I’m lying in bed with the morning sun streaming through the cracks in the window blinds. I’ve been up for an hour, but haven’t gotten out of bed yet. I started off the morning just lazily reading one of the books I’ve got in a pile by my bed. Then I moved on to studying football plays. That’s where I’m at now, reviewing a huge pile of papers that each have little diagrams and drawings on them. Coach knows a lot about football, but he’s no artist, and the drawings are impossibly crude, and occasionally hard to decipher.

There’s a loud banging sound coming from downstairs.

What the hell is that?

The sound gets louder.

I guess it’s someone banging at the door.

Damnit, this had better not be Jack.

I head downstairs wearing just my boxers. I swing the door open and sigh as I see Jack standing there.

We used to look alike, and in a way we still do. We’ve got the same facial structure, but in many other ways we look wildly different. He’s older than me, and he’s always looked older, but now he’s aged way faster than I have. He hasn’t taken care of himself, and he’s got a myriad of intense lines that run across his forehead. His skin looks old and weather-beaten.

He has tattoos all over him, but not the nice kind of tattoos. I have a couple myself, but they were professionally done and they look great. I have one on my inner bicep, for example, that gets a ton of compliments.

But Jack’s tattoos were done in prison, and while I’m sure there are some great prison tattoos, Jack’s certainly aren’t in that category. I suspect that he did them himself, inking himself with some kind of prison-made tattoo gun that hardly could get the ink on straight. I saw a documentary about it, actually. They use ball point pen ink and hot needles. Maybe they use parts of glue guns, I don’t remember.

Jack’s wearing tattered old clothes, and on his wrist is a very expensive looking watch. I can tell by the way it looks that it’s not one of those knockoffs. In fact, I’m almost positive that it’s a Rolex Submariner, a watch that costs at least $5,000.

Something about his appearance just doesn’t add up.

“Shane!” he says, coming right into the house and clapping me on the back.

“Hey, Jack,” I say, closing the door behind him.

He moves immediately into the living room and flops himself down on the couch, kicking his feet up.

“You know you can’t stay here, right?”

It breaks my heart to have to talk to him like that. But I’ve gotten burned too many times in the past.

“Oh, sure, bro, I get you,” says Jack, giving me a curious look. “No worries, just thought I’d drop by to see how my younger brother’s doing.”

“I’m doing fine,” I say, still standing, looking down at him. “What’s going on with you?”

“You mean why am I here? I told you I’m just coming by to see how my little bro is doing.”

“The real reason,” I say, already getting annoyed. I’ve had too many late night phone calls, too many times that I’ve had to bail him out of jail…

“Fine,” says Jack, changing his tone. “I know I can’t stay here, but I’ve got some bags with me, and I was hoping I could just store it at your place… just for a while until I get a bigger apartment.”

I don’t say anything at first, just mulling it over.

“Where are you staying now?”

“Just some temporary place. There’s not enough room there, and I brought my van down with all my stuff in it. You know, everything from my old apartment. It’s hard to move in this day and age.”

I nod my head.

“Let’s go out and check out what you have,” I say.

“No, it’s OK,” says Jack. “I’ll just bring it all in myself. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll do it all myself. Don’t worry.”

“You telling me not to worry makes me worried,” I say. “I want to see what it is you want to store at my house before I let you put anything in here.”

“Well, if you’re going to be like that, fine,” says Jack. “But it’s just normal stuff.”

“Let’s go check it out,” I say. “I’ll be right back down.”

I head upstairs to put on some jeans and a t-shirt. I’m aware of the fact that Jack might very well take the opportunity to rustle through my belongings downstairs and pocket whatever looks valuable enough to buy him some more coke, or whatever it is that he’s into now.

I come back downstairs and Jack makes a point of looking innocent while sitting on the couch.

“Come on,” I say. “Take me to your van.”

I follow Jack outside.

His van is a busted up huge half town van from the late ‘80s. To say it’s seen better days would be saying too much. It’s seen bad days, and then some.

“Well, here we are,” says Jack, opening the van doors.

There are some duffel bags and black plastic trash bags. Jack starts opening them up to show me the contents, making a point to act as if he’s being totally upfront. Since I know very well that being upfront is never the case with Jack, his acting like this only makes me more suspicious than ever.

“Looks normal,” I say. “Looks like your normal shit. Now what do you have under that tarp that’s taking up most of the van.”

“What tarp? What are you talking about?”

I point to the tarp. It’s quite obvious. It’s a bright blue color and it’s the only thing in the van that looks like it was bought sometime in the last decade. Except for maybe the trash bags.

Jack’s actual possessions only take up a small space in the huge van. The tarp takes up the rest, and there’s clearly a huge amount of stuff underneath it.

“Oh, that,” says Jack, doing a bad job of acting. “That’s nothing. Just some odds and ends left over from a construction job I had. They let me take some of the older lumber home and I just didn’t have a chance to sell it yet.”

I nod my head. “Sure,” I mutter. “Now let me see what’s under it.”

“You don’t trust me, bro?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

Before Jack can do anything, I tug at the end of the tarp and pull it. It comes off easily.

Underneath the tarp, now revealed, there’s a huge pile of incredibly expensive looking musical gear.

It looks like Jack made off with an entire band’s equipment set, minus the drums. And it looks like nice stuff.

There’s a shiny Fender Telecaster. It looks like the USA-made edition, which runs for quite a bit. There’s a Rickenbacker electric bass, and the most shocking of all is the collection of vintage looking tube amps for the electrical guitar and the bass.

“All you’re missing is the drum kit,” I say. “What, you couldn’t steal that before the band came back?”

“No, it’s not like that,” says Jack. “There was this confusion… a friend asked me to store his stuff for him after a gig. He didn’t have any place to put it. He’d just gotten thrown out of his apartment. It was a real mess, and I was just trying to help out.”

“A minute ago you told me it was just bits of spare lumber,” I say.

“Well, I didn’t want to make you worried.”

“This shit is worth a lot,” I say. “So you stole it and you were looking for a place to keep it under the radar while you waited for a chance to sell it once the band stops putting up their advertisements looking for their stolen gear, is that it?”

“Uh…”

“I can see that it is,” I say. “Now get the hell away from my house with this shit, before I do something I don’t want to do.”

“And what’s that?” says Jack. “You going to call the cops on your older brother? Who the hell are you?”

He rushes towards me without warning, his fist cocked back, ready to swing at me.

I don’t need to get into a fight with my brother, not before the first game of the season.

I dodge him easily. He’s probably coked up, angry and aggressive, and his reflexes are shot from years of drinking hard.

He comes back at me, already swinging. I don’t have any choice but to swing at him myself. I go for the quickest end to this stupid conflict. I uppercut him in the stomach, saving most of my strength. I want him to be able to drive away from here. I don’t want to be caring for him all day.

The punch takes all the wind out of him.

He doubles over in pain, but I can see by the look in his face that he’ll be fine.

“Asshole,” he mutters, breathless, getting back in his van.

I watch him as he peels off the best the van can do and drives down the street.

Shit, that didn’t go well.

I stand here in the street and think about what the hell just happened. I can’t believe Jack is still up to his old shit. There’s no way I’m going to mention this to my parents. It would seriously break their hearts.

I know I’m nothing like Jack, but seeing that he hasn’t settled down at all really makes me stop to think. About half of the guys on the team have wives and kids, and the other half are living in a state of perpetual adolescence, getting drunk all the time and trying to pick up every chick they see at the bar. Which state am I in? Maybe it’s time to settle down. Maybe it’s time I start a family.

This makes my thoughts turn to Lia. She could be the one…

Maybe she is.

I have the feeling when I think about her, as if my chest is light.

Plus, she makes my cock twinge and grow, just thinking about her.

Maybe it’s time I tell her that I’m getting serious about her.

But that’s crazy. We’ve still barely spent any time together.

Well, there’s a chance to get to know her better after the game.

I head back inside. I shake my head briefly, like a wet dog, to get all these thoughts to go away. I’ve got to, as we say in the business, get my head in the game.

There’s no point in going over the plays more, though. I know them inside and out. There isn’t anyone on the team who’s studied them more than me.

That’s the way it should be.

I am the quarterback after all.

The whole game is riding on me. Riding on my abilities. Riding on my ability to think on my feet. Riding on my strength and my accuracy.

I swing my arms around me, in order to limber up a little. It might help things if I went for a quick, easy jog. I don’t want to get too tired out before the game.

It is tomorrow, after all.

Coach wants us to rest the whole day, but I just don’t have the stomach for that.

I swing my arms again, moving them back and forth, trying to get the blood flowing. My theory is that you’ve got to move it or lose it.

There’s a twinge of pain in my shoulder.

I ignore it and keep swinging my shoulders.

Maybe I’d better do just a few pushups. I’m feeling kind of cold, as if my body hasn’t warmed up completely. There’s nothing like a set of pushups to get me feeling better.

I drop to the floor quickly and bang out twenty in just a few seconds. No one, and I mean no one, can crank out pushups as fast as I can.

I’m not done with the set yet, but my shoulder starts to hurt. The pain flares through it, radiating down my arm and also towards my back.

Shit, this isn’t good.

It’s my right shoulder. My right arm is everything. It’s my whole career.

What’s a quarterback without his throwing arm? It’s only my second professional season. I can’t hit the bench this early in my career. I’ll be toast. Who knows how long it’ll take me to recover from this. Some guys go out and they never come back onto the field. Some guys go out and don’t come back until the season is over, and then they’re never the same again. Like I say, you’ve got to move it or lose it. I’ve got to keep throwing or else the ability, this weird gift I have to throw the ball farther and more accurately than anyone else, might disappear, float away in the air like little particles of dust.

I stand back up, try swinging my shoulder, and the pain flares through it.

Shit. Game’s tomorrow.