My routine’s next stage was carefully lacing my cleats, but when I went to do so, I saw my shoes were missing from the bottom cubby space of my locker, where I always kept them. Maybe I’d just placed them in a different cubby yesterday? But those cubbies were already filled with my other shoes. Had I taken them back to the dorm? Of course not. We were fifteen minutes from Coach Zeller’s pregame speech, and every second I failed to find my shoes, another layer of luck fell away.
Chase. He was sitting in his locker, tying on his own cleats and not-looking at me in a way that suggested he was only pretending he wasn’t watching me freak out. It had taken me eight months to break in those cleats the way I liked them; if I were to wear my second, unused pair, I wouldn’t get ten minutes into warm-ups before my feet developed blisters. He’d sabotaged me. Again.
I stomped over to his locker and looked over his shoulder into his locker’s cubbies.
—You lost, retard?
—Where’d you put them?
—Put what? Your tampons?
—My cleats, you faggot.
The word just leapt out of my mouth. Chase was caught off guard, too, and was more surprised than angry when he responded:
—I don’t have your shoes.
—Well, they were in my locker, I said, pointing back at it. And now they aren’t. I’m not fucking around, Chase.
—And I don’t have your fucking cleats!
—Yo, settle down.
This was Cornelius, whose locker was three spots down from mine and who’d been disturbed enough by our bickering to pause in writing ritualized runes onto his wrist tape. I admired Cornelius as much as I did anybody on the team and wouldn’t dare disobey him. I stalked back to my locker and stewed, resigned to the new cleats. Just as I’d feared, they pinched my heels when I slid them on.
—Can’t win anything fairly, I muttered.
—What, retard?
I looked directly at Chase.
—I said, you have to fucking cheat to get anything you want.
—Fuck you.
I was standing again.
—Couldn’t get Sadie on the phone, Chasey? She tell you to fuck yourself again, Chasey?
Chase hurled his helmet at me, missing my head by inches. I rushed him, ready to punch him in the throat, but Cornelius stepped between us.
—Chill, Furling! Go dress in another cube … God damn.
I snatched my new cleats, shoulder pads, and helmet, walking past Chase, staring at him, daring him to hit me. But he didn’t move, and I sat in an empty locker in a cube on the opposite side of the room, so furious I didn’t acknowledge the jokes players were cracking about my newfound temper. I was thinking about Chase, not the game or my assignments, which is exactly what he must have wanted.
A minute before Zeller was to come in for the pre-scrimmage speech, Cyrus Pyle, the equipment manager, walked up to me. He was holding my shoes.
—I noticed they were down to the nubs, he said, handing them over.
They had new three-quarter-inch cleats screwed in. Embarrassment welled, but I pushed it back down, needing to regain focus.
I took Scan’s hand and followed the line of other paired-up players down into the tunnel. The structure trembled as we waited to be introduced, the steel vibrating in a way it never had, and when we sprinted onto the game field we were met with a roar I hadn’t expected to hear in Blenheim. The Crown Committee’s advertising campaign had worked, and the lower third of the stadium, from one end of the horseshoe to the other, was filled with fans, some 12,000 people. That left two-thirds of the stadium empty, of course, but to me, dressed in full pads, blood still boiling from the locker room episode, it seemed like the entire world had come to see us play.
The scrimmage would proceed in phases, the one offense facing off against the one defense, then twos versus twos. The one defense stood in a huddle on our sideline, listening to last instructions from our defensive coordinator. I stood nearby and caught Chase looking at me—and at my cleats.
He ran out with the starting defense, and if he didn’t play as poorly as he had last spring, he also was nowhere near his peak. “Mushy” is a good way to describe it. The ball would be snapped and he’d step into the gap he was supposed to fill, but he’d get stuck there and not make the tackle; or he would wrap up a ball carrier, but not well enough to bring him down by himself, having to wait for reinforcement defenders to finish the job.
—Remind me never to fuck with you, Jimbo said, standing next to me on the sideline. Bringing up Sadie was some cold shit.
Guilt tried staking another claim, but I wasn’t going to let it, not now. I focused on Coach Hightower, who was growing impatient with Chase, pointing out to me all the things he was doing wrong. Chase mistakenly blitzed instead of dropping back into coverage, and Hightower had enough. He threw his call sheet into the air.
—Get his ass out!
There it was, the shove, and here I was, sprinting on the field,
