He looked at the sign, unconcerned.
—Your boyfriend’s name.
—That’s a girl’s name, you moron. I knew you were stupid, but this—
—That’s code for your faggot boyfriend. Cornelius sucked his teeth.
—McGerrin, why you always trying to stir up shit?
—Why would Furling punch me in the fucking face if he wasn’t hiding something?
Chase turned to me.
—If that’s a girl’s name, show them your phone. Show them the texts you get from “Gwen.”
People in the cube looked at me, thinking I would show them my phone and clear everything up.
—This is some desperate shit, I said, throwing my pen at my locker.
Chase walked over to my cube to try and take my phone. I shoved him away.
—See! he said, regaining his footing. Faggot doesn’t want me anywhere near it.
—Enough, Cornelius said, stepping up to me. Just give it.
He saw me hesitate—as did everyone in the cube, as did Jimbo and the other people from other cubes who’d come over to watch us.
—Furling, Jimbo said. Are you serious?
Cornelius was still waiting, and I could see he was clinging to his sympathy for me. He despised Chase for having been a nightmare roommate their freshman year; he wanted to believe me. Finally he just snatched my phone from my hand.
The amount of time it’s taken for mountains to form and crumble. The eras in which whole empires have been built and razed. Those spans must have seemed much, much shorter than it was to watch Cornelius stare at my screen. And when he reached the text Thao sent me last night, he looked up from the phone with—it wasn’t disgust. Not yet.
Gwen. Players knew this technically referred to the boy I’d been dating, but because they didn’t have an actual human being to attach that name to, it existed as an abstraction that had an abstraction’s flexibility—it could easily be used as a name for me, could serve as a handy way to differentiate between the boy they had in front of them and the boy they had known. Miles was the starting Will linebacker, the redshirt freshman from Colorado, the teammate, the friend. Gwen was the faggot, the infection the body of the team needed to reject.
Most players first heard the name in meetings, and when I walked into a room, I would see teammates lift their eyes to track me; and because it was so hard at first for them to believe I was what I’d been accused of being, many would lean over to me during film to whisper reassurances, to say that they thought it was bullshit, stay strong until the truth comes out. But this grace period was short-lived, since these doubters and defenders would be referred to one of two people—Chase, who was spreading his accusations as fast as his ugly mouth could spew them, or Cornelius, who stood as sober witness. By the time I got to the practice fields that afternoon, only a couple players walked up to pat me on the shoulder and halfheartedly say everything would be all right.
The whistle for stretch was blown, and I partnered with Reshawn. I hadn’t seen him yet today, and my heart thudded painfully as I lay on the grass and raised my right leg, waiting to see him hesitate. But, as always, he took a knee next to me, his crotch only inches from mine as he cradled my upraised leg, rested my calf against his shoulder pad, and leaned forward to stretch my hamstring.
—Gwen! Errol yelled. Do semen really taste different if the dude you suckin’ off eats pineapple?
Reshawn looked down at me.
—The fuck is he talking about?
I realized Reshawn was so far removed from the team’s mainstream, so loath to linger in the locker room or any other place where teammates gathered, that he hadn’t heard what happened yet.
—Who knows, I said.
From stretch we jogged to Special Teams period, where I joined the one huddle for kickoff. Like any other huddle, players held hands; but when I reached over to take the hand of Donald Hans, a junior fullback, he shook me off. We broke the huddle, and when the kick was up and we sprinted downfield, I felt like there was an invisible bungee cord tied around my waist that was preventing me from running full speed, a cord that only got tenser, tauter, the farther I ran, a cord that, were I to stop, would fling me backward into the woods bordering the field.
—Gwen, you got a dress I can borrow?
Chase asked me this when the linebackers gathered for Individual period. I wanted to unbuckle my helmet and beat him to death with it; but getting into a fight would anger the coaches, and that was the last thing I needed. The best I could do was trade places with others in the drill line so I faced Chase, collided with him, tried to inflict pain on him, maybe even injure him. But I was too distracted, and my form was sloppy. He overmatched me every time.
A text message from the real Gwen—or maybe I should say the less fake one—was waiting in my phone when I returned to the locker room. I didn’t reply. I skipped showering and whatever special hell that would have entailed and drove to Training Table, which I did merely so I could get my name checked off the roll list the graduate assistants maintained for team meals. I bought food back on West Campus, not remembering I still had the stink of practice on me until the café employee crinkled her nose as I raised my arm to give her my cash. I returned to the dorm where Reshawn and I now lived—Mennee Hall, a Collegiate Gothic masterpiece in the center of West that had verdigris downspouts running up the sides of the façade and gargoyles grimacing on its eaves—and headed for the showers.
Reshawn was at his desk, exchanging the textbooks in his
