—So he’s where, at a game? he asked.
—Are you in one of his classes?
—No no, we met at Brown.
—In Cleveland? He laughed.
—Not the Browns. Brown. University? We were on the same campus tour. He was obsessed with how you didn’t have to declare a major. We learned we were staying at the same hotel in Providence and spent the weekend hanging out.
The more he talked, the less I understood. Ivy League schools like Brown were not just D1AA and consistently boasted the division’s worst teams, but they gave you no money, none, for athletic scholarships. Whenever one of the programs had contacted me, I felt offended they would dare to even think I would consider playing for them. So it would have been confusing enough to learn Reshawn had let it cross his mind to humor one of these schools, and I don’t quite know how to convey the disorientation of hearing this kid say he thought Reshawn was planning on attending one.
—We lost touch last year, the kid continued. I assumed he’d gone to Brown, but a girl at lunch today was talking about this football player named Reshawn who lives in her dorm. I’d thought it was a different kid, but then she says this guy brought like five hundred books for his dorm room, so I knew it was him.
—You didn’t know Reshawn was a football player?
—I saw he was muscular, but this was a guy who kept talking about the history of Anne Hutchinson he was reading. You really lucked out—my roommate’s an asshole. I’d give anything to have someone nice like Reshawn.
—You sure you’ve got the right person?
He paused, miffed by the suggestion that Reshawn was himself an asshole.
—One hundred percent.
I read the note as soon as he left. The kid’s name was Jesse, and the note referred to people, places, and events I had no context for. But that didn’t matter. What did was the warmth in Jesse’s writing, the exclamation points, the insistence they catch up.
I lay down for my nap, but I couldn’t manage to fall asleep, restless with all the paradoxes. Reshawn was taking bribes on top of his full scholarship, but had considered attending a school where they didn’t even pay for your textbooks. He despised football, and had just played yet another dazzling game. But I think what unsettled me most was the idea that the Reshawn Jesse had met and the one I’d known at school could be so antipodal, that Jesse had grown fond of an eager kid, an excitable literature nerd, while I was living with someone who smiled so seldom I couldn’t have said with certainty that he possessed all his teeth.
You had to go back six seasons to find the last time we started with a record as good as 2–2, and more than a decade for our last victory over Georgia Tech. But for all that, the Hay was sedate during Sunday film and grew even glummer as we entered the next week. Short-tempered players were liable to snap at the slightest provocation, while whole cubes that were usually riots of pranks and howling laughter went silent. I was at a loss until I overheard Devonté and Fade talking during afternoon lift: midterm grades were out on Wednesday.
King’s system was in the process of transitioning from paper to digital, and this was the last semester in school history when you first learned what your grades were when you held a piece of watermarked paper. After breakfast on Wednesday I walked with Scan, J1, and J2 to the mail room in the basement of the East Student Union, a low-ceilinged, windowless space whose walls were honeycombed with metal post-office boxes.
—Fuck, J2 muttered as we squared up.
On the count of three we inserted our keys and removed our envelopes. Scan let out happy little noises at the sight of his grades. J1 and J2 both squinted at their sheets, as if to blur the Ds into Cs and the Fs into Bs. I winced at my own report.
Intro CompSci
A
Sports Market. in Mod. Age
A
Whose Public Policy?
A
Dinosaurs
A
I took no pleasure in the grades, and not only because I’d gotten them in the easiest classes I had ever taken. They signified how much spare time I had, no new defensive packages for me to memorize, no punishing games to recover from.
—Furling, what’d you get?
—Doesn’t matter, I said, tossing my report in the trash.
The coaches also received copies, and before afternoon film we convened in the Team Room to hear Coach Zeller’s impression of the team’s academic status. He ambled in just after two-thirty, wearing an inscrutable smile.
—How’re y’all’s asses? he asked. Sore?
—Yes sir.
—I bet they are. One of my TCU coaches use to have this sayin’. He told us academics come first. Zeller held up two fingers.
—And football comes second. Now he held up one finger.
A few players chuckled, but most people, including Zeller himself, weren’t amused.
—That was funny at TCU, he continued. But we can’t fuck around at a school like this. I need y’all eligible, or else this whole thing goes to shit. So listen up: anybody below a 2.5 has study hall the rest of the semester. Get your hand down, O’Connor, I already know what you’re gonna say. I don’t give a good goddamn if you’re fifth year or freshman. You’re below 2.5, your ass is in study hall till December. And do not test me. You miss a session and you’ll be running a stadium at six a.m. Reshawn, Miles.
—Yes sir, we both said, sitting up in our chairs, exchanging confused looks.
—Y’all got some osmosis
