Seven-thirty, Thanksgiving morning. Just plain wrong.
I stop the alarm on my phone and stare at the screen, trying to clear my head of the weird-ass dream that I can’t seem to remember. Something with T-ball, my seventh-grade math teacher, and Lily Branson. I don’t know who the lucky bastards are who enjoy their dreams every night. I only ever wake up frustrated and confused.
My covers are calling me back to them, but the thought of walking into practice late—to be the one guy standing at the back of the huddle, catching only the tail end of Coach’s talk, Coach watching you join the group but never pausing his speech, all the other guys knowing it, too, but unwilling to make eye contact with you—that gets my butt off my bed. That’s terrifying. Because the eight thousand suicides I’d have to run by myself wouldn’t be the worst part. My body would be past caring by that point, anyway. No, it’s the eight thousand suicides the whole team would have to run for my transgressions—JV and varsity—before my individual sentence began at the end of practice. And those are on top of the regularly scheduled suicides we run at the end of every practice. Coach calls them “opportunities”—opportunities to ensure that we leave absolutely everything on the floor.
Still, it will not be this 160-pound freshman who adds to that torture.
Dad’s already in the kitchen making coffee when I make my way downstairs. He’s sporting his plaid pajama pants that fall short of his ankles and his ancient Shippensburg sweatshirt, and the hair on the back of his head still stands straight up from his pillow.
“Looking good, Dad,” I say, grabbing a Pop-Tart from the cupboard. He grunts without turning around. Since Mom will be doing all the cooking for the family today, Dad volunteered to wake up early and drive me to practice.
I munch my Pop-Tart in silence. Dad reads the news on his tablet across the table. Mornings with Dad are kind of nice—there’s no pressure for conversation, and the sound of Dad’s coffee brewing is almost hypnotic. And even though it tastes like boiled mulch, I love the smell of it in the kitchen in the morning.
“You ready?” he says, bringing me back from wherever my mind drifted. Dad steps into his man-slippers and pulls on his long winter coat to complete the look.
“You’re going out like that?”
“I’m not planning on getting out of the car,” he says, pouring himself a cup of coffee for the road.
“Right.”
The ten-minute ride to school is equally peaceful, Dad sipping his coffee and jamming out to an old Dave Matthews CD of his. Most of the leaves are down now, and the sun is starting to shine through the bare branches of the trees in the neighborhood.
As we pull up in front of the school, the sun disappears behind the gym.
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah, thanks, Dad. See you later.”
Practice is brutal. Everyone else is as sluggish as me, including Coach, which makes him even more irritated by our sloppy, lethargic play. I don’t know how many times he stops a drill and yells, “Baseline!” for a quick, painful opportunity to redeem ourselves.
The only exceptions are Trip and Elijah Leppo, who’ve formed an interesting relationship when we square off for JV-varsity scrimmages during practice. Trip simply will not be outhustled. And even though Leppo is about as laid-back as any human on earth, he’s a pure athlete, and he loves the competition. They feed off each other: the better Leppo plays, the more Trip dials up the intensity. Leppo usually gets the best of him in the end, partly by being surrounded by a better supporting cast, but there’s no animosity, each one expecting the other to bring his best every time.
It’s how I imagined I’d be with Branson, making him work his ass off in practice, being the reason he takes his game to another level during real games. But because of my height, I’m automatically put down low at power forward, where I’m awkwardly matched with Trevor Lighty, which can be summarized with this quick graphic representation: │vs. █.
│ cannot box out █.│ cannot muscle through █.│ can only try to dance around █. And coaches are not particularly impressed by │ dancing around █. So yeah. I stick a few turnarounds over him—more of that “weak shit” from the Y—which pisses him off. When I miss, I have zero chance of a rebound because he’s already boxed me to the floor. It’s awesome.
Branson plays out on the wing at small forward, where he routinely annihilates Devin Heiner, one of the few juniors on the JV team. It’s like Branson’s on autopilot, which pisses me off, because it’s like his whole damn life is on autopilot.
After two-plus hours topped off by at least a dozen suicides, Coach calls an end to the suffering.
“All right, bring it in, gentlemen.” Coach goes on for a while about our focus and overcoming adversity and says some stuff about our opponents in next week’s tip-off tournament, but I’m not sure any of us hear it over our desperate gasping for oxygen and the visions of turkey and stuffing and pie-baking grannies that dance in our heads.
“Try not to eat too much today. Seven-thirty again tomorrow. If you come in the way you did today, you’re really going to be hurting.” He laughs a soulless laugh to himself. “All right, hands in. One, two, three—”
We all give a halfhearted “Black Bears” and disband. Trip and I stay behind to collect all the balls and put the racks back in the closet. One of the perks of being freshmen.
When we trudge down to the locker room a few minutes later, half the varsity guys are doubled over about something, but I don’t think anything of it. They’ve found a little more energy now that they get to go home. I’m sitting on the bench in front of my locker, pulling out my sweats, when I hear Lighty’s voice above the others.
“What’s the deal with the freshman, B? She sucking your dick yet?”
My body freezes. The other guys keep laughing.
“Dude, shut up,” Branson replies casually.
“She’s a cockmonster, isn’t she?”
I’m still frozen to my bench, one leg through my sweats, unable to raise my eyes from the crack in the mildewed floor tile in front of my foot.
The varsity guys are still laughing, including Branson. “Light, you’re an asshole,” he says. “This is why you never have a girlfriend.”
To which Lighty starts singing cockmonster in falsetto.
I manage to look up for a second, my hands trembling while I finish pulling my sweatpants on over my shorts.
Branson’s smiling—there’s not a hint of anger on his face, like this is all no big deal. He snaps Lighty, hard, with his towel, Lighty howling with glee.
When Branson turns back to his stuff, he sees me staring. I have no idea how the look on my face reads. I look down at my bag, yank the zipper closed, and sling it over my shoulder.
“Ignore him, Wainwright. He’s an asshole.”
I fake a laugh as best I can, manage some noise that resembles yeah as I walk by them out the door.
Trip comes out behind me and hustles to catch up.
“Were they talking about Tabby?”
“Yeah,” I say. I can barely get it out, and I can’t look Trip in the eye when I do.
“Tabby and Branson?”
I nod.
“Tabby’s a freshman.”
I nod again.
“He’s a senior.”
“I’m aware.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
Luckily, Dad’s car is parked along the curb, so I don’t have to wait while Branson and crew come out. I still feel like I’m consciously forcing my lungs to breathe, and I’m not sure I can continue this deep discussion with Trip.
The same Dave Matthews CD is playing when I open the car door. Dad’s combed his hair, but the slippers and pajama pants remain, and he’s sipping on what is likely his eighth cup of coffee.
“How was practice, bud?”
“Good.”
“Good.”
And back into the cocoon. Bless this man.
It starts snowing on the ride home—flurries that swirl up and over the car, never landing on the windshield to be wiped away. It’s like riding inside a snow globe that’s been shaken.
I stare out the window, the usual landmarks blurred by these unusual snowflakes, as my mind runs awful, ridiculous movies on a loop:
Branson going stone-faced in the locker room, grabbing Lighty by the neck and slamming him back into a locker.
“You don’t ever talk about Tabby that way.”
“S-s-sorry, dude. It was a joke!”
But that’s just stupid.
Or me, walking up behind Lighty as he’s singing his song, palming the back of his stubby, lumpy head and slamming his face into his locker, smashing his nose and knocking him unconscious. Then I turn to Branson, Lighty’s body laid out on the floor between us.
If you’re not going to be man enough to stand up for Tabby, then I will.
And I step over Lighty’s body and past Branson’s incredulous face, walking out without another word.
But my brain doesn’t like to let my fantasies run too far without slapping a little reality on them, rewinding the scene back for editing, so when I put my hand on Lighty’s head, it doesn’t budge.
“The fuck are you doing, freshman?”
And with one arm, he shoves me backward, sends me crashing over a bench, the whole team howling at the scene.
“Song’s not about me, dumbass. I’m not sucking your dick. But check with my man Branson, here. He’s into freshmen. He might let you suck his.”
More laughter. Including Branson.
And throughout all of these, I see flashes of Tabby—
Wow.
My brain sucks.
As we pull into our neighborhood, I try to focus on the familiar houses, the flurries, the music, Dad’s drumming on the steering wheel—anything to keep my brain in the present: It’s Thanksgiving. I’m going to eat awesome food till I’m sick, lie around on the couch, and let the drone of football announcers lull me to sleep.
Everything’s fine.