I crossed my feet beneath my chair.
—You need your teammates, Zeller continued. Coaches can support you all we want, but what it comes down to is foxholes.
—Foxholes.
—Exactly. I have no doubt you, uh, care for the men around you. But you need those men to care about you to the same degree. Otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
—I—
—You’re a special player, Miles. Seldom have I seen somebody blossom like you have over the last year. And it just kills me to be sayin’ this. But I got a responsibility to look out for the whole you, not just the player.
He paused, blowing air out of his nose resignedly.
—What I’m sayin’ is, I think you’d be better off at another program.
I tried to say something again, but he held up his hand.
—That talent of yours, that’ll make you real attractive to a lotta schools. Way more’n what were interested in high school. And when they find out you’re only eighteen? Phew. I can think of a couple dozen programs that would just fall over themselves. Penn State. Florida. Alabama.
Zeller knew precisely what he was doing, dropping the names of those programs, places I’d spent my childhood fantasizing about. For a moment the bait-and-switch worked, as I relished the fact that a coach of Zeller’s caliber was telling me I could play with the very best. But this was a sugar high that wore off fast, and remaining beneath was my knowledge that, if I was indeed such a valuable prospect, Zeller would be offering to stand up for me, tell the team to cut out the Gwenning. What he was proposing amounted to off-loading me onto another, unsuspecting program. Like a lemon a used-car dealer buffs to a high shine. Like an iffy stock whose value you know is going to plummet soon after it leaves your hands.
—But I love it here, I finally answered.
And that was the truth. Hellish as my life on the team had become, I still loved King. Zeller was unperturbed.
—I’m sure you do. But think how much more you’ll love a place where you’re not dealin’ with these kinds of rumors.
He lifted a wastebasket and spat.
—It’s the right choice, son. Rest assured we’ll keep you on scholarship while you’re lookin’ around. We got a whole year to find another place—though I suspect somebody’ll snatch you up real quick. It’s not every day a surefire All-American comes on the market.
He kept up the flattery a few more minutes, and when I stood to leave, he shook my hand and told me to put together a list of schools for him to contact. We would reconvene in a few days to get things started.
If there was anything resembling an upside to being forced off the team, it was that I gave up on secrecy, and after dinner that night at Training Table—where the players had already heard about my expulsion—I texted Thao to tell him to meet me in my dorm room. I did this because I felt liberated to, yes, but there was also aggression in my invitation, since I knew Reshawn would be in the room. I wanted to make Reshawn uncomfortable by having Thao over, wanted to force him—by which I mean force somebody—to accommodate me after a lifetime of making my own accommodations.
To my surprise, when Thao arrived, Reshawn not only made the effort to say hello but continued studying at his desk while we talked. Reshawn was offering an olive branch. But fuck him—too little, too late.
—Can’t you stay on the team? Thao asked, sitting next to me on the bed. Like, dare Zeller to force you to leave?
—Scholarships are renewed annually. He just wouldn’t renew it at the end of the spring. Anyway, even if I stayed here, I’d be a bottom feeder the rest of the time.
—A what?
“Bottom feeder” had become so engrained in my vocabulary that it took Thao’s question to remind me how strange a term it was.
—A loser who doesn’t play.
—What about—
Thao looked over at Reshawn uncertainly. I knew what he was getting at.
—Maybe I’ll actually follow Coach Johannsen’s advice at the next school, I said. Or maybe I’ll just find a better way to hide.
—I’ll move wherever you transfer, Thao said.
I squeezed his hand. After graduation he was planning on following a long-held dream to move to New York City and become a choreographer. Meanwhile, any D1 program worth its salt would be, at minimum, hundreds of miles away from New York. No, we would stay together only for as long as we both attended King.
The night was unseasonably cool, and Thao and I took a walk around West Campus. We held hands for the first time in public, moving slowly for the sake of my ankle—which, thanks to pressing down on it virtually the whole time I met with Zeller, had fresh circuits of pain sizzling through it. I felt a heavy, almost sweet sadness overtake me. I loved this part of West. Loved the tall, regularly spaced iron lamps, loved how the dark quad grass resembled deep water. I loved the archways that connected the residence halls, loved how the crenellations crowning the tops of dorms made this place look like the setting of a fairytale. I could have told you the name of every building I passed, which cafés were still open, where the best part of the library was to study after 8 p.m. King, I realized, had come to feel more like home than home ever had.
Going without seeing Thao for a week had been torture, and I simply couldn’t conceive of living hundreds, maybe thousands of miles apart. Next year we would call each other often, maybe I would visit him in New York. But we would fall out of touch eventually, and I’d be left to spend the rest of my time on earth carrying around an
