A few teammates—Jimbo chiefly—took open satisfaction in the sight of his suffering, but for the most part the players encouraged him, bringing him water bottles, putting their arms around him so he could lean on them in between conditioning sprints, yelling out that he’d return to his old self soon enough. Some did this because of genuine compassion for the boy who’d fallen out of shape while standing next to his mother’s hospital bed, but others—people I knew for a fact hated Reshawn—cheered him on simply because they understood we needed him to return to form if we wanted to make a real run at our first winning season in decades. Errol fell squarely into the latter camp. Off the field he would harp on the Intro to French snitch and studiously avoid talking to or even looking at Reshawn, but on the field there was nobody who encouraged our starting tailback more vociferously.
USA Today was delivered to Marriott guests’ doors, and on the last Friday morning of camp Reshawn and I stepped out of our room to discover that Arnold Duffy’s article had been published. Front page, above the fold, it featured a large photo of Reshawn and Coach Zeller returning from practice. They are entering the game field tunnel that leads up to the locker room, player and coach centered in the mouth of the tunnel. Reshawn is on the left-hand side and still wearing his shoulder pads, face mask dangling from the fingers of his left hand. Sweat beads his nape, and his body is slumped, head down. Coach Zeller is on the right, vigorous yet nurturing, his left hand resting on Reshawn, fingers gripping the back collar of his star’s shoulder pads.
Players were poring over the article when we arrived at Training Table for breakfast. They bragged about how swoll they looked in the background of other photos accompanying the story, boasted about how insightful they sounded when they were quoted. Duffy described me as a “rising star in Reshawn’s recruiting class.” It was the first time my name had appeared in the most important college football newspaper section in the country, and I had been dreaming of being described like this for, well, pretty much all my life. But I couldn’t derive any satisfaction from his words, and in fact wasn’t even able to bring myself to finish the article. I knew the thing was a sham, and I didn’t like how it prompted me to wonder how many of the other articles I’d cherished as a kid had been fiction.
By camp’s last practices Errol finally started getting the hang of our offense, while Reshawn recovered his old brilliance. The gamble Coach Zeller had taken in lying about Reshawn’s disappearance was going to pay off, and the man was in raptures whenever you saw him, humming the fight song as he hurried from one meeting room to another, lying down on a bench press during team lift to show us he still had some of his old college strength.
On Saturday afternoon, the penultimate day of camp, we were falling into formation for team stretch when Coach Zeller mused:
—Feels like I’ve lived ‘bout a hundred years the last three weeks. How about y’all?
He strolled between the lines of stretching players.
—Coach Armando, what we got planned tomorrow? —Normal schedule, Coach.
—That’s it? —Yes sir.
—Seems kinda anticlimactic. Zeller stopped.
—At the end of camp every year at TCU, we had us a freshman talent show. One of the best damn days of the whole season. What we got planned tomorrow night, Coach?
—Just move-in.
Zeller broke into a big smile.
—What do y’all think? he asked us. Freshman talent show tomorrow? Start a new King Football tradition?
—YES SIR!
Sunday happened to be my birthday. The team checked out of the Marriott that morning, and when Thao picked me up at the rotary during the afternoon break we drove to his house in Carsonville so he could give me his gift. I thought the “gift” was his body, which had to be the loveliest body in the history of the world, in particular the muscles that descended from either side of his belly button, twin grooves of hard smooth flesh called the iliac furrow, the Apollo’s belt. My hands rested on those grooves as I went down on him, gripping them when I felt his body lock into climax, and after he’d gone down on me and we lay on our sides in bed, facing each other, I trailed my index finger across those grooves again, skating along the hard, sweat-slicked surface.
—Do you want it now? he asked.
He didn’t wait for me to respond before jumping out of bed and hurrying downstairs. I felt so happy, listening to him bustle around the kitchen below, hearing his careful footsteps as he ascended the wooden stairs, and though I knew what I was about to see, when he nudged the door open with his hip and walked in carrying a small Black Forest cake with eighteen burning candles, I couldn’t stop myself from crying. Thao laughed gently and blew out the candles himself. He set the cake on his dresser and sat next to me in bed, rubbing my back.
That moment alone would have made this the best birthday I’d ever had. But then Thao drove me to West Campus, and when I followed the other linebackers into our meeting room I found a tray of homemade chocolate cupcakes waiting on the back desk. The number 18 was written on the cupcakes’ tops in white icing.
—You
