Damage - A. M. Jenkins [15]
“Now, what the hell was this, Rhinehart?” Freeze frame on Rhinehart of the saggy pants, caught in bewildered mid-lope, yards behind a guy he can never catch up with. “You look like you’re playing flag football at the Y! I’ve never seen so many mental errors in my life,” Coach announces. “When I was in high school, I would’ve rather died than made some of the screwups you guys pulled last night. It didn’t take a whole staff of coaches barking at us to keep us in gear. We took care of our own business.”
“Dogpile,” Brett Stargill says under his breath. His eyes are lit up; words are one thing, but pounding is something Brett understands.
“We kept our own heads in the game,” Coach says.
“Dogpile,” Brett says again, a little louder.
Coach gives him a sharp look. “You coaching this team, Stargill?”
“No, sir.”
“Then shut up.” Coach stands in the middle of the room, staring at nothing with furrowed brow. He sighs and rubs his forehead as if there’s too much going on in his head to even attempt to explain.
Then he looks across the room at Stargill, who wears his feelings on his face. At Cody Billings, who talks trash on the field then holds his own in a fight. At Ryan Hernandez, who explodes with each snap of the ball. “All right,” he says, almost to himself, and then he announces loud and clear: “Come Monday morning, we’re going to have a new drill. It’s time to get serious, gentlemen.”
Rhinehart sits with his eyes straight ahead, his pudgy cheeks splotched red and white. Curtis is sitting up straight now; Curtis who has been serious about football from the first time he put on a uniform back in third grade, in the recreational league.
You started playing football at the same time as Curtis. But number 83 is not on the screen right now, because he wasn’t on the field at this point last night. And right now you don’t feel that you’re anywhere at all.
“It’s going to be a good year.” Coach adds firmly, like he’s going to make it be a good year by sheer force of will.
It’s going to be a good year.
Something flickers inside you. The last time you heard those words was on Heather’s front porch.
You are going out with Heather tonight.
The thought has lain there since Monday afternoon, like a seed. Now it’s Saturday, and while everybody else is getting serious about football, that seed flutters to life.
I’ve always liked you, Austin.
The tape rolls on. The screen becomes a blur of swaying lines and battling bodies again. Faceless, like ants. Not one of them is as real as the tickle of Heather’s breath in your ear.
CHAPTER SIX
You pick Heather up early in the evening. You’ll take her to dinner first, then a movie.
While you’re waiting for her to answer the doorbell, you look around Heather’s neighborhood with its neat streets, its tidy yards shoved tight together. It makes your neighborhood seem downright shabby, with yards and pastures patched together not by concrete driveways, but by barbed-wire fences or white plank fences or no fences at all; brick houses neighboring wood houses neighboring trailers.
Then Heather opens the door, and you forget all about feeling shabby. When she walks down the sidewalk next to you, her perfume brushes against you like light, teasing fingers. It’s not flowers or spices, but the kind of thing you’d expect from a girl who went to the prom last year in a short little black strapless dress that made every guy there wish it’d ride up just a few more inches. Or else fall down just half an inch.
You breathe a little deeper to catch the scent again.
Once the truck’s moving, you guess you wouldn't would mind putting your arm around her—she’s sitting in the center of the seat, right next to you—but you know from experience you’ll have to move your arm every time you shift gears. And once when you did that, you conked your date in the back of her head with your elbow.
So you let your right hand rest on your thigh, though it’s it’s actually sort