Freshman year we never went to any football games, so walking into the stadium, I had no idea what to do. It was starting to get cold outside, but we left my house so suddenly, I didn’t think to get a sweatshirt. I was in a T-shirt and shorts, surrounded by people in hoodies and jeans. I felt like I’d walked onto the set of a Japanese game show. All the overhead lights were on. I didn’t know what I should be looking at. I stayed at the back of our group. There were tons of open seats up at the top of the bleachers, but we walked past all that prime real estate and headed straight into the crowded student section, jamming our way through bodies until we got to the sophomore area. We were surrounded by people I had no interest in seeing outside of a classroom setting between the hours of 8:40 and 3:40, Monday through Friday, and I was sure they felt the same about me.

We settled on a spot and I stood on the very edge of the bleachers between the aisle and Will. Through some unspoken pact, everyone had decided to stand up the entire game. We’d all be happier sitting down, but I guess no one wanted to be the first person to do it. Everyone in the student section went insane every time something happened on the field. Some of them were painted and holding signs. How could anyone actually care? What difference would winning or losing this game make to anyone who was just watching it from the stands?

I tried to figure it out for a while, standing there observing everyone and wondering if my thoughts were profound or if I was just being an idiot and needed to stop thinking so much. It’s tough for a fifteen-year-old guy to determine if he’s the physical manifestation of Holden Caulfield or just a run-of-the-mill pompous jackass. Luke and Will clearly weren’t thinking about anything. They were chanting and screaming for Sam and Patrick the whole time. I wondered if Haley and Jen were jealous.

Once our team finally scored a touchdown, all the guys freaked out and formed this mosh pit, jumping up and down and smashing into each other. Luke and Will dove into it and I watched. They looked like gorillas or cavemen or — or — I couldn’t think straight enough over the noise of screaming teenagers and the school band’s abrasive, jarring honks to decide what sort of uneducated beasts they exactly reminded me of. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t stop thinking about how bizarre the football game was. How strange the idea of sports was, like some pretend version of war. I wanted to stop thinking all those cyclical thoughts I knew a hundred million other guys exactly like me had already had. So ten minutes later, when our team scored again, I pushed myself into the mosh pit.

I don’t know if fun is the right word for it. It was kind of satisfying, at least for the first few seconds, because I stopped overanalyzing high-school football culture, since my brain was fully occupied trying to keep me alive.

All of a sudden, James Dunne, whose personality is defined by his pet snake, looked at me like I had a spider on my face and said, “Holy shit, dude, I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

“Uh, yeah?” I didn’t know what he was talking about.

All the other guys turned and stared at me. Their eyes lit up and someone said, “What the hell happened?”

I reached up and felt my forehead. It was covered in blood.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

James Dunne said, “Dude, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

I covered my forehead with my hands and squeezed my way out to the aisle, then ran up the stairs and into the bathroom to look at my face in the filthy mirror under the buzzing fluorescent lights. James Dunne had elbowed a ripe zit on my forehead and it had burst like a fire hydrant.

I wanted to wash it off, but the faucet spewed a yellow liquid that looked like pure E. coli. So I dabbed my forehead with dry paper towels until it was mostly clean. It was calm in the bathroom. Quiet and still. It reeked of stagnant piss and week-old turds, sure, but that was a fair price to pay for some solitude.

Two kids — probably in middle school — came in. As soon as they saw me, they started laughing, then smacked each other’s arms to stop, which made them crack up harder. I felt my face turn red. Goddamn it. Maybe they weren’t actually laughing at me — I had no way to know. It didn’t matter, though, because even if they were laughing at some unrelated inside joke, the sound of them cackling reminded me how pathetic and out of place I was.

There were still fifteen minutes left in the game, but I didn’t feel like going back to the student section and having to explain to everyone a million times that I was fine, it looked worse than it was, and it was really just one meaningless zit on the zit-covered forehead of Accutane Kevin. So when I left the bathroom, I went down to the parking lot, sat on the back bumper of Haley’s mom’s car, and folded my goose-bumped arms across my chest and squeezed them tight to keep from shivering.

This group of six freshmen was standing around talking and laughing and drinking those slushies from the gas station that kids put vodka in. I could have sworn those kids were complete losers. They spent the mornings sitting on the floor by their lockers drawing weird pictures of anime-style dragons, and it was verified school lore that three of the guys, on separate occasions, had been caught watching hentai in the computer lab. But apparently those freaks went to football games and were part of a group of friends that included girls. Yet there I was, alone with my frigid nipples chafing against my T-shirt, trying to convince myself I was cooler than them.

I imagined what Alex was doing. Wearing a big, old T-shirt, leaning against her kitchen counter reading a French novel while Bright Eyes played and tea heated up in the microwave. Later she would call me and we’d talk about the pointlessness of homecoming, how weird it was to see my friends wearing suits before they went to the dance, why I’d never go to another football game again. She’d ask me questions and she’d think my responses were funny. I tried to remember those lines for when I’d see her next.

A river of my excited classmates flooded down to the parking lot. Before I could see her, I heard Haley say, “He probably called his parents. We should just go without him.”

They stepped around the car and saw me. I stared at them, frozen, like they’d caught me trimming my pubes with the family scissors.

“Oh,” said Haley. “What happened to you? Are you okay? We were worried.”

“Uh, yeah, no,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. Like, nothing happened.”

Luke said they were going to meet Sam and Patrick and some of the other players at Waffle House to celebrate the win. I told them I should probably just head home, since my house was on the way to Waffle House anyway.

Luke started trying to persuade me to go, but Jen said, “Whatever. Just let him do what he wants,” and I crawled into the way-back seat.

They dropped me off at my house and I was relieved to no longer be a fifth wheel to their double date, or whatever that outing was. Luke and Will still hadn’t explained their relationships with Jen or Haley or any of those other girls who’d suddenly been promoted from background extras to guest stars in the high-school TV show that happened around me.

I walked inside, told my parents I had fun and it was “good,” and then sat down behind them on the family room computer and put my headphones on. I had to do the iPLEDGE thing to assure the government that I had not had sex in the past month. I thought for a while, trying to recall if perhaps I’d had a few sexual encounters and forgotten about them because they were so commonplace for a guy like me. Had I banged a few babes in the locker room before school? While waiting in Mom’s minivan in the Kroger parking lot, had I gotten downright nasty with a couple of nymphomaniacs? I was pretty sure I hadn’t, so I told the government it could relax.

I went upstairs to my room and closed the door. My brain replayed the scene of those two kids laughing at me — or near me — or whatever — in the football stadium bathroom and I got nervous for a second, like I was worried they’d pop out from behind my bookshelf and laugh again and I still wouldn’t know if it was about me. Had I always been this paranoid and self-conscious? In middle school, did I cringe and tense up any time I heard laughter in the halls? Or was I the kid laughing at everyone else? When I’d fake being sick, was I just exploiting a loophole to stay in bed watching TV all day, or was there a reason I didn’t want to go?

I pulled my sixth-grade yearbook off the shelf to try to remember. I looked at my picture. I didn’t have acne, but I was chubby and had a bowl cut. I guess it was a trade-off. Maybe when my skin cleared up, I’d grow a potato-size cyst on my neck to keep my overall value even.

I found no clarity about my feelings in that picture. It might as well have been of some other kid. I remembered things I’d done but couldn’t think back to feeling sad or stressed out or even happy or excited. My memories were all facts and information, all quantitative. It was like I knew the list of ingredients that made up my middle-school years, but I didn’t remember how the recipe actually tasted. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

I shut the yearbook and fished around my desk drawer for my list of questions to ask Alex at our next appointment. I read through my questions over and over so I wouldn’t forget them. I’d find out about her life and I’d tell her about my movie. Our snow-globe-waiting-room world would have no noise and no chaos, nothing but us.