FOOTBALL.
After all this, there was still football. Naturally, I quit the Broncos, but Coach Hammer didn’t accept my resignation. He threatened to flunk me in Phys. Ed., which meant I wouldn’t graduate that spring.
Rah, team.
Actually, there was one advantage to remaining a Bronco. When I ran up to kick that first field goal, there would be a delicious moment where even I wouldn’t know what I’d be sending through the uprights—the ball, or Todd Buckley’s lousy head.
The thought sustained me as I arrived at the field that Saturday. I clung to it, hugging it to my chest like a tiny perfect gem.
I was a little surprised to find the stands crowded, but strangely quiet. Then I realized what was missing. Dipsy—sparkplug, mascot, buffoon—was not in attendance today, screaming his lungs out as he gave his all to the Broncos and a two-pound bag of Doritos. Of course, it was early yet, but I really hoped he was staying away for good. Maybe I didn’t have the guts to boycott this gang of backstabbers, but I loved the idea that the remora had relocated to another reef, where the sharks weren’t so vicious.
In the locker room, the Broncos were trying to rev up some bloodlust without the natural gifts of Nelson Jaworski, who was out of danger, but still hospitalized. Nelson’s dubious career in athletics—any athletics—was over. On the brighter side, he had reconciled with Melissa. His blow on the head had so scrambled his memory that he couldn’t recall why he’d broken up with her in the first place. At least, that was my theory. Nelson wasn’t the forgiving type.
The team mood was not very pleasant. No one was thrilled about last week’s forfeit, and there wasn’t much optimism about our prospects today. We were without our toughest lineman and our long-snapper.
“Damn that Garrett!” Todd spat, lacing his shoulder pads. “First he costs us Nelson. Then he costs us last week’s game. Now he blows town, so we don’t even have our long-snapper. And after all we did for him!”
“Yeah,” I put in. “You even loaned him your girlfriend. Some gratitude.”
I’d earned myself a punch in the face, and I was about to get one when Coach Hammer walked into the room, escorting a large man with a potbelly that extended halfway to infinity.
“Listen up, guys,” barked the coach. “I want you to meet Sam Bloch from Eastern Illinois State. He’s come to take in today’s game. Let’s show him what we’ve got.”
It was the one thing that could divert Todd’s mind from how much he wanted to deck me. When we took the field, Todd’s famous front row would actually be host to a bona fide college scout! This was going to be the first day of the rest of his miserable self-centered life.
“Come here, Sam,” Coach Hammer invited the guest. “Let me introduce you to Todd Buckley. You’ll want to keep an eye on him.”
“Sure,” the big man said with a semi-interested shrug. “But where’s this Garrett kid? I hear he’ll give you a perfect long snap ninety-nine times out of a hundred. A guy like that will always have a place on a football team.”
I glowed in the warmth of that statement all through the game. Glowing wasn’t easy. We got killed, which was definitely justice. I had to hold myself back from cheering every blown snap. Remember, the back-up long-snapper should have been Nelson, so we were down to volunteers. Coach Hammer looked like he was ready to get out there and do the job himself. But nothing would have helped. The final score was 28–3.
I didn’t mind because I didn’t care. I walked out of the clubhouse as the only Bronco with a clear conscience.
Something smacked me in the back of the head, and I wheeled, expecting to face an angry Todd. But there was no one there. My teammates had all hung out for the postgame postmortem.
And then the next projectile was incoming, a crab apple aimed with deadly accuracy at the center of my forehead. I ducked, and it sizzled by my ear.
That was when I saw her, perched in the tree by the end of the sidewalk.
I wasn’t in the mood for our usual games. “What are you doing, Jen?”
She hopped down to the ground. “Hey, Ricky. I just remembered. I owe you an apple-picking.”
Apple-picking. Two years of silence on the subject, and now here it was, out in the open.
I picked up the first crab apple with every intention of winging it at her. Instead, I said, “Just because I play along with your Warrior Princess crap doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.”
“I have feelings too,” she told me.
“Caffeine dependency isn’t a feeling.”
“That day in the orchard,” she persisted with my favorite subject, “how do you think it made me feel when I heard you’d been making out with Hayley DeLuca the night before?”
I gawked at her. “I never touched Hayley DeLuca!”
“I figured that out,” she snapped. “Later! But when Todd hit me with that story in the middle of a bunch of people, what was I supposed to think?” She looked at me earnestly. “It’s enough to make a girl do something stupid.”
I didn’t know whether to be happy or furious. “Two years!” I exclaimed. “I thought you blew me off! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Would it have made any difference? It still happened. You know me, Ricky. I’m not a then person; I’m a now person. I only talk about the past when there’s something big at stake. Like you and me.”
You and me. I could hardly believe it. It had taken two years, but we’d finally reached a point where there was nothing at all standing in the way of you and me.
But first we had to clear the air.
“Your friends hate my guts.”
She shrugged. “That’s their problem. We’ve all got our faults. I don’t give to Greenpeace.” She looked down with a half shrug. “And I can be sort of kind of a bitch.”
“I think Starbucks is a ripoff,” I volunteered, adding, “but I’ll still go there for your sake.”
She squeezed my hand, disarming me of the crab apple. “I always knew you were a hopeless romantic, Ricky. That’s why I never gave up on you.”
I squeezed back. “I learned from the world champion.”
She nodded sadly. “Jake. What’s going to happen to him?”
I sighed. “He’s going to be miserable for a long time. And then one day, he’ll wake up, and go to his new school. And somewhere between algebra and a tuna-fish sandwich it’ll dawn on him that the world didn’t come to an end.”
“I wonder if he’ll be the new Jake or the old Jake there,” she mused.
“There’s only one Jake,” I said firmly. Understatement of the century.
Still hand in hand, we began to walk away from the school.
“He did it all on purpose, right?” she asked after a moment. “Planned it out like one of his chess matches. Operation Didi or something.”
“Guys have done more to get a girl,” I pointed out.
“Yeah? Name one.”
“That king from the Trojan War,” I replied. “He sent a thousand ships to get Helen back.”
Jennifer whistled. “Man, she must have had it going on.”
“She was hot,” I agreed. “But she was no Warrior Princess.”