If there was ever a TV show called People Who Are Crazy and Need to Have Their Heads Examined, I'd be the very first guest. They'd put me on one of those couches and a guy with a beard and funny accent would ask me questions, and the audience would ooh and aah as they realized this girl was crazy. What else would explain what I had just done? I've been thinking about it for months now, and I still don't have a good explanation. All I come back to whenever anyone asks me, including me, is that it sounded like fun. And—though it took Jimmy Ott to point this out—it was my idea. It's always a lot more fun to do something that's your idea. Plus Brian actually agreed to it, which still amazes me. I guess he decided that training with me for a week was better than benchwarming come September.
I know these aren't very good reasons, but they're all I can come up with. Maybe a shrink could figure out more if I had millions of dollars to spend on shrinks. But I do know this: I don't have many ideas, and not very many good ones. But this one got me excited.
And I stayed excited for the whole rest of the afternoon. During milking I thought about the lifts Win had used back when he was a high school QB, and how Brian could weight train in the barn while I worked. The free weights were still in the barn too, under a tarp. Mom wouldn't let Win and Bill keep them inside because their room is small enough as it is, and the two of them plus the weights would probably bring the house down. The weights were all dusty, but it's not like any football player ever said, Oh these are too dusty for me to train with. Thinking that gave me a grin. If Brian said anything, that's the crack I'd use on him.
At dinner Dad and Mom kept going on about how great Brian was, how hard he'd worked and on a Sunday too, how much he liked Dad's cooking, how nice he was, and on and on and on like he was the kid they should have had instead of us. If it had been one day earlier I probably would have barfed out of disgust. I mean, you could tell Brian was being nice just to impress them, and he was only doing the unloading to get in good with Jimmy. And sure he had an arm, but his aim stunk and he didn't have any wind or anything. You could see he was falling apart just by the end of our pickup game.
A couple times when Dad and Mom were laying it on extra thick Curtis caught my eye and I'd grin. But most of the time, because I was crazy, I sat there thinking about how I could build Brian's arm up, and his wind, and how his kissing up to Dad probably was a pretty good idea since we'd be sneaking around behind his back for the week because there was no way on this earth I was going to tell Dad what we were doing.
That night Amber called. "Hey, what'd you do today?"
"Nothing." On top of everything else, I'm a terrible liar.
"Liar!" Amber laughed. "Come on, tell me."
"Really. I milked the cows and took a nap." All of which was true, at least.
"What else?"
"Nothing. Really. What did you do?"
Eventually I got her talking about how much her job stinks, but I wasn't really listening. I hate keeping secrets, especially from Amber who hates it too—hates it when people keep secrets from her. But I sure didn't want her finding out about Brian, any more than I wanted Dad to.
And then all my enthusiasm faded away. What if Brian blew me off? What if he told his friends and they all made fun of me for thinking a dumb F-in-English farm girl could even be a football trainer? Because there's never been a teenage girl football trainer I've ever heard of. What if it turned out I couldn't do it? What if Brian did everything I said—which I didn't have too much faith in to begin with—but nothing happened, and Jimmy Ott said sorry but he'd made a mistake about me knowing football?
And what if it turned out just the opposite, that I was pretty good, and Brian stuck with it and people found out who turned Hawley's snotty, lazy QB into a real player? My folks would talk to me probably, but Curtis wouldn't. Amber would pretty much kill me, and so would everyone else in Red Bend, just for that one game if nothing else.
Let me tell you about that game, that one Hawley–Red Bend game two years ago.
Bill had trained all summer just to play Hawley. Every afternoon he'd go out to the heifer field and run his guts out, run until sweat poured off him like water, gasping Hawley's name every time he started his next sprint. He wanted to beat Hawley so bad—Win had beaten Hawley his senior year, and now it was Bill's senior year and everyone said he was even better than Win had been, bigger and faster and more versatile. By the time the game started Bill had worked himself up until he was in another place altogether.
Bill is a linebacker—someone who works defense behind the line of scrimmage, tackling runners, slowing down receivers. But that game Bill was everywhere. Every play he'd be somewhere else, up at the line or back, on either side of the field depending on where he thought the ball was going, ready to run down anyone, anyone at all from Hawley who came near him. Every time the Hawley QB reached for the snap, Bill would holler at the top of his lungs—we could hear it up in the stands; it gave me goose bumps—"That's my ball! I'm gonna get that ball!" And the QB—first their starter and then another guy, and then Brian, who was brought in at the end even though he was only a sophomore because the two other quarterbacks were so beat—would shiver a little, you could see it, and Hawley's offensive linemen would give this little twitch and step away from Bill without even realizing it. And not on that play, maybe, but within three or four plays Bill would run them down, get the ball somehow, get possession for Red Bend.
Then the Red Bend offense would screw it up. It wasn't like when Win was still playing when he was on offense and Bill was on defense and they balanced out. Instead, because our offense sucked so much, Hawley would get possession again and back in would go Red Bend defense, meaning Bill. That's what the game was: the entire Hawley team, eight at a time, against my brother. Hawley was ahead by seven for most of the game, and then in the last five minutes Bill intercepted a pass and ran for a touchdown, which would have been just fantastic except that the Red Bend kicker—I won't say his name because he's suffered enough—missed the extra point. And Hawley won.
And God, were they jerks about it.
Especially Brian. Every time he missed a pass or got tackled you could hear him chewing out the other Hawley players even though it was clear Bill would have wrestled a bear to stop the play. After the game, when Bill was crying he was so upset, Brian stood there in a crowd of Hawley players and jeered at him, calling him a baby and a girl and every name you could think of.
Remembering that game, well, you can imagine that didn't make me too pleased about Brian. He'd been fun this afternoon—that pickup game was okay, it really was. And he'd worked hard unloading the hay—worked like he should have worked three days ago, but still. And he was pretty civil to me, even. And that's what made me so confused. How could a guy who was such a jerk, how could he act so nice?
I was also thinking that if Bill ever found out I was training Brian Nelson, I wouldn't make it on to a TV show about crazy people. Because my brother would drive right up to Red Bend and kill me. You don't need to be speaking to someone to do that.