The Baller: A Down and Dirty Football Novel(36)

“That’s understandable. It sounds like you’d already done so much.”

“The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I came home. Marlene had had a mild heart attack, and it seemed to have woken Willow up. She was clean and even had a part-time job at a music store that she loved. We spent a lot of time together, and I hated to go back to school when August rolled around. I felt like I had the girl back I’d fallen in love with, and I was afraid she’d disappear again when I left. Marlene sensed I was considering not going back, so she decided she and Willow were going to fly down for homecoming weekend to see me play. That way I was going to see her again in only three weeks.”

Brody paused again. “I promise. I’m finally getting to the point of dumping all this shit on you.”

“Take your time. We’re in no rush.”

He nodded. “Anyway, two days after I got back to school and we started practicing again, Willow stopped answering her phone. That was never a good sign. I talked to Marlene, and she said Willow hadn’t come home all weekend. We were practicing six hours a day, NFL scouts were starting to come to practices, and all I wanted to do was go back home. But I couldn’t. Eventually, Willow surfaced again, most likely because she had run out of money, and the next three weeks she played on her grandmother’s weaknesses. I hadn’t actually expected her to show up for homecoming, but somehow Marlene got her on the plane. She meant well. She thought getting her away from her dealers and back near me might help. But scoring on a college campus is a heck of a lot easier than some people might think. After homecoming, Willow disappeared, and Marlene and I spent a week looking for her, but the drug addicts I threatened to help me find her were more scared of losing their source than they were of me beating the shit out of them. People with nothing aren’t easy to find.”

I was afraid to ask how she eventually turned up, but since we hadn’t gotten to Colin yet, I knew the worst was yet to come. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I do. I owe you an explanation and an apology. If you’ll have me when I’m done explaining, I hope to give you a long, multiple apology.” Even in the middle of an obviously painful story, Brody was . . . Brody. It made me smile, for the first time since the bleachers this afternoon.

“Well, then get on with the story so we can get to the apology,” I teased. At that moment, we needed a little levity.

“Colin was a freshman at Georgia. We’d met the first day of August practice, and I didn’t like him right away. He had a gigantic chip on his shoulder and constantly talked about women like they were sexual objects. Not to mention he had a short fuse that was easily lit. Guy’s still an *.”

Whereas before Brody sounded like he was close to breaking, speaking of Colin changed his tone. “Anyway, one night, some of the guys in my frat dragged me to a party. It was off campus, and I really wasn’t in the mood to begin with. When we got there, it wasn’t the standard keg-and-plastic-cup college drunk fest. The place was a hellhole, and there were some pretty seedy looking people smoking crap from a glass pipe that smelled like burned plastic. Colin was already there with some of the other freshmen from the team. He was bragging about some girl he was going to get with. She was getting high with his buddy, and he could tell she was down for it—it was shaping up to be a good party. The way he was talking about the woman made me sick. I voiced that if the woman was too high to know what the hell she was doing, it was shaping up to sound like f*cking rape to me.”

“I knew it had to be something bad for you to react that way today.”

“That’s not the half of it.”

It was getting worse by the moment. My original assumption that two men had fought over sharing some cheerleader was starting to feel like wishful thinking.

“I had driven to the party, and some of the guys wanted to stay for a while, so I wound up staying longer than I wanted to. More and more people were showing up, and I didn’t like the looks of most of them. I wanted to get the hell out of there before the cops arrived. Eventually, I told the guys I was going to the bathroom and then leaving. They could come or find their own way back to campus. There were people all over the place, so at first, it didn’t seem strange that two guys were waiting outside of a closed door next to the bathroom. While I was waiting my turn, I asked what they were doing, and one of the guys said their friend was inside with some hot crackhead.”

“No—”

“I don’t know why, but I still didn’t put two and two together. I went to the bathroom, came out and saw the two guys still standing there. Halfway down the stairs, I heard one say to the other, ‘What’s the chick’s name Colin’s got in there?’ The other * responded, ‘I don’t know. Rose, Violet, Meadow? Some sort of flowery shit.’”

My hand went to my chest. “Oh God.”

“I’ll save you the details, but Willow was in no condition to make a decision to be with anyone. She could barely speak. I had to carry her out of there.”

“That’s rape.”

“It almost was, if you ask me. Luckily, it never got that far. Colin claimed they were fooling around, and then he realized how out of it she really was and tried to help her up. With his pants f*cking open, he was trying to help her.”

“Did anything ever happen to him?”