did you explain to your coaches that you’ve changed a lot, like how you explained it to me?”
More silence.
“Because you said that you have,” I reminded him. “You said that you were an asshole and you did a lot of stupid pranks and acted childish and attention-seeking when you were in high school.”
“And college,” he added.
“I didn’t know it had continued, but ok. And you said that your first year in the league, you walked around with a swollen head and expectations that people would defer to you and your talent, that within a year, you’d be the starter.”
“Where are you going with this?” Everett asked me.
“You’ve changed,” I said. “You don’t act like that anymore. You’re humble and hardworking. You won’t throw any ICU balls.”
“Hospital.”
“Right, sorry. You won’t throw hospital balls or play the slots, which I think you said you were also doing in college. You could talk to that Portland receiver tomorrow and apologize for it,” I suggested. “And the coaches will watch you this season and say wow.”
“Wow,” he repeated.
“They’ll say, ‘Wow, we were wrong. Wow, he’s so good. Wow, we made the right decision when we made him the starter and we hope that he can forgive us for our doubts and negativity. We shouldn’t have been so mean and we’re really sorry.”
I heard him laugh quietly. “I’ve never heard a coach apologize like that, but there could be a first time.”
“You told me that you were going to show them how much you deserve this,” I said. “You’ve been doing that for the whole preseason, and you’ll go out there tomorrow and show it again.”
“Ok,” he said. “Ok, thanks.”
I was his friend just like he was mine, and I was very glad if I’d helped him.
I also wanted to start another petition, this one to tell the Woodsmen offensive coaches that they needed to change the way they dealt with their players.
Were they kidding with that? There were several books from my teacher training that they could have read to learn about intrinsic motivation and also about empathy.
Had they cared that he’d played last season after the death of his grandmother?
Had they noticed that he wasn’t the same guy now? Geez!