As soon as JP had his fingers on the ball, I took him down again, this time pulling his jersey up out of his shorts and dragging him with it until it was fully inside out and covering his head. We were about ten feet out of the ring now, and the guys opened a gateway for JP to run through so he could get to the score. If he could make it past me.
JP stood up, leaving the ball at his feet as he tucked his jersey back into his shorts.
There were streaks of grass and black mud on his face.
“What the fuck, Ryan Dean?”
“Watch your mouth, JP,” Coach M warned. He added, “Nice job, Eleven.”
I don’t think I’d ever been so physically aggressive in my life, but all I could think about was JP and his smug I’m-taking-your-girlfriend-out announcement over lunch, and how Annie told me to get tough this year. So I was sick of this shit, of being treated like a little kid, especially by my best friends, and I wasn’t going to let it keep on happening to me.
“Trick or treat, assbreath,” I said.
I’m certain Coach M had to think about that one, and, since he didn’t say anything, he must have concurred with me that “assbreath” is not a true cuss word.
JP smiled. “Oh. I get it. Okay, Winger. Happy Halloween to you, too.”
Now it was clear to everyone. JP and I were in a full-scale fight, the only kind you could possibly get away with at PM.
He ran at me again, but this time he slipped my tackle and I fell, managing only to wrap the crook of my arm tightly around his left ankle. I rolled, and JP fell on top of me, dropping his knees (on purpose, I’m sure, but it was totally fair for him to do it) right into my back. It felt like he broke my ribs, but as he went down JP dropped the ball, and his left cleat came right off his foot and into my hands.
I got to my feet. I was sweating and in pain. I could feel my heart drumming against the bones inside my chest. I knew I was just about finished, that I couldn’t keep JP out of the circle much longer and he was getting really pissed off about it.
I think what probably pushed him over the edge was that, as he was getting up again, I threw his cleat as far as I could down the pitch and some of the guys laughed.
I could hear Seanie saying, “JP’s Winger’s bitch,” and the guys laughed even more.
JP stood there, panting, the ball tucked into his arms. He looked to where I’d thrown his cleat, then he looked back at me, not even a hint of friendship in his expression, then he got low, put his head down, and wearing only one shoe, came at me full speed.
When I hit him from the front, JP went straight into my tackle and landed squarely on top of me. He went down, too, but he brought his knee up into my face and I heard something pop—like stepping on a grape—when he hit my eye. I remember hearing the “ooh”s from the guys when I sat up, and as I tried to get to my feet I saw a blurry red image of JP scoring behind me, and the next thing I knew, Seanie and Joey were there, putting their hands against my shoulders and telling me not to stand up.
Everyone began crowding around me.
I looked down at my lap. I was covered in blood, could feel it pulsing down my face and onto my jersey, splattering my muddy legs.
Coach M kneeled beside me. “Let’s have a look,” he said. I realized my left eye was closed for some reason, so I turned my head to look at him.
“That’s going to need stitches,” he said.
And then Seanie was right in my face, saying, “You can see his skull! You can see his skull!”
Which is probably just about the last thing you want to hear at a time like that, even if Seanie did sound overjoyed by the discovery.
I started to lie down, but they wouldn’t let me. The physio was there, wrapping gauze and tape like a headband tightly around my pulsing head, over my left eye. Then Seanie and Joey each took an arm and helped me to my feet.
I was sore and dizzy, but I willed myself not to collapse.
I remember Coach M telling them to put me in the cart and drive me down the hill to the doctor’s, and I saw JP standing in front of me, holding the cleat I’d thrown.
“Hey. Sorry, Ryan Dean.”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
IT TOOK EIGHTEEN STITCHES TO close the cut across my eyebrow, some inside the skin, and some outside. But the cut itself wasn’t that big. The doctor let me look at the stitches in a mirror when he was finished, but I mostly paid attention to how horrible the rest of me looked. I was filthy and damp and covered with blackened crusty blood that clotted on my skin and in my hair.
Seanie and Joey stayed there with me while the doctor stitched me up, but he wouldn’t let them stand too close when he was doing the actual sewing part. I didn’t say a word the whole time I was there; all I could do was think about JP and Annie and how mad I was.
Then the doctor left the room, and his exceedingly five-out-of-five-possible-fruit-arrangements-on-your- head-in-a-Brazilian-dancer-kind-of-way-on-the-Ryan-Dean-West-Samba-mometer nurse came in and asked me to lay my head back on the pillow.
“Let’s take off that bloody shirt,” she said, so sweetly. “Here. Raise your arms.”
She pulled my jersey up out of my shorts and lifted it, so gently, over my head. When it was all the way off, I quickly looked around the room to see if my great-grandma and that run-over Chihuahua were present. I was convinced I had died and gone to a much, much better place.
Thank God for compression shorts.
“Boiiing!” Seanie said.
I had to laugh. “Shut up.”
You know, I sometimes disappoint myself. Because at that moment, if anyone had asked me about Annie, I know I would have said, “Who is that?”
“Does it hurt?” she asked. She softly swiped a warm towel around my face and began rubbing my hair clean with a second wet towel.
I tried to look extra sad. “Just a little.”
I lied. I couldn’t feel it at all.
“Aww,” she said.
If I was a cat, I would have purred.
If I was an alligator, I would have been hypnotized.
But since I was only me, all I could do was lie there and contemplate everything perverted I had ever dreamed about since I was, like, seven years old.
She dropped the first blood-rusted towels onto a tray by the bed and grabbed two more. She wiped off my neck and shoulders. She sponge bathed me where blood had dried on my chest and belly, right down to the waistband of my shorts. She even toweled off the thin hair in my armpits, which kind of tickled, but there was no way I was about to giggle. And I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t stop staring at her extreme hotness. Then she gently wiped the blood from my knees and up my thighs, all the way to where my compression shorts ended, and at that point I got so flustered, I began hiccupping.
I am such a loser.
She put all the dirty towels in a pile beside the bed and said, “Now you look perfectly handsome again. There’s no concussion, so you won’t have to stay here tonight . . . .”
“. . . but you’ll need to take it easy . . .”
