I was a tackling dummy for the first- and second-string linebackers during Individual period, after which I was banished with the other red jerseys to serve as a blocking dummy for the offense. The latter drudgery meant I was lining up across from Reshawn on snap after snap, and whereas in that film session with Hightower I had been torn at least two new assholes for not hitting Reshawn hard enough, if I collided with him at full speed now, the offensive starters would shove me and the offensive coaches would shout:
—Don’t be a fucking hero!
I could not escape Chase. He was in my cube, in my meetings, in my practice drills, at my meals, and in the hotel room every single morning and every single night. He was as cocky as you’d expect, and often when the linebackers met for film, he would have gotten to the room early so he could cue up Reshawn’s hit. He would pause the film the moment after the collision, so that when I walked in I would find myself on the screen, suspended in midflight.
This all would have been torturous enough, but as we started the second week of camp I developed a deep, confounding obsession with looking at Chase’s body.
It had taken me the length of my high school career to grow comfortable in locker rooms, to use a surface sangfroid to chill the innermost heat and confusion, and by the time I came to King I was so at ease that the only reason my eyes rested overlong on a teammate’s naked self was out of aspiration—I wanted this one’s pecs, I wanted that one’s thighs, I’d always wished my calves had the heart shape his did.
But during camp’s second week my eyes started straying toward Chase every time he was dressing or undressing in the cube. I had the urge to look not just at his cock but at the pale buttocks speckled with red welts, at the thighs streaked with blue bruises and raspberry turf burns, even at the forehead rubbed raw by the strip of rubber at the front of his helmet. My compulsion was horribly circular. I would tell myself not to look at his body, which would increase my need to see, which need would only make it that much more important not to look at him for even one moment.
Was this sexual in nature? I couldn’t tell. It’s not like I worried about getting an erection whenever I struggled not to look at Chase, and yet there was something about his relentless, gleeful urge to dominate that found in me an answering submissiveness, a desire to give in to the bullying, and so maybe why I kept looking at his body was to puzzle over why exactly he was bringing this out in me, what it was about him that affected me the way it did.
My obsession spread to the point where Chase didn’t even have to be undressed for me to need to look at him. If he was sitting in front of me in film, I had to stop myself from staring at his nape or the crinkled dry skin on his elbows. If he was snoring in the hotel room, the only way I could not watch his lips softly putt-putter was by keeping a pillow clamped over my face. Even his voice stirred me, and whenever he hid in the bathroom to talk with Sadie, I would have to turn on the television and crank the volume in order to drown him out.
The volume got higher and higher over the course of the second week as Chase and Sadie’s fights grew worse. He would yell and plead, banging his fist against the bathroom’s countertop to punctuate whatever words he was angrily saying. By Saturday night his voice was so loud and our television so blaring that Fade, staying in the next room over, knocked on the wall our rooms shared to quiet us down. Chase ripped open the bathroom door and stuck his head out to glare at me, thinking I was the one who’d knocked; but when he saw the sounds were coming from the wall, he realized how loud he was being. He closed the door, said a few final words to Sadie, and hung up and came to bed.
I turned onto my stomach and laid my pillow over my head. A few seconds later I heard a weird whine, as if a mosquito had somehow gotten trapped in the goose down, and when the whining turned into a keening I realized what was going on. I uncovered my head and looked over to see Chase leaning his back against his bed’s headrest, clutching his cell phone with both hands while snot streamed from his nose. My first feeling was joy, and I considered just sitting there and watching him weep. But his sobbing was getting wild and starting to make me uncomfortable. Purely out of the urge to stop my own discomfort, I testily asked:
—You okay?
He slapped himself across the face—a hard, vicious slap. There was a pause, red creeping into his cheek, and just when I thought that would be it, he hit himself again, then again, the strikes harder each time. I thought he was doing this to stop himself from crying, but even as his sobs subsided and a taut silence took over the room, he continued to slap himself. Then he made a fist.
I leapt out of bed and grabbed his wrist
