—Don’t know him, Reshawn said, and tried to change the subject. Did you see—
—I was outside the door at the Marriott. During our visit.
He stopped.
—You were fucking eavesdropping?
He was trying to intimidate me out of asking anything else. This would have worked before, but now I knew he was trying to cover his vulnerability with anger. I had the advantage.
—I didn’t hear that much, I said. Only the part where you told McGerrin other schools were offering you more.
He watched me a moment, then continued walking.
—That’s not how it happened.
—Then how?
—Why do you care? You want to blackmail me, too?
—Reshawn—
—What?
—Wouldn’t everything be easier? Couldn’t I—I don’t know. Couldn’t I help?
He laughed, which I thought was the final sign he wasn’t going to say anything more. We reached the bottom of the main quad, and I was about to turn left, toward Stager Hall, wondering if I’d spoiled the first good moment I’d had with him. But then he said:
—Let’s keep walking.
We turned right and walked to the far end of East Campus, where we joined the gravel jogging path that ran just inside the stone wall. Reshawn was quiet. I knew he was going to tell me his story, and I sensed that what had made him angry wasn’t only that I knew his secret, it was also the idea that I was trying to coerce him into talking. So I think why we walked the next five minutes in silence was that Reshawn wanted to make it perfectly clear that he, and only he, was in control of the telling.
Finally he started to speak.
For the first half of high school, he had loved being the game’s messiah and all the fanfare that came with it. His mailman carried a special bag for the dozens of handwritten letters coaches wrote him every week, the glossy school brochures, the personal testimonials from famous football alumni who wanted Reshawn to know their alma mater was the perfect fit. Ali had kept a scrapbook to hold the umpteen magazine articles and newspaper clippings, while Senior maintained a collection of VHSs on which he recorded every TV interview Reshawn gave. A simple walk through the Archerville mall would end with teenagers and grown men alike stopping him for autographs, photographs, recommendations-qua-interrogations for which programs he should consider. Growing up a black boy in Oregon had meant a childhood of unwanted stares, but now the attention seemed overwhelmingly of the good variety. The eyes no longer stopped at his skin but seemed to see right into the core of him, into his deepest, best self.
He had never given much thought to his schoolwork. He took easy classes he aced, and when his teachers told him he could be applying himself more, all he’d heard was that his brain was yet another of his preternatural muscles. Then, the summer before junior year, he contracted mononucleosis and was bed-bound for the better part of two months. It was the longest stretch he’d ever gone without playing some kind of sport, and the only thing he had the energy to do was read. First he read whatever was in the house, and when he tore through that, Ali started bringing home books from the library, novels she’d enjoyed when she was at Oregon State. He kicked the mono by late July and resumed training for the coming season, but to his parents’ surprise the reading didn’t stop. He said it was like a fever that replaced the fever. He read everywhere. During meals with his family. In between sets in the weight room. He was fascinated by how each book set its own borders, its own rules. One’s idea of what made a book great, or even what a book could be about—this got reinvented every time you started a new volume. Freedom, is what I think he was getting at.
Junior season started and he noticed a strange new feeling while he played. It was as if his body was leading the rest of him around—like his body wasn’t him but was in control of him. He hated the sensation, and he started to lose his taste for the attention he’d once adored, became impatient with people who asked for autographs, saw how rote the words were in the coaches’ letters. He was close with his parents, always had been, and was honest about his sudden cooling toward football. When his junior season ended, they talked through his options and agreed he would play his senior year and start putting together college applications separate from football. If he still felt that inner distance by the end of next season, he would be allowed to quit the game and apply to schools as a regular student.
Ali and Senior made this promise because they believed they could afford it. Senior had a few years earlier opened branches of his sporting goods store in two more towns, while Ali, who had served as both comanager and bookkeeper for the original store, became so overwhelmed by the added business she brought in a woman named Diane to help manage their finances. But the next ten months saw twin disasters. Diane proved to be a crook who siphoned money from the stores, and by the time the embezzlement was discovered, all three business were in harrowing financial trouble. Diane fled to Canada. While the scandal consumed the McCoys’ lives, Ali hadn’t thought to mention the strange tingling she had started to experience in her right leg. When she finally got around to seeing a doctor, the family had already traded the good private insurance they’d had for a much cheaper package, a cost-cutting measure that they’d been forced to take as their businesses drowned, and that now made their
