A GIRL SQUEEZES IN next to him at the bar, orders two drinks. Afterward he won’t be able to say what the drinks were or anything about her except that her hair was brown and medium-long and he never asked her to be there.
Leaning into him, her right side against his left, she hooks a heel over the rung on his barstool.
“You guys win?”
He shakes his head.
“So, next year?”
A month from graduation, there’s no next year for him. “Yeah, I guess.”
“You know my boyfriend?”
She gives a name, kind of foreign, that he won’t remember till later. He just shakes his head again, not looking at her, but she presses closer anyway, her right breast indenting against his biceps.
“He got cut from the team freshman year. Don’t tell him I told you, okay? He’s watching us.”
She’s drunk—he sees it now. Her face so close her lips are misting his left ear. Faintly repulsed, but not meaning harm, just needing space, he gives her a tiny nudge with his shoulder—to shake her off.
Too hard: his soft touch unbalances her. As if the wasted strength that earlier coursed through his body has cruelly lingered, turning back to waste. Her heel catches the rung of his stool and with a low cry and a surprising heaviness she tumbles sideways into the black woman on her left.
He’s in the process of standing, about to apologize, when a hand grabs his shirt from behind and jerks him violently backward: for a moment, eyes rolling wildly over the browned ceiling, he is airborne.
His spine slams the floor, the back of his skull thuds into ungiving wood.
Dazed, internal flares dilating his pupils, he comes to on his knees in the rank-smelling sawdust: his brain fogged like that mirror, past the bartender’s betrayed glare, which continues to serve down his own stunned reflection.
To his wonderment, a small clearing has formed around him. People staring from a safe distance, as if he still has teeth left to bite.
Stupidly he kneels there, pawing at the back of his head for blood.
The lugged sole of a boot splits his shoulder blades, catapulting him over the fallen stool into the bottom of the bar.
He lands on the UConn duffel, the aluminum bat crowbarring his chest—a blow so ferocious it’s like smelling salts, waking some older, vestigial pain. Rage rises in him like animal blood. And suddenly everything but what burns inside him is underwater-quiet. He doesn’t think; at last he just becomes. In one swift move he unzips the duffel, pulls out the bat, and, levitating to his feet, turns on his assailant—just another young buck like himself, and so beneath his pity—and drives the bat two-handed, with all the strength he’s ever wished for, into the guy’s stomach.