By that fall there was no question Reshawn’s passion for the game was gone—and no question his family needed him to attend college on scholarship, despite Ali and Senior’s lukewarm assurances that it was still up to him. He wanted Brown, yet felt he had no choice but to visit the football juggernauts that had been recruiting him, places that, yes, had good academics but, more important, would put him in the best stead to play professionally. Ali’s medical bills would be rising every year, and he needed to make whatever money he could for her by playing in the NFL.
Enter Coach Zeller, the newly crowned head coach of King College, who came to Archerville High last December to make what he knew was a long-shot pitch to the country’s best recruit. When Zeller arrived at the school that afternoon, Reshawn had just returned from spending his lunch break at the physical therapist with his mother, a session that had been especially horrible. The PT had told Ali she would need help walking soon and would eventually require a wheelchair. Reshawn was in a state when he met with Zeller, and they hadn’t been talking five minutes when Reshawn broke down and told the King coach far more than he’d admitted to any other recruiter—that he’d burned out of football, that he needed the sport more than ever. Zeller encouraged Reshawn to get everything off his chest.
Later that week, an unmarked envelope was pushed through the mail slot in the McCoys’ front door, ten thousand dollars in cash. Coach Zeller called that evening and said there was only one string attached, and a thin one at that. In exchange for the money, he’d like Reshawn to take one of his official visits to King. The visit alone would boost King’s profile, and if at the end of it Reshawn decided the school wasn’t for him, he could consider the money a get-well gift. Nothing more.
Reshawn hadn’t liked King, just as he’d hated all the other schools he’d officially visited, and he was planning on declining Zeller’s offer at the end of the weekend. Zeller surmised as much during the meeting he and Reshawn had on the same Saturday morning I was offered, and the last thing he asked Reshawn was that, before he made a final decision, he meet with Mr. McGerrin, the source of the money. As arranged, Mr. McGerrin had stopped by our hotel room the next morning, and yet this visit was anything but rote. McGerrin marched into the Marriott room and told Reshawn that as far as he was concerned, the moment the McCoys deposited his money into their bank account Reshawn had accepted King’s offer. By taking the bribe, Mr. McGerrin said, Reshawn had broken NCAA regulations, and if that came out, Reshawn wouldn’t be eligible to get any kind of scholarship, not from any school. Reshawn saw he was trapped, and was convinced this had been the plan all along—that Coach Zeller would play the good cop and Mr. McGerrin the bad. But who meant what was moot, and in the meeting with Mr. McGerrin, Reshawn realized the only thing left to do was haggle for more money.
—Camp, Reshawn was saying now. Film. Yes sir. No sir. Pretending like the game means a goddamn thing to me. I’m used to that. I can kind of turn my brain off while the body does the work. But going to school here? Sometimes I wish I’d just gone to one of those big bullshit programs. Here the professors, classmates—everything’s what I’d been wanting, but it’s like I’m being held back from having it. Like this place is being kept just out of my fucking grasp and all I can do is stare.
By now we’d walked three full laps around East Campus. Sad as his story was, I noticed Reshawn had relaxed while he talked; he had gotten some relief from telling me his story. I’m not saying he was hanging his arm around my shoulders. I was still a teammate, after all, still someone who adored the game he loathed, and I could sense the hesitance he still felt around me, a skepticism about whether I could ever truly understand what he was saying.
I had my own reservations. The me that Reshawn had liked tonight, the player who’d been willing to break from the herd to stop Chase from bullying Henry, he was half fiction. Reshawn didn’t know the real reason I’d thrown Chase, and I wasn’t sure it would ever be safe to tell him.
What I’m saying is, we finished that night as allies, not friends.
FOUR
Winter break was lonely and long—no childhood pals to catch up with, no old flames to rekindle, just solitary lifts in Sillitoe High’s weight room, wind sprints up the hillside of a municipal park, and marathon viewings of bowl games on my parents’ old corduroy couch. Every night at dinner Mom and Dad tried to make up for not visiting me at school by asking endless questions about it, and the difficulty I had in describing even the simplest events showed how the canyon gap that already existed between us when I left for college had only widened. But the main reason the visit was misery was Coach Johannsen. I’d been obsessing over the details of my encounter with Thao every day, every hour, every minute of the past month, feeling his whiskers on my cheek, his fingers squeezing my biceps, two kinds of touches I had never received from a man who wasn’t father, coach, or teammate, two touches that brought me to climax even quicker than the picturesque jocks in my back issues of Sports Illustrated. But the vigor of my fantasies was matched by my guilt for indulging them, and all break long I was convinced I’d run into my
