I smiled.
—What do you have now? he continued.
—Melville in the English building. You?
—Not Melville in the English building.
This exchange might seem mundane, and I guess it was, but mundanity was also what made it so extraordinary. I could sense a new evenness to Chase, a comfort in his own skin. Public Chase and Private Chase seemed to have collapsed into someone I hadn’t met before, someone sustainable, someone who might be lastingly likeable. Was this the only Chase I’d know from now on? If it was, maybe I wouldn’t even need to tell Thao what happened.
In twelve days’ time the team would be in South Bend to play the University of Notre Dame for our first game of the season. Notre Dame was one of the most prestigious opponents in Division One, a nationally ranked squad, not to mention a program whose every game was broadcast to millions of people weekly on NBC. It was the biggest debut imaginable for King Football, and a public relations campaign was in full swing to generate excitement among our steadily growing fan base.
The latest step in that campaign took place the next evening, following practice. We dressed in our purple game jerseys and jeans in the locker room and migrated upstairs to the third floor, whose old, fusty trappings had been renovated into the futuristic football aesthetic you find at the country’s great programs. A latticed steel-and-glass veneer had been overlaid on the drab white walls, the coffee machines with their singed hotplates were traded out for automated K-cup machines, while the entire back wall was now a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked onto our stadium. The floor was split into four main areas: a King Football Hall of Fame tricked out with interactive displays; a chic restaurant called The Scepter that was to serve as a kind of on-campus extension of the King Club; a series of luxuriously appointed offices for members of the Crown Committee; and a ballroom complete with a custom-made chandelier fashioned out of curlicued iron.
Long folding tables had been arranged into a U in the ballroom, and we took our seats in the order of our game jerseys. Soon after we sat, the doors cracked open to let in a surprisingly heavy stream of fans, from infant boys in King Football onesies, to perma-bachelors in head-to-toe King gear, to a trio of walkered octogenarians who informed each and every player that they were the last surviving members of King’s 1948 Rose Bowl team. With gold permanent markers we autographed complimentary posters with this season’s schedule printed on them, footballs, baseball caps, old game programs, the backs of T-shirts, the thighs of jeans. Many fans were asking me to sign copies of the USA Today profile by Arnold Duffy, and I saw that, in addition to the free posters, Mary Sue Kim and other Athletic Department flacks were giving out copies of the paper.
Most of the fans had already read the article, judging from how often people stopped in front of Reshawn to ask after his mother’s health, tell him they had someone in their own family suffering from MS. One sun-poisoned man in overalls was a preacher, and without warning he laid his right hand on top of Reshawn’s head, removed a miniature Bible from his back pocket, and held the book aloft as he silenced the room with a resounding
—LOOOOOOOOOOORD!
People bowed their heads and closed their eyes, mothers shushing children.
—Lord GOD we ask that you massage your mercy into the legs of Reshawn’s mother!
—Yes Lord!
—Take away her illness!
—Praise!
—ERASE her pain!
—Please please!
—We ask you to FILL FILL FILL her with the light of your truth, Almighty God, which guides us through this dark world every day! And we ask all this in the name of your only begotten son, Jesus Christ.
Reshawn kept his eyes open the whole prayer, looking up at the preacher with the intensity of someone trying to use only his neck muscles to prevent his head from being shoved underwater.
What a difference a year made. Last season I was so inconsequential nobody on the team cared whether I wore pads on the sidelines during games, while this year I was to be on the field against Notre Dame more than any other player—in addition to starting at Will linebacker, I was also a starter on the kickoff and kickoff return squads.
I was perfectly ecstatic about that, and when kickoff was called onto the field at practice the next afternoon, day turned to night and our practice field morphed into the glittering, bulb-bathed Notre Dame Stadium, complete with an 80,000-strong crowd emitting expectant surf-murmur as they waited for the kick. I locked hands with my fellow starters and ducked my head to listen to the huddle call.
—Break!
We fanned out to our positions. I sank my hips, swaying right-to-left in time with the crouching players ahead of me. The kicker raised his arm, the whistle sounded, and as the kicker lowered his arm and advanced toward the ball, I did too, slowly, slowly, until the ball was up and I was off, the crowd screaming as I sprinted downfield and keyed in on the Notre Dame snarler assigned to block me. My left arm crooked into a right-angled weapon I used to tear through that blocker’s arms. Dip, rip, I was past him, now running so fast I felt I was in a kind of horizontal free fall, bearing down on the Notre Dame returner, on the verge of making my first tackle of my college career. But just when I was about to wrap him up, the back of my right shoulder pad was jolted and I was knocked off balance, redirecting me away from the returner and costing me the tackle. With that, the stadium reverted to the practice fields, night turned back to day, and I was staring at Barron Filmore, the freshman tight end who’d just blocked me illegally.
Our freshman class was more than
