—Sir?
—Darren says y’all are the only roommates we ever had who both got a 4.0.
The whole room turned to glare. Reshawn kept watching me, not bothering to hide his surprise. I wanted to disintegrate.
—This is a team, Zeller said. I expect people like y’all to take the lead in makin’ sure the rest of your teammates stay in school. So get with folks and get to tutorin’.
—Yes sir, we both said again.
Nobody was going to ask Reshawn for help—the guy gave you a murderous look if you so much as asked to borrow his pencil—which left me all the more mobbed. In class teammates bickered over the desks near mine that gave unobstructed views of my quizzes, and after team dinners I attended study hall so as to float from table to table seeing what help I could provide. The desperate paid me some of their stipend or Pell Grant money in exchange for writing response papers, added income I gladly accepted. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts repairs I already had to make to my Saturn took a huge bite out of my own Pell funds, while the negligible walking-around cash I received as part of my scholarship barely covered the after-hours calories I devoured to try and gain Coach Hightower’s extra ten pounds.
A few evenings after Coach Zeller’s come-to-Jesus, Chase found me in study hall and asked if I’d come to his apartment for one-on-one tutoring. He’d received an especially bad midterm report, which didn’t surprise me. He was in three of my four classes, and for over a month I’d watched him snore through whatever lectures he hadn’t skipped.
I followed his truck to Central Campus, and when I entered his apartment I recalled how uncomfortable he’d grown during Jimbo’s rant about the wealth of King students. At the time I’d thought maybe that was because Sadie was rich and Chase was offended on her behalf; but now I understood Chase was the rich one, the rare player who could have afforded to attend King without a full scholarship. He lived alone, which you could only do if you paid an extra housing premium the team wouldn’t cover. There was a leather couch with cushions as soft as pork belly, a new flat-screen television, and a mighty sound system with cabinet-sized speakers that had been professionally mounted. Other details I’d observed about Chase clicked into place: that he wore a different Abercrombie and Fitch outfit every time I saw him (I’d learn his mother sent care packages once a month); the tricked-out truck he drove (his second since coming to King); and, more generally, the wide-stanced entitlement with which he approached life.
He was surprisingly gracious as we sat on the couch, offering me a beer and asking if I wanted to order some late-night pizza, his treat.
—Want to start with PubPol? I asked.
—Fuck yes. I didn’t know who the fuck those liars were Professor Wilson keeps talking about.
It took me a second. Outliers.
—It’s easy, I said, opening the textbook.
I’d been tutoring teammates since freshman year of high school and quickly recognized the telltale signs: Chase’s inability to sit still, his impatience with explanations, the unfunny jokes he cracked about his stupidity. After I explained outliers, we moved on to the homework that was due tomorrow. Halfway into my explanation of standard deviations, Chase asked if I’d finished the assignment yet. I knew what he was getting at and handed him my finished answer sheet. Now all the focus he’d been lacking snapped into place, and the apartment fell silent as he concentrated on copying my answers in such a way that the TA would have trouble matching his answer sheet with mine.
Idle, I finished my beer and went to get another. The refrigerator was decorated from top to bottom with photographs of Chase and Sadie: standing at the beer pong table at the Football House, sitting on the flagstone steps that led up to the King Chapel, Sadie smiling for the camera while Chase was too cool to do anything but stare. I thought, for the thousandth time since he’d told me, about him ejaculating onto Sadie.
A knock at the door. Chase took out his wallet and handed me a fifty-dollar bill to pay for the pizza. It only cost twenty, but when I returned to the couch and tried to give him the change, he waved me off.
—Keep it.
Thirty dollars would cover gas for my Saturn for two weeks. And yet I didn’t want to accept money from Chase like I had from other teammates, didn’t want tonight to amount to nothing more than a transaction. I insisted he take the money back.
A better payment by far was sitting next to him on the couch as he finished copying my homework.
To balance out the three consecutive away games we had at the beginning of the season, we played several games in a row at home. But though I was happy to have my weekends full up with football again, the streak of home games also made it painfully clear how right Jimbo had been—King Football meant nothing to King College.
When we played the University of Virginia, there were just as many seagulls picking through the trash in our stadium’s stands as there were people sitting in them. During Kent State, the only kids in the student section were frat boys who’d made the mistake of getting drunk before they painted King’s letters onto their torsos, spelling out KNG FOTBALL. And by the Navy game, word started spreading among players of the unsavory tactics the athletic department was using to boost the crowd count: instructors in King’s half-credit gym classes were talked into making attending games a course requirement, while members of the Blenheim Boys and Girls Club were bused to King on the pretext of exposing underprivileged kids to an elite college when really it was a way of adding a hundred-odd fans.
During Navy I could look at the family section behind our bench and
