9. Friday Night Lights #2
For the next week, Dub actively avoided Taylor—he wouldn’t even look at her—and he saw Hakeem only at practice, where Hakeem iced him out.
Coach Bosworth, who cared solely about beating Northmeadow, devised a new play called “Around the Apple Tree,” which they ran five million times and successfully executed three.
After practice, Coach called both Dub and Hakeem into his office, where he said the predictable things: I don’t care what the two of you are dealing with off the field, but you need to leave it behind for the sake of the team.
Am I understood? They both grudgingly nodded, but Hakeem wouldn’t look at Dub and they did not shake hands.
That night at dinner, Hakeem and Taylor sat together in the Booth and Dub ate with his offensive line, all of them underclassmen.
Taylor led Hakeem out of the dining hall by the necktie and there were cheers and whistles and Dub figured they were probably headed to God’s Basement, where she would give him a blow job.
He cleared his tray. This was the way things had to be. For now and maybe forever.
Before the Northmeadow game, Dub let Teague Baldwin, the senior running back, lead the chants because he just wasn’t feeling it.
As the rest of the team was heading out to the field to stretch, Dub noticed Hakeem sitting on the bench with his head in his hands.
He waited until everyone had left, then said, “Man, just punch me so we can get this over with.”
Hakeem leaped to his feet and socked Dub in the jaw, hard.
Dub, who had grown up with three brothers, instinctively hit back, and within seconds the two of them were brawling.
At one point Dub got Hakeem in a headlock and thought, What am I even doing?
So he loosened his grip, and Hakeem spun out and threw Dub up against the side of the lockers, trying to choke him.
Now, here they are: Hakeem has Dub up against the lockers.
Dub closes his eyes and remembers being in this same position as an eighth grader back in Durango.
A kid named Calhoun Royal, who had already gone through puberty and a growth spurt, was bullying Dub, saying he was being rewarded by the coach only because of who his older brothers were.
But your brothers aren’t here to help you now, are they, little Webber?
He then called Dub a pole choker, threw him to the floor, and kicked him so hard he broke two of Dub’s ribs.
Dub told the nurse in the ER that he’d taken a hit on the field, which was the same thing he’d told his mother.
Karen Austin, however, was a perceptive woman: A brochure for Tiffin Academy arrived in the mail the following week.
She’d already talked to Coach Bosworth, already discussed financial aid.
Massachusetts? Dub said.
You’ll get a top-notch education, Karen said. You’ll get… away.
His mother knew there was a lot Dub wanted to escape in Durango: the looming shadow of his two older brothers, Brent and Case; the encroaching shadow of his younger brother, Dallas, who was already playing better ball than Dub; Dub’s father, who’d had an affair with one of the rafting guides at his outdoor expedition company, gotten her pregnant, and moved with her to Telluride; but most of all, Dub wanted to leave behind the bullies like Calhoun and his buddies who somehow sensed Dub’s weakness and preyed on it.
Now, in a reedy voice Dub doesn’t even recognize as his own, he says to Hakeem, “Kill me.” Dying, Dub can handle. But he can’t handle Hakeem hating him.
Hakeem lets Dub go and Dub coughs, bends in half, and spits on the ground. When he stands up, his vision is blurry and his jaw throbs. Hakeem has his hands on his hips and his eyes are blazing. “Man, she’s my girlfriend, not yours.”
They stare at each other for a long moment; then they hear the music out on the field and Dub knows Coach is about to come looking for them.
Dub says, “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll back off. I love you, man.” He isn’t the kind of person who would say Bros before hos, but he considers doing it now, just to make things okay.
“I know you do, man, which is why I just don’t fucking get it.” Hakeem shakes his head, his hands, his shoulders. “I know Cinnamon is gone and Taylor’s a nurturer and whatever the fuck, but you have to stay away from her.”
“I will.” Dub raises a fist. He just wants this whole thing over.
Hakeem stares at Dub a second, then grudgingly bumps knuckles. “Let’s kick Northmeadow’s ass.”
“Bet,” Dub says, and they run out onto the field.
Taylor Wilson is in the bleachers. She’s wearing Hakeem’s practice jersey and has his number, 62, painted on her face. But what the past week has brought into focus is that Taylor doesn’t love Hakeem like she used to, and maybe not at all.
She discovered a new word on TikTok: limerence. It means “an intense desire for someone, marked by intrusive thoughts and a desire for a relationship and reciprocation.”
This perfectly describes how Taylor feels about Dub.
It’s not her fault that Cinnamon Peters’s death turned Dub into a tragic romantic hero.
Underneath Dub’s tough exterior, Taylor senses a swollen river of grief that draws her to him.
Dub is Hakeem’s best friend, which makes him completely off-limits. This only makes Taylor want him more.
The Tiffin team bursts onto the field to “Lose Yourself” by Eminem, and Taylor cheers along with the rest of the crowd.
Hakeem seeks her out—maybe to make sure she’s looking at him and not at Dub.
She waves, blows him a kiss. She’ll def get the lead in the musical this year, she thinks. Her acting is that good.
Chef Haz has Friday night off. He considers going to the game, though he really only enjoys sports when he has money riding on the outcome.
He wonders if old Jameson wants to wager fifty bucks—Jameson will take Tiffin like the loyal dumbass he is—but before Haz can reach out to him, a text comes into his phone.
It’s Andrew Eastman: Can u talk?
This is interesting, Haz thinks. And probably not good.
Sure, Haz says. I’m in the Back Lot having a butt.
A couple minutes later, Haz sees the glow of a single phone moving through the trees above the lot, and then East comes loping down the stairs. In the distance, Haz hears cheers: The game is underway.
“Hey,” Haz says. He offers one of his Camels to East. Corrupting a minor, Haz thinks—except East isn’t a minor, he’s nineteen, and he could smoke crack and no one here would blink an eye.
East waves away the pack and sucks on his vape, also forbidden. Then he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a thick stack of—Haz blinks—hundred-dollar bills.
“I have a proposition for you,” East says.
A speakeasy. In an old bomb shelter deep beneath the dorms, connected to both Classic North and Classic South by brick tunnels.
Did Haz know this place existed? No, but he’s not surprised: This campus is like something out of a book, so why wouldn’t there be a secret tunnel that connects the boys’ dorm to the girls’ with a bomb shelter in between that is fitted with both electricity and running water?
East seems to think it was built during the Cold War.
(Has he been paying attention in history class?) He wants it bougie, he says, with velvet and leather, brass and mahogany, soft lighting, good music, craft cocktails.
“Cocktails?” Haz says. For the last few moments, he’s been able to pretend this might all be on the up-and-up, a new hangout space, a place for the kids to chill that would be an alternative to the loud, bright chaos of the Teddy. “With alcohol, you mean?”
East laughs. “Yes. Cocktails with alcohol.” He flips through the bills in his hand like an old-time gangster. There’s twenty-five hundred, maybe three grand there, Haz would guess.
“No,” Haz says. “I am not going to help you set up a speakeasy. I am not going to buy you booze.”
“You are, though,” East says in that goddamned cocksure way he has.
“You’re going to tell me it’s morally wrong; I’m going to tell you the kids drink anyway.
Last year in the dorm checks, they found forty-one water bottles filled with Tito’s and something like a hundred nips of Fireball.
Everyone drinks, Chef, even the third-formers.
This would be elevating the experience; we’d be showing the kids how proper drinking is done.
I’m going to keep our clientele exclusive.
This isn’t a keg party. It’s two hours on a Saturday night, eight or ten kids who will sneak down to enjoy a vodka martini or a Dirty Shirley, listen to music, and conversate.
” He hits his vape again. “Think of it as a representation of the seventeenth-century Parisian salons. Or the Algonquin Round Table. Fucking intellectual.”
“Ha!” Haz says. “You’re an entrepreneurial chip off the old block, that’s for sure.
” What Haz thinks but does not say is: I’ve already been banished out here to East Japip for breaking the rules once.
I’m not idiotic enough to do it again. “But I’m sorry to say, I’m not helping you with this little endeavor. ”
“I’ll pay you twenty-five thousand dollars, cash, to provide alcohol, juices, mixers, garnishes, glassware, and specialty swizzle sticks and cocktail napkins. I’ll give you twenty-five percent on top of everything you order.”
Haz flicks his cigarette butt to the ground and crushes it under the heel of his clog.
Clientele, he thinks. Dirty Shirleys. Glassware, swizzle sticks.
Despite the chill in the air, Haz starts sweating under his chef’s jacket as he fights off his worst impulses.
But, as Haz has learned again and again, his worst impulses will win.
“Thirty-five grand,” Haz says. “And thirty-five percent.”
“Thirty grand,” East says. “And thirty percent.”