At the sound of the next day’s wake-up call Chase was out of bed like a shot, not bothering to brush his teeth before hurrying to the elevator. He didn’t say anything to me at breakfast or in any of our day’s first meetings, but I would catch him watching me and would see him become as flustered by being caught staring as I had been when I’d been caught watching him over the past week. At morning practice he was manic, sometimes changing places in drill lines so he wouldn’t have to face me, other times striking me viciously. Once, he tackled me so hard he broke off one of the plastic clasps that held my face mask, so I had to get a loaner helmet from Cyrus Pyle while mine was fixed.
Chase couldn’t come down on whether the carrot or the stick was the best way to prevent me from telling the team what I had witnessed, but he needn’t have worried: I had no appetite for embarrassing him in front of the others. If anything, I was grateful for what had happened. It had been thrilling to hold his wrist, to feel his strength surge beneath his skin, to feel his adrenaline make mad fast laps around his thick, warm body.
THREE
Camp ended and the team’s freshmen were given Sunday afternoon to move into Stager Hall, a red brick and white marble dormitory perched at the top edge of East Campus’s main quad. The room Reshawn and I were to share was small, irregularly shaped, and old, outfitted with cast iron doorknobs, painted-over water pipes that ran along the ceiling, and a pair of creaky wood-framed windows we had to shove open because this building in the heart of North Carolina didn’t have central air. I found the place unimpressive—if our school was so rich, why couldn’t it afford to put freshmen in a new building?—but Reshawn seemed energized by the genteel dilapidation, and he set about nesting so thoroughly you would have thought he planned on living here for the next ten years: carefully arranging photographs of his parents and two little brothers on the windowsill next to his bed, alphabetizing on our built-in bookshelf the hundred-odd volumes he’d packed into a large wheeled suitcase, and showing an indecisiveness I’d never seen from him before as he vacillated over where to hang a collage print—the name in the corner said Bearden—depicting three sad-eyed, snub-footed musicians jamming on a country shack’s porch.
He finally settled on placing the print above his bed, and he was standing on his mattress and tacking it up there when an Asian girl knocked on our open door. She was tall and bob-haired and wore a lemon-colored sundress.
—Football players? she asked, seeing the logos on my T-shirt and shorts.
—Yeah, I drawled proudly.
I noticed the armpits of her dress were dark. With a wilting smile, she asked:
—Would you do me the biggest favor?
Her name was Michelle. We followed her to the parking lot behind the dorm, where an elderly man was laboring to haul a heavy wooden futon frame from the trunk of his minivan. Michelle took him by the elbow and said something not-English, pointing at us.
—My grandpa really shouldn’t be lifting this stuff.
We carried the frame up for her, as well as the unwieldy futon mattress, and in thanks for our help she insisted we stay in her room while she ran downstairs to buy us water from the vending machine. Her grandfather remained stoically upright while she was in the room, but the moment she left he plopped down onto a bare striped mattress, pulling a crinkled handkerchief from his pocket to dab his forehead. He offered me the rag, and though I tried to wave him off he impatiently shook the thing at me until I gave in and dabbed some of his sweat onto my own.
Reshawn, meanwhile, was looking over a stack of books on Michelle’s desk, bending nearly perpendicular as he read the spines. Michelle returned with an armful of frosty Dasani bottles and handed them out. Her grandfather started rising, but she laid a hand on his shoulder to keep him resting.
Reshawn gestured at the AP Biology textbook in her stack.
—Premed? he asked.
—Yeah maybe, she said in an excited rush. Or PhD. Or maybe MD/PhD? I don’t know—I just want to study neurology.
—Do you like Oliver Sacks?
She didn’t know who he was, and with that Reshawn set down his water bottle and jogged to our room, returning with his copy of Awakenings.
—I also have some of his essays, he said.
She read the back cover.
—Are you premed, too?
—Nah. I just like stuff about the brain.
She looked up from the book, and her expression suggested she wouldn’t have minded a back cover for Reshawn, something to summarize why this bruiser owned a personal copy of a 1970s medical memoir.
Michelle invited us to meet her at the freshman carnival being held tonight on the quad. Reshawn practically shouted yes and then rushed back to our room to get ready. He took a long shower and returned brushing his hair in short, vigorous swipes, which confused me: his hair was maybe an inch high, and I didn’t understand what good all the brushing did. He proceeded to try on half
