Mateo
A miracle happens.
Nell skips all her classes the next day to sleep late with me. Even though she’d sworn last time that it would never happen again. I didn’t even have to ask. When the alarm went off, she reached over and turned it off like she’d been doing all through the night, but instead of getting up and getting ready for school, she crawled back into my arms.
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t announce what she was doing. She just turned the thing off for good and settled back in with me.
Sleeping was not how I wanted to celebrate her loosening the reins a bit, but it was my only option. And something about just lying together like this felt better anyway.
By the time we’re awake for good, my symptoms have eased to nuisance level. The sensitivity to light and sound is the worst, but still bearable. My thoughts still occasionally wander off, but it’s rare enough that most people will just think I’m distracted. I’ve skipped all my classes, though that has less to do with the concussion and more to do with Nell, but there’s no skipping my daily workout and practice.
But I’m having trouble leaving Nell’s room.
There’s no need for her to monitor me for another night, but twice now I’ve slept with her beside me. I know what it’s like to wake to her soft thighs pressed against mine, to be surrounded by the smell of her hair and skin—I can’t un-know something like that. And I want it again. Even though, as a general rule, I don’t spend the night with girls. I made an exception that first night because it was her first time, and I didn’t want her to feel like I was running out on her. But that was supposed to be it. Supposed to be.
But Nell is never easy to put into a box. Just when I think I know where she fits in my life, she rearranges things. And really, what would it hurt to break this one rule? Just every once in a while. Not all the time. I want to enjoy the feel of waking up to her again when my mind isn’t battered and foggy.
She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop, e-mailing excuses to her professors. Her long, dark hair is twisted into this thick knot on top of her head. There’s one lock that didn’t make it in, and it falls loose and curly against her long neck. Before I really know what I’m doing, I’m climbing onto the bed behind her and reaching for those rogue strands. I settle in behind her, one of my legs on each side of hers.
“Tunnels tonight?”
She frowns, tilting her head slightly back toward me. “We can wait for all that stuff until you’re fully recovered.”
I lift my hands to her shoulders, kneading gently. “Hell no. You’re on a deadline, after all. Gotta get all your wild and crazy out before you graduate.” She opens her mouth to respond, but then closes it. And I wonder if she can hear the slight edge to my voice when I talk about her graduating. Not that I have a right to be pissed about it, but I can’t help it. I don’t like having a deadline. I don’t like not having a choice about how much time I get with her. I decide to keep talking so she doesn’t have time to dwell on it. “Besides, it’s not like the tunnels are going to be physically demanding. If I can make it through practice, I can definitely walk down some concrete tunnels. And then who knows, maybe I’ll even feel up to some more physical exertion afterward.”
I lean down to kiss her shoulder, but her back straightens, and she shifts to look back at me. Ignoring that last statement, she says, “You’re going to practice?”
“First I’ve gotta go lift.” And I am so not looking forward to the sound of the weight room—all clangs and thuds and scrapes. It’s going to be a nightmare. But a necessary one. “Then practice, yeah.”
Her eyebrows furrow, and I can see her debating about saying something before she finally spits it out. “So, you’re not telling your coach at all? Do you think that’s smart?”
It would be cute that she’s worried, if she weren’t voicing the thoughts I’ve done a lot of work to keep myself from thinking.
“I told you. I’ve had concussions before. This one is so mild I’ll probably feel good as new within the next few hours.”
“Yeah, but if you were to hit your head again shortly after your initial injury, it could cause serious damage. You could die. It could—”
I lower my mouth to hers, cutting her off. For a moment she resists, not quite kissing me back, but not completely immune either. After a few seconds she relaxes and one of her hands travels up to my neck. I get a little lost in her mouth. In the softness of her lips. The taste of her tongue. The quickening of her breath.
I pull back before I get carried away and give in to the urge to toss her computer to the ground and strip her naked.
“I’ll be fine, Nell. I know my limits. I promise I’ll be careful. You’ll see. You’re worrying about nothing. You and me. The tunnels. Tonight.”
Her eyes flick over mine, narrow, but then finally she nods.
DESPITE WHAT I told Nell, I don’t feel good as new in a few hours. I take it easy during my workout. They’re unsupervised—at least technically—so no one will call me out for going at half strength. But even taking it easy, I’m exhausted before I get halfway through my hour. I’m worn out by trying to appear normal while my nerves feel more and more raw by the second.
When practice starts, I very nearly spill to Coach. But then I tell myself that it’s laziness talking. I’m strong enough to power through this. My reasons for staying silent are the same today as they were yesterday. So I stick to my guns and suffer through practice. I think it’s obvious to everyone that I’m not up to par, but I hope they chalk it up to a bad day rather than to the fact that I’m avoiding getting tackled as much as possible.
If you don’t catch the ball, not much point in someone taking you to the grass.
I even take a nap after practice, but it barely takes the edge off, which is why I’m exhausted when I get to Nell’s later.
I can tell by her worried look when she sees me on her porch that this isn’t going to be good.
“You ready?” I ask.
She fixes me with a silent, assessing gaze.
Maybe I should have canceled. I knew she would give me grief over “knowing my limits,” but I wanted to see her. So I figure I can take a little grief.
“Come on.” I hold out a hand to her. “I’m excited about this. Both of our first times, remember?”
“Mateo . . .”
“We’re just walking. It’s nothing strenuous. We’ll walk a ways in, explore a bit, and then we’ll leave.”
“And you’ll sleep?”
I jump at the chance to spend another night with her.
“If you’ll be my nurse again.”
Her eyes lift in a smile even though her mouth doesn’t, and I know I’ve won. In my truck, I flip my heater on to full blast. Some hint of winter is beginning to creep in, and the night air is crisp and there’s a cold breeze. She’s wearing a light jacket, but I can tell as I drive that she’s cold. So I flip the middle console up, and tell her to scoot over, and I drive onto campus with her huddled close to me. We park near the tunnel entrance by the north parking garage, and I find a Rusk sweatshirt in the backseat to pull over her head for extra warmth. It swallows her, falling all the way to her knees, but the dark red looks good against her skin, and I like seeing her in it.
Even with her jacket and my sweatshirt, she loops her arm around mine and snuggles closer. I lead her down to the mouth of the tunnel, which at first glance looks like an oversize drainage pipe. A concrete-covered ditch runs for about fifty yards before the entrance to the tunnels, and a thin line of water runs down the middle. As we stand at the entrance, the tunnel looks dark and dank. Hardly the most romantic place, but it pricks my sense of adventure, and some of my fatigue gives way to anticipation.
“You’re sure this is safe?”
“Now that you mention it, I keep thinking of that disaster movie where one of those underwater tunnels in New York collapses and there’s a huge wave of water coming down the tunnel.”
“Fantastic. Exactly what I wanted to think about.”
I laugh and pull out the flashlight I brought with me. I direct the beam down the tunnel, and it shines far enough to show that it splits into three tunnels a little ways in. As far as I can tell from here, they’re parallel, but that doesn’t mean they don’t branch off somewhere farther down.
“Let’s go, sweetheart.”
Fifty feet in, we find our first piece of graffiti on the concrete wall. In faded black spray paint, it reads “College Is Okay If You,” then the writing gets too faded to read, leaving the secret to making college “okay” forever mysterious.
When we get to the split, I have Nell choose, and she picks the middle.
We stumble upon a zombie horde painted on the wall, and I squeeze her arm. “Good choice.”
She wrinkles her nose, and I laugh. The sound echoes eerily off the walls around us and causes a twinge of pain in my head.
Nell sees it.
“We shouldn’t have done this.”
“I’m fine,” I assure her. “Let’s keep going. Maybe the Batcave is somewhere down here. Or the Chamber of Secrets.”
She doesn’t react to my Harry Potter reference even though I know she’s read the series because I saw them on a shelf in her room. Stubbornly, she says, “You’re not fine. I did some research after you left this morning. You said you’ve had concussions before. And with each one, no matter how mild, your risk for brain trauma increases. The next time you hit your head a little too hard, the symptoms might not go away for months or at all. They could be permanent. I read an article about one football player who not only can’t play anymore, but he has to have a tutor in all of his classes even though he used to be a straight-A student. He can’t concentrate. Can’t retain facts. And it’s been three years since his last concussion. He can’t play football, and football has made it so that he’ll have a hard time doing anything else.”
“I know, Nell.”
She stops abruptly, pulling her arm away from mine. “You . . . know?” She sounds like my knowing this is some kind of betrayal.
“Yeah, I know it’s risky. But I’m a wide receiver. Not a rough-and-tumble tackler. I don’t take frequent hits to the head.”
“Frequent enough,” she says.
“In a good game, I make maybe six catches. A great game could be eight to ten. Some of those don’t even end in a tackle. And yes, I’m tired now. And I’m still showing symptoms, but I’ve got several days before the next game.”
“And what about practice?”
“I’m taking care of that.” Though I’m not sure how long I can get away with underperforming like I did today. One bad practice is fine, but any more and I might jeopardize my chance to play this weekend even if I don’t mention the concussion.
“It only takes one hit, Mateo. Just one. I get that you’re this big, strong athlete and you think you should just tough it out, but you’re wrong. This game can’t possibly be that important.”
“It is.” We’ve both stopped walking and she’s dropped my arm to square off with me in this dark and dreary corridor.
“Football’s your dream, and I get that. And I know your coach mentioning going pro the other week has you excited, but you also have to be realistic. It’s just not smart.”
Her words stir up long-buried memories, and in an instant all the things in her that remind me of Lina come to the surface, similarities that I haven’t thought about in a long time. But I’ve had this fight before. Maybe not about a concussion, but that dig about being realistic is always the same. People think it’s the nice way to help you manage your hopes . . . that they’re doing you a favor by being honest. But that’s fucking ridiculous. It assumes that you’re stupid or naive, that you don’t have reality beating down the door to your thoughts day in and day out. It takes fucking work to dream, and I don’t need anyone else shoving the unlikelihood of success in my face, because I do that to myself enough already.
I need someone to believe with me. To believe for me when I can’t believe myself.
“You have to take care of yourself, Mateo, if you want to—”
“You know what?” I say. “Turns out that I am pretty fucking tired.” I gesture to the tunnel walls. “I don’t know why I gave a shit about this anyway.”
I turn back toward the entrance, and I don’t pause to take hold of her hand or let her grab my arm. I need the space.
“Mateo. You can’t just keep deflecting like this. It’s not enough just to rest. You need to tell someone. You need to take precautions against—”
And then I just snap. I whirl around and pin her with the beam of the flashlight. “You know fuck all about what I need, Nell. Jesus, you’ve never even been to a game. You don’t know anything about football, and you don’t know anything about me.”
For a moment she looks small. Too damn small. The black of the tunnel looms around her, threatening to swallow her despite my measly light. Her arms are wrapped around her middle, and in that big sweatshirt she looks like she needs protecting.
From me.
And just when I’m about to go to her, to say something, to take back my harsh words . . . anything . . . she lifts her chin in that familiar proud way of hers.
“I’ve known you from the moment we met, Mateo Torres.”
How could I have forgotten? “A puppet? That’s what you called me, right? Letting other people pull my strings. Sorry, sweetheart, but I pull my own strings.”
“Maybe you do. But you’re still performing for other people. You play class clown for others, thinking it makes them like you or makes you fun. But history has a word for that . . . you’re playing the fool.”
That hits me harder than any tackle, and for all her words about it just taking one hit to knock me out, it’s ironic that she would be the one to deliver the worst blow.
“Fuck this. I don’t need any of this.”
I take off down the tunnel, heading back for the small hole of light I can see in the distance. My feet splash through puddles, and the noise from my movements amplifies in the small space, becomes harsher and distorted as it echoes. Then I hear Nell hurrying along behind me. She calls out, “I’m not saying you are a fool. Mateo, would you stop? Listen to me for a second. You’re smart and kind and wonderful, and I—I . . .” She sucks in a breath, probably from trying to keep pace with me, but I don’t stop. “I’m just saying you don’t need to play that part for other people. Your friends care about you. I care about you. You don’t need to pretend for us.”
I jerk around, and she barely skids to a stop before slamming into me. And my voice is too loud, and she’s too close, everything is too close as I yell, “It’s for me, damn it. It’s not for you. It’s not for my friends. Did you ever think of that while you were dissecting me? My life? The way I am . . . I do that for me.”
My heart thuds in my ears so loud I’m surprised it doesn’t echo in the tunnel, too. Nell swallows, and I can see those big eyes working, studying me, moving around the pieces of me in her head to fit this new development.
“Why?”
One damn word. Just one damn word, and it’s the absolute last thing I want her to say because I know how my answer will sound. Pathetic boy with a broken heart pretending so it doesn’t hurt. It’s so goddamn ridiculous.
“Because it helps. Helped.”
She lifts a hand like she wants to touch me, but then seems to second-guess herself, and it stays hanging in the air between us as she asks, “With what?”
Then I tell her everything about Lina. With my eyes on the ceiling and the walls so that I don’t have to look at her, I tell her how in love I was.
“She was this brilliant, confident girl. The kind of girl that when you look at her, you know she can do anything, be anything. She had the whole fucking world in the palm of her hand, and she had me there, too. From the moment I met her. But you can’t . . . you can’t love someone like that without feeling like you have something to prove. To her. To the world. I needed everyone to know that we belonged together. That even if I wasn’t some genius, even if I had zero hope of going to the Ivy League schools that were practically begging for her attention, I was important. I was going places. So when it looked like football could do that for me, I threw everything into it. I had to play college ball. I had to go pro. There was no other option. She and football were linked in my head, the two great loves of my life, and I would have done anything, given whatever it took, to keep them both.”
I break off, and I realize that my breathing is ragged, that my heart is pounding hard enough to put a dent in my ribs.
“What happened?” she asks.
And finally, I look at her. Only she’s not looking at me; she has her arms wrapped around herself and her gaze on the circle of light my flashlight makes on the ground.
“I got too caught up in it all. I was so focused on proving myself that I didn’t realize I was losing everything in my attempt to gain it. Lina and I started fighting. Every time I brought up football, she would tell me to be realistic, that I needed to have a backup plan in case it didn’t work out. But all I could hear was that she didn’t trust me to be good enough.”
“For football? Or her?” Nell’s voice is small as she asks.
I sigh and drag my hand over my face. “Both. It was always both.”
“Senior year, I narrowed it down to two schools. Rusk, which had the bigger program and was closer to home, and a smaller Division Two school that was not too far from the university that Lina had chosen. I was torn. Rusk was the better place to prove myself, but it was too far away from her. The Division Two school had a good football program, but the chance of getting noticed in Division Two was a lot smaller. I could have possibly swung a transfer to a bigger university eventually, but it was a risk. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. She broke up with me the night before I was going to commit to the Division Two school. She said that we wanted different things out of life. Her exact words were something about her moving on from high school to bigger things. But I was so stuck on football that I didn’t know when it was time to let go. She didn’t want to hang around while I relived my glory days for as long as I could.”
“That’s awful.”
It was awful. Most of the time our fears come from within us, but she planted the seed that day. And every time I’m feeling low, I water it with thoughts about whether or not the best parts of my life are behind me.
“To be fair,” I say, “I wasn’t exactly the best boyfriend there at the end. I let the recruiting game go to my head. I was so wrapped up in being the best athlete that I could be for her that I didn’t realize I was ignoring her in the process. I tried to fix it. God knows, I tried. I would have done anything, maybe even given up football, if she had shown even the slightest interest in giving me a second chance. But she didn’t. So I committed to Rusk, and tried to put it all behind me. And when I got here, I thought I was starting over. I hid my broken heart behind parties and jokes in the beginning because I wanted to make a good impression. No one likes that mopey guy who misses high school during freshman orientation. After a while it became second nature. And some days, it was almost like I’d never known Lina at all. In fact, I’d almost forgotten her completely.”
“Until you met me.”
“I—”
I don’t know what to say. Is it better to be honest? To lie? Either way makes me an asshole.
“The day we met, after I got hit with the Frisbee . . . you said I reminded you of someone. It was her? Wasn’t it?”
I don’t answer because words will only make this worse. And I wish my earlier joke about that disaster movie would come true, that some pipe would burst or there would be some freak flood, and a wall of water would come and just drown this all out.
“I think I’d like to leave now.”
She takes the flashlight out of my hand and walks past me, and for a few long moments I stay where I am. I let the light fade away. Her footsteps, too. And as silence moves in around me, I realize that what just happened was nothing like the fights I had with Lina. Our fights had been loud and aggressive, and they’d left me burning up. And when things with Lina had ended, I felt like I’d been at the center of some explosion, and all the pieces of me were scattered everywhere, and that everyone had to see it, see how broken I was. I was alive, but in pieces.
Fighting with Nell is like . . . it’s like drowning. And each word that pushed us further apart, each step she took, was another gulp of water into my lungs. And just like someone stuck underwater . . . I knew I should stop. I knew that each gulp was killing me, but I just couldn’t.
And now that she’s gone, I’m not in pieces. There was no explosion. No battered and bleeding pieces of me to hold together. No, I would almost prefer that there were.
Because she’s taken the last of the air with her, and inside now I’m as still as the dark tunnel around me, and just as lifeless and empty.