The Hard Count(4)
“I think I need to ask my question again, Reagan,” he says, and my chest seizes under the rush of numbness pouring through both it and my veins like morphine. He’s tapped into my nerves by just saying my name. He’s trying to make me angry. He wants me to emote. But I won’t. I won this time, and he’s going to have to swallow that pill. I’m not going to play a war of words that doesn’t matter.
My lips pursed, I raise my brows as I look at him and stand, my bags gathered over my shoulder and my books clutched against my chest. I look away when he doesn’t speak immediately, moving to the opened doorway, ready to disappear into our crowded high school hallway. His voice at my shoulder slows me down.
“Your confession—just now—that you only admitted, for your own pleasure of beating me in some silly, meaningless, classroom debate over a book that’s older than the bricks that built our school…” he slows, and I turn just enough to catch the dimple. “How did that make you feel?”
I part my lips to answer, ready to reject him, to refuse to walk down this path, but I can’t. A small breath escapes me, and my heart beat slows into a steady, obnoxious drum. I close my mouth, because there’s really no need for me to answer. Nico doesn’t wait to hear one. He pushes his hair from his eyes and tugs his bag tight against his shoulder, tucking his long board against his side. His lip ticks up just enough to push the dimple even deeper as he takes three or four steps backward before turning away and becoming lost in the crowd before me, always a step ahead.
I wait for nearly a minute, leaned against the doorway, my mind retracing every word I said, looking for the flaw in his argument, until I realize just how obsessed I’ve become over the last hour, over beating him. I chuckle to myself, glancing at his seat and mine, then shake my head while my teeth saw at my lip.
I answer his question in my head as I begin my trek to the football locker rooms. Beating Nico in a debate felt great. It felt amazing in those small breaths of a moment where I thought I had. But I hadn’t really.
Smug * was right all along.
Even worse, he doesn’t care who knows.
2
No matter how many times I hear the speech, I still get goosebumps.
The first time I went to the game early with my dad, I was maybe five or six. I crawled up on a training table in the back of the film room and pulled my legs in to make myself small so nobody would see me, but after a few of my dad’s players mouthed some choice words, he was quick to point out that his baby girl was in attendance and all foul language would result in hours of running up and down the bleachers on Saturday morning. Mouths were glued shut after that, but I believe they would have been anyway, because the moment Chad Prescott turns into Coach Prescott, people are brought to attention.
It’s always the same, yet somehow, each time, his words are unique, as if being said to virgin ears and being uttered without careful practice and memorization. Maybe it’s the tradition of it all—the tradition he’s at the heart of—that makes those words hit so hard.
My dad has coached the Cornwall Prep Tigers for twenty-two seasons, and he’s brought them to the state playoffs for seventeen. The five missing years don’t get discussed much. Four were early on, when he first took over the program from the beloved Michael Colson, who was my dad’s coach when he played here. Colson’s health was declining, and the transition of the team from him to my father was assumed to have rough spots. However, the other year—last year—is fresh on everyone’s mind. Lips are sealed on the subject, at least when it’s to my father’s face, but the threat lives in everyone’s eyes.
As much as Cornwall is built on tradition, it’s also teeming with superstition. We don’t talk about things that are broken. We eliminate them. We’re not a religious institution. We’re a private college prep riding on the wealth that pays for the best. Cornwall is all about the arts, the academics—a miniature college in many ways. And unlike our neighbor, nearby St. Augustine, our school was founded on one principle, and one principle only—we lead. And when we don’t, we crush whatever is keeping us from being on top. Last year, we lost to a new contender—Great Vista High School, a newly-minted Division I public school with six times our population and a football team that decimated us on the field and left graffiti behind on our walls to rub it in.
The whispers started the moment the clock ticked down to zero and my father led fifty young men back into the locker room with their heads low and their hearts heavy. My father yelled. He threw things. He made boys cry. He blamed my twin brother, Noah, who my dad gave the starting quarterback position to over a senior. Words weren’t spoken, but it’s clear that’s who everyone else blamed as well. My brother played hard, and against any other team, his effort might have been good enough. But Noah also likes to party and cut corners. Those small cracks in his work ethic became gaping chasms during last year’s playoffs, and they’ve born an almost suffocating environment in our home.
That’s what happens when you fail at Cornwall. You become the target. You become the thing that must be crushed. There aren’t excuses, and my dad has one year to make things right. Noah—maybe less. I know they both will. And right now, their mouths are shut and their eyes unable to blink or look away from the man with graying sideburns and a permanent sunburn around his eyes, from where his sunglasses rest during practice; my father’s team believes they’ll right the ship, too.