Beast(71)

And two: I joined the day after I overheard my mom talking to my grandma in hushed tones about how leaving her big meeting in Pittsburgh set her career back and she won’t be able to ask for a raise for a while and she doesn’t know what to do when college comes around. Then she asked Grandma for some money and I felt like garbage. So I went straight to Coach Fowler’s office the next morning and he jumped up and hugged me.

Now I have somewhere distracting to be every day after school, and our weight room more than lives up to its name. It is a room and it is full of weights. Machines that you sit on and push and pull things that get progressively heavier the more reps you knock out. In addition to housing beat-to-hell pieces of equipment with chipped white paint and a faded banner that reads STATE CHAMPS 1994, the entire room smells like endless crusty-sock miasma. After a while I don’t notice the stench but I’m not sure yet if that’s a good or a bad thing.

My leg’s still frozen in a cast, so I’m doing upper body. Three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesdays and Thursdays I’m in Coach Fowler’s office watching film and getting tutored with the playbook. He gave me a list of names of guys who went to the NFL from the Ivies. He made it abundantly clear there are lots of great colleges out there, but I have tunnel vision and he honored it. I got nervous when he couldn’t promise I wouldn’t get a concussion, but he said he stresses no helmet-to-helmet contact and that as long as I lead with my shoulders and chest, I should be fine. Besides, my brains aren’t my only asset anymore. I’m very much looking forward to hitting someone. Like, a lot.

Offensive line. That’s pretty much what I figured, and that’s where I’ll be for next year’s season. Maybe if I get good feet, I’ll move on to defense, and that’s where I’ll really get to murder people, but start slow. So all right, that’s what I’m doing. Dr. Jensen reinforced the bottom of my cast with a flat, textured grip, so I can start to put tiny amounts of weight on my leg. I’m supposed to still use crutches and go easy on it, but it doesn’t stop me from adding another twenty-five pounds on either side of the three-way row. Everything situated, I lean into the incline.

At first I hated the idea of doing weights. I mean, seriously, why do I need to build mass? I come pretty close to having my own gravitational pull. But it’s really frigging hard. I’m always out of breath. Turns out, I am in terrible shape from sitting on my ass and doing nothing for years.

Coach Fowler says if anything, football is going to help me be the right weight, so okay, I can deal with that. If I have to be the Beast, I might as well do it correctly. It makes me focus on getting through these sessions. I do it for me, I do it for my mom, and I do it for my dad. Maybe he can look down and help us win some games or something. Maybe after I make a tackle, he’ll materialize in the stands and poke the guy next to him and say “That’s my boy” right before he vaporizes back into nothingness.

I’m done with a set of ten and I take a break. There’s a bunch of noise outside and my stomach tightens. People approaching. When there’s other guys in here, I can feel them watching me bench out of the corner of their eye. It’s weird. One senior said he would kill to be as big as me.

That was weird but I nodded and said, “Thanks.”

The din gets closer and the baseball team comes in as one. They’re getting ready for spring. I grab my towel and move because I don’t want to see JP for anything. Been working overtime to avoid him for weeks, but I’m not fast enough. “Hey, man,” JP says, coming over. “What are you doing here?”

“I joined the football team.”

“But I thought you hated football?” he asks.

“I have a latent predilection for violence.”

I move over to the chest press and add more to the puny amount already stacked. Two hundred and fifty pounds. I give JP a look. There’s no way in hell he can do that if he tries. I sit down and do two sets of five. “I have more reps to do. Later.”

“So…”

What the hell, he’s not leaving?

“How’s things?” he asks.

As if he cares.

“Got any new games?”

Of course he would ask that; he has no concept of living on a budget. Yeah, no, dipshit. No new games.

JP leans in way too close for comfort. “Can I talk to you?”

“What do you want, JP?” I say, low as I can. “You want to use me? Feed me a load of shit so I do something dumb for you because some poor kid didn’t pay you back? Well, guess what: those days are over. Whatever you have to say is pretty f*cking pointless these days.”

“Whatever, dude.” JP slips away and I’m alone again.

Fine. He’s got nothing. He wants to talk? That’s nice, since he’s nothing but talk. There’s no way he has anything relevant to say, it’s him being full of shit as per usual. I keep my head down and steady my hands on the machine. I start to go through the motions and count one…two…three…four…, but the background noise deep inside my head wonders what he wants.





THIRTY-ONE


The holidays at my house are always lonely.

In a lot of ways, I blame said house. Mom didn’t want to leave it when Dad died, and twelve years later the mortgage is still sucking her dry. It’s more important to her to keep the house she picked out with Dad when he was an upstart young engineer than it is to move somewhere else more affordable. So we stay permanently house poor. Some days it seems like a tent on the side of a highway would be most prudent. We don’t travel. We don’t get on planes and visit relatives back East often, if ever. It’s me and Mom and the ghost of a dead man that only talks to her.