I was surprised that he continued to keep the secret. Jamie was leaving King, after all, and telling her didn’t seem to risk the secret spreading to the wrong people. But when I said as much to Reshawn, he just shrugged and asked what difference it would have made.
As it happened, the next morning we saw both of the men responsible for Reshawn’s stubborn silence. We had finished our first team workout and were undressing in the locker room when Mr. McGerrin and Coach Zeller walked in with the fifteen members of King Football’s newest class in tow. It was a historic group, universally considered our best-ever recruiting class. Each kid was at minimum a first-team All-State honoree, and several were All-Americans, their bodies so much bigger and brawnier than, say, those in my own freshman class that were it not for their baby fat and overcompensating coolness you would have thought they were seniors rather than pre-frosh. My teammates saw the recruiting coup as the latest sign of our program’s steady ascent, not to mention yet another confirmation that our head coach was as talented a recruiter as he was a strategist. Though both things were undeniably true, I also knew Mr. McGerrin had played his own quiet, crucial role—some, if not most, of these players must have received extra enticements to commit to King.
Ironically, though, the best player among them was also the one recruit I knew for certain hadn’t been bribed. He was the white kid standing at the head of the pack, six feet five inches of muscled lank, with buzzed hair the color of graphite and the whitest teeth I had ever seen. Errol Machen, a transfer student three years older than I was. He’d been the number two quarterback prospect in the nation my junior year of high school, and in contrast to Reshawn he’d lapped up the limelight during his prep days, glad to mug on magazine covers, comfortable chatting with reporters on postgame fields, happy to gossip with superfans during an ESPN-carried Signing Day ceremony in which he’d chosen Auburn over dozens of other top schools. But things had quickly gone downhill. When he arrived at Auburn, Errol went from being the savior of his team to just one of its many prophets, and his ego was ill equipped to handle the demotion. He threw water bottles and started fights, talked back to coaches and badmouthed his team to whatever reporter would listen. And yet even this was par among immature star recruits, and Errol rose to proper infamy only when, in the celebratory locker room following Auburn’s bowl win that December, he had been so bitterly jealous of the starting quarterback that he shoved the QB in front of the whole team, claiming it should have been him out on the field. This starter, who had taken Errol’s shit for the better part of four months, finally had enough and slammed the kid’s face against a locker seat, breaking his nose.
By then Errol had burned so many bridges that players and coaches alike blamed him and only him for the fight, and he was dismissed for violating team rules. The football world gorged itself on the scandal for the next few weeks, while Errol and his parents, who owned a string of liquor stores in a suburb north of Los Angeles, publicly and repeatedly threatened to sue the school. The threats made Errol so non grata that no other elite D1 team was willing to take him on as a transfer, and he was forced to retreat to a junior college in southwestern Arkansas to wait until he was picked up by a program. The elite coaches continued to stay away, and his anger over this snub made him so petulant that even coaches from lower-rung programs, men who should have been delighted to take Errol, said no thanks as well. Months passed, National Signing Day was approaching, and Errol realized he was staring down the barrel of life in limbo for another year, if not of becoming a cautionary tale about football hubris that coaches use to admonish their coltish players. And so when Coach George Zeller from the King College Monarchs visited to preach the from-the-margins gospel he’d given me when I was recruited, Errol kept an open mind.
—Hold up a minute, fellas.
A dozen of us were heading for class when Coach Zeller beckoned. He and Errol were standing next to the locker room’s Gatorade dispenser.
—Y’all meet Errol yet? Zeller asked.
—What’s good, Errol said, lifting his chin.
Though Errol had been raised in an all-white suburb, he affected what he thought was a black pattern of speech. He came off sounding like a hill person from West Virginia.
—Errol’s takin’ French with y’all, Zeller said, and turned to Errol, patting him on the shoulder. These guys’ll set you up.
We started across a dewy, steamy West Campus, heading for the Romance Languages Department. Reshawn hung toward the back, trying to avoid talking to Errol, but Errol found us anyway.
—Yo, you go to USC’s summer camp? he asked Reshawn.
—Nope.
—I swear I saw you there senior year.
—Must have been some other black kid.
Errol’s laugh was surprisingly high-pitched.
—McCoy’s got jokes…. You sealed the deal for me coming here. I figured someone like you’s at King? This place can fuckin’ win.
Reshawn walked even more slowly. But Errol took no notice, enamored of being seen walking alongside Reshawn, the one player on our team
