I worried my rift with him would become a rift with the wider team, that the vets would take his side against mine. But I was safe—not just because a player drunkenly slamming another to the ground at Stefan Knows was far from unusual, but because many of my teammates were happy I’d done so. The first one to tell me as much was Cornelius Belkins, our starting Mike linebacker and Chase’s roommate freshman year. Cornelius was born to two heroin addicts in Oakland who’d schlepped little him from one shelter to another until they were arrested for killing a store clerk during a botched armed robbery. Both were sentenced to life without parole when Cornelius was three, leaving him to bounce around aunts’, uncles’, and grandparents’ houses, school to school, a strong-bodied, stronger-willed child who flipped from wary silence to destructive outbursts without warning. By nine he’d run out of relatives and was made a ward of the state, and his life would surely have gotten more difficult had it not been for the loving foster parents who adopted him. His new parents were social workers who moved him to Sacramento and enrolled him in an alternative school, an oasis of patience that taught Cornelius how to sequester his anger and use it only in sanctioned places, like the football field. His outbursts gradually subsided, and his quiet, watchful side gained the upper hand, so that by the end of high school he was captain of his football team and a speaker at graduation.
Radically self-sufficient, Cornelius was the worst possible match for the needy, spoiled Chase, and the two of them made horrendous freshman roommates. If anyone could tempt Cornelius into his old anger, it was Chase, and to prevent himself from backsliding Cornelius spent the majority of his first year in the East library, giving Chase and Sadie free rein to fuck, study, and watch movies on Chase’s big-screen TV. The rare times Cornelius was in the room, he’d grit his teeth listening to Chase’s passive-aggressive digs about Cornelius’s habit of leaving wet towels on the back of his desk chair, or oblivious cavils about the souped-up truck Chase wanted to trade for a newer, even more expensive pickup.
By the end of that year Cornelius declared he would rather pitch a tent on the quad than room with Chase McGerrin again, and sophomore year the only person willing to live with Chase was our punter, Gunter Atkinson, and that only because Gunter had just transferred from the University of Richmond and didn’t know what a nightmare Chase was. Gunter spent his first year at King listening to Chase argue on the phone with the girlfriend who’d transferred to Georgetown—often at one and three and five in the morning. Gunter told me he fantasized about smothering Chase with a pillow while the asshole was asleep, and come that spring he laughed in Chase’s face when Chase asked if he wanted to room together again—as had everybody else in their class, which is how Chase came to pay the extra money to live alone in his Central apartment.
Learning all this might well have led me to feel for Chase, knowing his behavior was a compulsion he couldn’t really control, knowing there was decency beneath all the posturing—might have, had it not been for the fact that, along with hearing these stories, I was also hearing the rumors he was spreading about me, such as the one that depicted me as a homesick little bitch during camp who had begged him to hold my hand while I cried in bed. So, no—no reconciliation, no forgiveness, only a resumption of our rivalry, which had higher stakes than ever now that Fade had graduated and we were competing for the starting Will linebacker spot.
My first order of business in beating out Chase was gaining weight, and as the spring semester got under way, breakfast and lunch and dinner ceased to be three separate meals and combined into a single, massive ordeal I shoveled down daily: fried eggs, slab bacon, link sausage, buttermilk pancakes, buttermilk biscuits, Belgian waffles, cheese grits, bacon ranch cheeseburgers, coconut chicken fingers, garlic knots, garlic fries, whole red velvet cakes, whole pecan pies. There were appetizers for my appetizers, snacks between snacks. My cholesterol shot through the roof and my bathroom visits became the stuff of horror films, but I was gaining another pound every couple weeks.
The next task was strength, and at team workouts I sacrificed my body upon the altar of my Body: bench press, incline press, decline press, military press, squats, cleans, hang cleans, dead lifts, biceps curls, lat pull-downs, triceps pull-downs, box jumps, suicides. My skin swelled so tight with angry muscle I felt at once like a water balloon and like the crazy-eyed kid who’d attached the balloon to a full-blast spigot, and I became so sore so perpetually that the act of rising from a chair in class, of climbing a solitary flight of stairs, of sneezing could leave me breathless. But, again, I was seeing progress: my lift maxes and vertical leaps rose, while my 40-yard-dash and shuttle times dropped.
And then there were the “fitness games,” periodic strength contests that brought the coaching staff down from the fifth floor to watch. Our inaugural game fell on the last Friday of January. After my group finished its regular lift and conditioning, we were told to return to the weight room, grab two matching dumbbells weighing not less than forty pounds apiece, and form a circle that wound around the perimeter of the room. Like a train of circus elephants we were to march clockwise, doing a “lunge” every step. Lunging involves keeping your back straight and, weights hanging off each arm, touching alternate knees to the ground as you advance. But we noticed something troubling as we approached the rack to choose our weights: King Football had acquired a brandnew set of dumbbells, and the scored handles
