He’d tossed and turned all night, despite the hard weight training and cardio the previous day. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sleep or wasn’t worn out enough to. It was that damn new girl.
Dragging his butt out of bed this morning was hard. Elijah showered and dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved black t-shirt that he topped with a tee that Alex bought him supporting the Second Amendment. He couldn’t wait until he was old enough to buy a gun. The legal age was twenty-one. It changed a few decades ago, which had been something that had irritated their father. He wasn’t much of a gun owner, only had a shotgun, but he just didn’t like the government interfering with people’s rights. Wearing shirts like this was against the school’s rules, but not for him. They’d let it slide. He could probably walk in bare ass naked, and nobody would say anything.
“I’ll be working some longer hours for the next few weeks,” Alex announced over scrambled eggs and sausage that he’d prepared for them this morning.
“That sucks,” Elijah commented, still out of sorts from the new girl cussing him out like some dude with a sailor’s mouth. Some of the guys on the team didn’t even talk like that. Heck, he hardly ever talked like that. And it was all because she was wrong. And also, because he’d pointed out her accent, something he was pretty sure she was trying to cover up. Why? And what the hell was a fuckstick?
“No, it’s good. It’ll help us bankroll some dough.”
“I still think I could get a part-time job, man,” he complained for the thousandth time.
“No, the school covers all your expenses. Don’t worry about working. I just want you concentrating on your game and workouts.”
He tuned out a bit as his brother droned the same spiel he’d heard so many times.
“Elijah!” Alex said forcefully, drawing his attention back. “Hear me? No girls.”
“I know. What the heck? I already know that.”
His brother’s eyes searched his as if trying to figure something out. Elijah looked down at his food and began inhaling it. He didn’t need Alex worrying about whether or not he was staying focused. Besides, other than that damn new girl, he was.
“Homecoming dance is coming up,” he mentioned, although school dances weren’t really his scene. Since he was now the starting quarterback, it would be expected of him to show- he was supposed to represent the school in the highest degree, to the highest standards and set an example. He went to homecoming in the ninth grade with a girl. The whole night had been miserable. He’d spent it hanging out with Jeremy instead while their dates were in the bathroom piling on more makeup and then ogling the senior boys. He hadn’t been to a school dance since. Now, he was the one being ogled. It was not a spectator sport he enjoyed.
“Homecoming,” Alex repeated and sat quietly while he thought about it. “Well, I’m sure your coaches and the school boosters will want you to go.”
“Yeah, but what if I didn’t? I’m not really into dancing and crowds and all that.”
Alex nodded and took a bite of eggs. “Doesn’t matter. You probably should put on a show. It’s expected. They’ll probably crown you homecoming king. And prom king and whatever other bullshit traditions they’ve got. I took Wendy Levy to the prom.” His eyebrows jerked up twice. “Quite the night.” Then, at Elijah’s frown, cleared his voice and said, “But don’t you do that. Just the dance and home.”
“Damn, guess I should’ve taken that free ride to St. Ignatius up north,” he joked, making his brother laugh. “Probably wouldn’t have to worry about dances.”
“Nuns and church in the middle of the school day? No thanks. I wouldn’t recommend it having done it in middle school.”
Elijah laughed. “I’m sure. How many rulers did those old biddies break on your knuckles?”
“Made ‘em tougher,” Alex joshed and flexed his fingers into a fist. “I hit ‘em with a hammer at work, I just laugh.”
“Yeah, right,” Elijah mocked. “Probably cry like a little girl. Anyway, I really don’t want to go to some dumb school dance, though.”
“When is it?”
“I think Jackson High School’s is the third week of October, so ours is probably the second.”
“Just a few weeks from now,” his brother confirmed, getting a nod from Elijah. “You’d better ask a girl to go pretty soon. I’m sure they’re all just waiting to accept their boyfriends’ invites until they see who you’re asking, QB.”
He rolled his eyes and groaned. “Greaaat.”
“Privilege has its perks, my brother,” Alex teased, knowing he didn’t want to go to the dance.
“It’s kind of embarrassing most of the time,” he admitted.
“Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. Just stay humble,” Alex advised. “And if all goes as I think it will- and how your coaches think it will- you’ll make QB at OSU in your sophomore year. Then you’ll really have to be careful. You think the jersey chasers are bad now? Just wait, little brother. You’ll have to watch out for who’s fake and who’s real. The girls in your high school just want to date you ‘cuz you’re the star of the school. The girls in college will be looking to lock that shit down. Make you their baby daddy and shit. I mean it. They’ll do it any way they can, including getting knocked up by you. It’s not often that a high school quarterback is talked about on ESPN. Just watch out for fake people. A lot of clingers out there, Elijah.”
“Yeah,” he responded after his brother finished his what felt like a ten-minute soliloquy. It also made him think about that new girl. She wasn’t fake like the other ponytails. She was a bitch right to his face no problem. Definitely didn’t want to date him.
“Anyway, I know we’ve talked about this before. I’m just worried about ya’. It’s a lot to deal with.”
“I’m fine. I’ve got it. I’m not gonna wreck this, Alex. I know this is our way out.”
“Your way out,” he corrected for the millionth time.
He just shrugged. If he made it to the top, his brother wouldn’t have to work construction jobs because Elijah was taking him with him. He could pursue other things in life. Maybe he’d actually find someone and fall in love and have kids. He dated Lila, but Elijah didn’t think it was serious for either of them. She didn’t want a commitment, and Alex just needed the companionship of someone other than his brother, who was still in high school. She was a single mom with commitment and trust issues when it came to men. They were perfect for each other, for what they both brought to the table and what they both needed right now.
“Well, like I said earlier. I’m working later now. I’ll probably not get home until around eight or nine for a while. This project on the new dome stadium is a rush job. Concrete’s gotta go in next. That’s gonna be a huge part of the project. They want it done by next season’s start. What do I care, right? We’ll be gone by then. But, as usual, they want a three-year job done in one.”
“Yeah, that’s gonna be a cool stadium, though.”
“New guy started last week on our crew,” Alex commented as he shoved a giant bite of toast into his mouth. Elijah didn’t have toast. He was on a stricter diet.
“Yeah? Is he cool?”
His brother frowned, contemplating how to answer that. “He’s different.”
“How? Is he a weirdo like the ones your boss sometimes hires?”
Alex chuckled. “No, not a sex predator hiding out or an ex-con.”
They joked a lot about the creeps and ex-criminal elements that Alex’s boss hired. The men Alex worked with were real men, though, and sniffed those scummy characters out really quick. Then they gave them the boot, literally. Concrete work and construction were hard jobs. Not everyone wanted to work such a difficult trade. Alex said he liked it, though. He always said it was like a free workout. Elijah wasn’t so sure he didn’t just say that to make him feel better about having a crappy job and being stuck as his guardian.
“I guess that’s good.”
“No, just different. Doesn’t talk much. Seems way too smart to be on a labor crew. When he does talk, he…I don’t know.”
“What?”
“It almost sounds like he’s got an accent or something.”
He’d only been minimally interested in learning about this new co-worker of his brother’s. Now his interest was piqued by about a million percent.
“An accent?”
“Yeah, British or something. I don’t know. I asked him if he was from England, but he gave me a weird look and said he just came from California.”
Alex shoveled in more food and shrugged.
“That’s interesting,” Elijah remarked.
“Yeah, I thought so, too.”
He considered it another minute before saying, “I think I might be going to school with his niece. There’s this new girl, and she said she and her uncle just came from California. I called her out on having an accent, and she got all pissy about it.”
“That’s weird,” his brother commented. “Maybe just their family’s own accent or something.”
“Mm-hm,” he concurred and finished his food, placing his dish in the sink to be washed later. He usually took care of dishes and cleaning because his brother worked so much. The big old house required a lot of dusting and vacuuming. Elijah was very familiar with dusting cloths and lemon-scented wood polish.
“You’d better run,” his brother said. “I’ll see you sometime tonight. Get your leg day in. It’s Tuesday.”
“I know. I’ve still gotta work on this Chemistry project, though.”
“Well, fit it all in,” Alex ordered quietly.
“Yep,” he agreed and grabbed his backpack by the door. It was going to be harder than it seemed to get that paper done. His lab partner was a little angry at him. He wasn’t too thrilled with her, either.
The Charger fired right up, and he backed out of their rear drive. The radio system was original to the classic car, so it didn’t come in so great, didn’t sync with devices, and had zero satellite capabilities. He tuned it into one of the few channels that came in. Unfortunately, it was an all-day AM news station. The discussion was about some sort of flu virus. It sounded pretty serious. He always got the flu shot, per his trainer’s health regimen. They kept a strict and keen eye on his diet and doctor appointments.
He was out of weight-builder protein shake mix, so he stopped at the large pharmacy on the corner where his trainer always had him and the other players go for their supplements and shake mixes. They knew him there. He didn’t pay for the things he needed like that. His trainer called in the orders, and the players went in and picked them up. He wondered if it would be the same at Ohio State.
He waited in line behind a few people at the pick-up counter in the pharmacy area and tried to be patient. He still had twenty minutes until he had to be at school and was only a few minutes from it.
“Hey, great game Friday, Elijah!” a man, a total stranger, said to him as he walked past.
“Oh, thank you, sir,” he acknowledged.
“Man, you sure do got an arm on you,” he said.
Elijah looked down a moment, embarrassed, as usual. “Yes, sir. Ate my Wheaties growin’ up.”
The man laughed. This was always the same. He felt uncomfortable under people’s praise and even moreso under their scrutiny. If he messed up, they were just as bold in public about calling him out on it. He’d be glad to be on such a big campus as Ohio State. Hopefully, he would achieve some level of anonymity there.
“Good luck Friday night! I’ll be there. Season pass holder here,” the man announced proudly.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” one of the pharmacy techs was saying to a woman at the drop-off window twenty feet down from him.
Elijah’s eyes darted back to the man next to him again. “Yes, sir. Thank you. I’ll give it my all,” he told the older man with a nod.
“Ma’am, I don’t understand you,” the pharmacy tech said.
She started rambling incoherently.
“My brother’s a lifetime season ticket holder,” the man in front of him was still rambling.
“That’s great. Thank you from the whole team for your support, sir,” Elijah said, trying to see past the man’s shoulder to the commotion at the other end of the pharmacy’s long counter.
The pharmacy worker repeated, “Ma’am?”
The woman elicited a low growl in the back of her throat and continued mumbling. Elijah looked at her more closely. She appeared to be a middle-aged mom, but she was behaving strangely as if she were on drugs or something. Her hands were fidgeting down in front of her, and she seemed agitated. Her shoulder twitched repeatedly. She acted like she didn’t have total control of her motor movements. Perhaps she ran out of her meds that helped with whatever was wrong with her.
“No problem. No problem. See you Friday,” the man said, shook his hand and walked away.
“Bye, and have a nice day, sir,” Elijah said to him cordially. He was pretty sure in the span of their conversation that the man told him his name, but Elijah didn’t remember it. People did that a lot, too. They always introduced themselves. One time, when he was throwing the ball around in the park with Jeremy, a man came up to them and introduced himself and his four kids as if they’d remember everyone’s names. He and Jeremy had joked about it later. They were gonna have to get better at the public relations aspect of the game.
“…not sure,” he heard one of the workers behind the counter saying to another pharmacy tech. Then she called out as if she were nervous, “Bob, you’d better get over here.”
Another said something about a seizure. Maybe that was it. Maybe the poor lady behaving so strangely at the drop-off window was having a seizure. Elijah walked closer in case she was going to fall. He didn’t want her to get hurt. He knew enough from his first-aid class he took three years ago that seizure patients needed to be handled with care to prevent them from hurting themselves. She looked like someone’s mom. He knew what it was like firsthand not to have one anymore, so he wanted to help.
Before he got to her, she went nuts. It was the only way he could describe it. She screamed and literally flew across the counter with her upper body and gripped the man who had come to help her, the pharmacist as Elijah knew him.
Elijah stopped dead in his tracks. He was stunned. She wasn’t having a seizure anymore if that’s what was happening to her before. She was in a rage. Although she was dressed nicely in casual ‘mom’ type clothing, she went crazy like a druggie needing a fix. She seemed perfectly in control of her movements now. It was as if she were on a mission, and that mission was to kill the pharmacist for some reason. Was she on some sort of drugs? Was she settling some sort of vendetta against the pharmacist? Maybe he refused to give her the drug prescription she wanted. She was scratching, clawing, and hitting the man with vicious intent. She even bit his ear before he lurched back and tried to get away. He couldn’t. Blood gushed from his ear and dripped down her mouth. She had him pinned to her.
People scrambled. Most backed up. Women behind the counter began screaming. Someone yelled for 9-1-1 to be called. An older man in line stepped past everyone and attempted to wrap his arms around her waist. It didn’t work. She reared back and head-butted him in the face. He staggered backward and placed his hand on his nose. It was gushing blood all over the gray carpeting. The crazy woman didn’t care. She didn’t even acknowledge him. She just kept on assaulting the pharmacist, who she hadn’t completely released. He was in shock, too. His face was also bloody, and there were scratches on it and his bare forearms.
Someone had to do something. She was seriously going to kill the poor guy or hurt others, too. She had her hands around his throat now, her claws digging in so hard he could see trickles of his blood squirting from beneath her fingernails. He couldn’t stand by another second. Nobody was reacting. There were plenty of people around. They were all adults, but they seemed frozen with fear.
Elijah squatted low and rushed at her, building up speed and momentum. He took her down with a solid tackle around the middle. They hit hard, but he didn’t care. She took the brunt of the fall. It didn’t slow her down for more than a few seconds, two at the most. She had a new target. Him.
Up close, he could see the brunette psychopath, dressed like a soccer mom in khakis and a purple sweater. He put her age at around thirty-five. He had a good eighty pounds on her. She was out of her mind with rage, but for some reason was now directing it at Elijah. Her fist lashed out and connected with his jaw but slipped when he deflected. His shoulder took the hit, which didn’t hurt. He tried to pin her hand to the floor, but she got it free and attempted to hit him again.
Her legs were flailing, too. He didn’t exactly have on his pads or a cup, so he tried to avoid her kicks and the knees she was bringing up to catch him in the nuts.
“Ma’am!” he yelled. “Stop. The police are on their way. Stop this now.”
She didn’t, of course. Instead, her incoherent words and mumbled jabbering turned into a primal scream of rage as she attempted to thrust herself upward to get Elijah off of her. Man, he hoped the cops didn’t run in and shoot him thinking he was actually attacking her.
She was attractive enough for a middle-aged mom, but the whole mom fantasy wasn’t his thing. Plus, her nose was running, her face was red and blotchy from strain, and her hair was now standing on end in a mess of brown tangles and sweat from exertion. She also had extremely bloodshot brown eyes that made him believe she was on some type of illegal drugs. Maybe meth or heroin. He wasn’t sure of that, either. They’d all had to take a class about the dangers of drugs and alcohol before their senior year. In the class, they’d learned what signs to watch out for in a person and which drugs caused a person to act or look a certain way. He hadn’t really paid much attention because, at the time, Elijah hadn’t planned on ever being around people like that. He wished he knew what drug she was currently under the influence of. It might’ve made this situation a little easier to handle.
One hand lashed out at him again, and the madwoman actually landed an upward, open-handed hit to the underside of his chin. He was vaguely aware of people yelling and screaming at her to stop as this all went on. He didn’t want to hurt her, but Elijah was tired of deflecting her jabs and scratches. It went on for way too long. Then she growled and attempted to bite his neck and his cheek.
That was it. He wasn’t getting bitten by her. She was probably a secret drug addict in her private life when she wasn’t running her kids to soccer or ballet practice. He’d seen once a person acting like this on the news when he was younger. They’d said the man was on ‘bath salts.’ He wasn’t sure what that meant, but that was exactly how she was acting. Crazy. Irrational. Unreachable.
As she lurched upward again, Elijah said a fast prayer for forgiveness. Then he hauled back and punched her. She went instantly limp. He’d knocked her out.
Then there was a rush of people around them.
“Are you okay, son?” the same man who’d just praised his game last Friday night was asking.
“Oh, my goodness!” an older lady was exclaiming over and over again and holding her chest.
Outside, he could hear the distant sirens of police and ambulance vehicles coming nearer.
Someone else questioned, “Was she on drugs?”
It was a commotion of noise and questions and chaos. Strangely, nobody was accusing him of being a royal asshole for hitting a woman, although he sort of felt like one. Somewhere a child was crying. Everything just felt loud and overwhelming. He was still reeling from the fact that he’d physically assaulted a woman. Probably someone’s mom. It made Elijah feel a little sick to his stomach. Actually, a lot. He felt like he might hurl his breakfast.
He touched the woman’s neck to make sure she was still breathing and caught a pulse. Elijah breathed a sigh of relief in the midst of the noise and bustling of people. He didn’t get off of her, though. He was still partially straddling her but was hesitant to get off. Instead, he knelt on one knee near her and waited to see if she’d wake and go nuts again. Within another minute, police officers jogged down the aisle. Without even questioning the situation, the first officer knelt, pulled back the woman’s eyelid, and nodded to his partner.
“We’ve got it from here, Elijah,” the second one said with a nod, indicating he should move back. He obviously followed Tigers football, too.
Elijah stood and stepped away. Then they rolled her over, causing her to snap to consciousness again. The first one quickly cuffed her. They hauled her out of the store, half carrying, half dragging. She resumed the incoherent mumbling of words and sporadic screams that weren’t in any particular language or in any known dictionary. Then she let out an ear-splitting scream that hit a decibel that seemed it should crack glass.
He had to suppress the shiver that threatened to overtake him. Elijah bent to retrieve the woman’s purse. He needed to give it to those cops so they could give it back to her or her family once she detoxed and sobered up. Instead, he stood there, frozen and staring at the woman’s purse, trying to process what just happened. When he looked up, that new girl, Wren, was standing at the end of the store probably thirty feet from him near the makeup department. She had her hand inside the zipper of her hoodie with a wary but alert expression on her face. Once he locked eyes with her unusual, very wide at the moment aqua ones heavily lined again with black stuff, she took off.