KNIGHT
Chapter Six
The twins are impressed with my parents’ house.
It turns out they were raised by their grandmother because they’re orphans.
They’re also now my best friends. It wasn’t the air fryer or the Wii that brought them randomly to my room one night.
It was the Cardistry book. Since I’d never heard of it, and they seemed really enthusiastic about it, I learned it with them.
Building a house of cards is laborious work, but it’s the opposite of running drills and smashing helmets in scrimmages. It’s slow, thoughtful, meditative, and extremely satisfying. My Instagram grid has become a mix of my practice reels and our card art.
It’s amazing how chill and deep a conversation can be when no one’s looking at each other and focused on something else.
Derek is the quieter, more thoughtful of the two, but he’s got the same goofball sense of humor as his brother Dillon.
They’re sweet. Pure. They’re the kinds of people who’d be friends with me no matter what.
Who my dad is or who I have the potential to be is only a cool bonus for them.
They’re the guys who’d start a meal train for you if you were ever housebound for any amount of time.
They’re the ones who’d come by every day just to check in.
They’re gonna spend the short summer here with me because they’ve never been to Michigan, we have room, and my family can easily afford to feed the two tanks.
When we get back to school, we have a house rented and ready to go.
Deandre and Rod are going to live there, too.
The fact is, with the amount of money we got paid to play for USM, we could all afford our own places, but we’re barely nineteen, and the twins weren’t gonna live separately anyway.
I don’t want to be by myself yet, Rod and I are used to each other, and Deandre’s just a good guy to have around, so it doesn’t feel like we’re sacrificing anything.
The house we got is big enough for the five of us, close to campus and a park where it’ll be cool to run routes with D.
After a year spent learning the team, I’ll be starting quarterback this fall.
During recruitment, I was led to expect it, but it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to blow if you don’t perform.
But my O-line, the graduating running back, and me—we came together like we’d been raised to be on this team.
I’m tense about being the captain and a starter but knowing we work well together and respect each other is a huge relief.
The first order of business when I got home was a sit down with my dad where he grilled me about all the players.
We’ve talked all year, but face to face at home, I’m able to give him all the smaller details I wasn’t able to on the phone.
He wants to know everything about my own game, too—about how they’re developing me as a quarterback.
While I had a coach and trainers in high school, my dad has always had the last word in what I do as a player.
I trust him more than anyone to know what I need because he’s been exactly where I am, even if I sometimes get the feeling he’d rather I’d be doing anything else.
Whether he’s proud of what I’ve accomplished or not, I can’t really tell.
“I know what freshman year can be like,” he says when we take our talk to the back porch.
He’s cooking steaks tonight, so he walks to the grill, lifts the lid, and proceeds to scrub it with a wire brush.
“Good for you for staying out of trouble. I saw your grades, too. Strong work. You’re still thinking marketing? ”
“Thanks. Yeah. It gives me the time to—”
“Because it’s not too late to do something more serious,” he cuts in. “Pre med. Law. You could work with athletes in either of those fields.”
I fight the urge to crack my neck because I know he hates the sound of it. “If I want to go to law school later a marketing degree is good enough.”
He sighs. “You’re so fucking smart, though, Knight.”
“Dad…”
He changes the subject. “You’re having some fun, though, right?”
“I’ve made good friends. Yeah.” I’m getting defensive but I can’t help it. Whenever he brings up my intelligence, it makes me wonder whether he can see something in me I can’t—like I might not have what it takes to be the kind of player he and his brothers were.
“Parties?” he asks.
“A few.”
“Girls?”
I force a grin since he’s turned my way. “Yeah, sure. They’re everywhere.”
“I met your mother my freshman year of college.”
“There’s no one special,” I say, but in my head I get several flashes of Sullivan Scott like a rapidly moving slide show through my brain.
He and I haven’t said a word to each other since that night before the first semester started.
I might have. I would have said something to him, but he either forgot that night happened, or he decided to pretend it didn’t.
Best I can say is we made eye contact a few times in passing.
We didn’t have any classes together, and I never did see him much at the dorm.
I kept my distance because it felt like he wanted me to, and because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.
I was worried he’d say something that would fuck me up—hurt me in some unpredictable way that I wasn’t ready for.
The other thing that scared me was this idea that if I let myself be closer to him, and he allowed it, that I would get too lost. My football career and everything that’s supposed to go along with it would swirl down the drain, and I wouldn’t care anymore.
Football won’t always be my priority. The sport doesn’t work like that. But for now, it has to be.
One of the great ironies of my life is that I have a family who would totally accept me no matter what, but I fell head over heels in love with the idea of a future that won’t.
“It’s weird,” I say to my dad to draw him slightly off the topic of my love life. “Half the guys I play with have a high school girlfriend they’re managing to keep things going with. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Is that a generational thing? Used to be you broke up before you went to college.”
“A lot of them came to the same college. They act like they’re already married. The parties I’ve been to aren’t as wild as you’d think. There’s a lot of playing video games and girls walking around making sure we’ve got enough snacks.”
My dad looks at me like I’m not going to the right parties.
I shrug.
“That’s weird,” he says.
“I mean, it’s been good bonding with the team.”
“I suppose.”
My mom walks onto the patio. My sister Kat is with her.
Kat’s only home for a week, and she and my mom are like best friends.
They look a lot alike, too. Both tall and willowy with dark hair and oval faces.
My mom doesn’t age much thanks to hair dye, Botox, and Pilates, but she looks great.
Not plastic or anything. My sister Kat is a ballerina who’s four years older than me.
She dances for a company in New York—at the top of her game.
I come from a family of people who dream big and get exactly what they work for.
My mom was a successful, working model when she met my dad.
Like he mentioned, they met when he was a freshman.
He was at a bar he probably shouldn’t have been at, and she was in town visiting friends at the same college.
They dated long distance off and on until my dad entered the draft early and went to play for Green Bay.
She followed him, became a football wife for a while, and then got bored and decided to get her real estate license.
I think she makes almost as much money as he does now.
Kat grins at me, takes me by the arm and pulls me onto one of the outdoor sofas to sit. “You look huge.”
I pat my flat belly. “I have a ways to go before I catch up with the twins.”
“Oh my god, they’re so cute. Those identical baby faces. Where’d they go?”
“I think they’re sleeping.”
“I’m glad you brought them with you,” my dad pipes up as he dumps a bag of charcoal into the grill. “We’re gonna turn the three of you into a machine.”
I appreciate that he says that. It’s better than him shoving me into med school. In that respect, I’m also really glad the twins are here.
“I have a few new houses for you,” my mom says.
The bouncing conversational ball is a feature of home I’ve missed.
“Yeah?”
“All staged. If you’ll just give them a little dust and diffuse for me, I won’t ask any questions.”
I laugh. “No one’s buying?”
“They’re all overpriced out on the lake. Honestly, I think one of them is haunted.”
“But you staged it?” Kat asks.
“Well, I had to do something with it to make it look like it was at least possible to live there.”
It used to be that this quirky hobby of mine was a secret.
When my mom discovered I’d been sneaking into the houses she had on the market at night using her realtor codes, she was pissed.
It led to a conversation I’ll never not be able to stop cringing when I think about it.
I remember her calling me her “soft boy”.
I was sixteen at the time, 6’2, and a starter on the varsity football team.
To have my mom call me soft because she found out I was playing house in strange homes rather than sneaking out to party with my friends wasn’t exactly confidence-building for me.
In her defense, I’d been crying at the time, a blubbering mess trying to explain why I liked imagining myself in these other places with these other lives. I’d done a poor job of it because I couldn’t really wrap my head around it back then, but I understand it better now.
I’ve known for a long time what my life was going to look like. I’ve also known I have choices. No one ever forced me into playing football. I was a daddy’s boy, in awe of my father, his success and his huge life. I wanted what he had. I still do. It’s a goal and a passion.