Damage - A. M. Jenkins [3]
Now it’s your turn. You push your helmet up and gulp down aching cold water, letting some run down your chin and neck to cool your front.
Everybody else is straggling onto the field. You crumple the cup, toss it into the trash, and turn to walk back, too.
“Hey,” Curtis says, not moving. “Austy.”
His tone stops you in your tracks. You turn to look at him. Curtis’s eyes are brown, but not the soft brown most people have. They can be hard like a flint striking sparks, if he’s angry. Which isn’t often; Curtis doesn’t let much get to him. Right now, though, his eyes are zeroed in on you with the intensity that means there’s some kind of emotion backed up behind them.
“It’s not just football,” he says. “You’ve been acting different. Out of it. Like you just woke up. Or like you’re some old man, in slow motion. Hey. You know you can talk to me, don’t you? If anything’s wrong?”
Curtis is quiet, not much of a talker. But he’s one hell of an observer.
“Nothing’s wrong,” you tell him. It’s true. It is—because you’ve got nothing to complain about. Nothing to explain, nothing that makes any sense. Nothing that’s a real problem, like what other people have.
Take Curtis. It was about five years ago you found him in the tack room out by your family’s barn. He was sitting with his back to the wall, knees drawn up, head buried on his arms, so he didn’t know you were there. You could tell he was crying, and you turned to sneak away—but that didn’t seem right, so you came back and sat down beside him without saying anything, and just kind of kept him company till he was finished. You didn’t look at him or ask about it, and he never did say what happened—but you had an idea what it was about. Sure enough, right after that his father left for Nevada with one of the summer interns from his law office.
Curtis never did talk about it much, but he spent quite a bit of time that fall out in the wooded acres behind your house, sawing up an old dead tree and hauling the chunks to your family’s barn to chop them small before flinging them onto the woodpile. Hardly said a word about his dad—but for a long time after that, whenever you went over to the Hightowers’, you felt like there was an invisible hole right in the heart of the house; a jagged hole that everybody walked around and nobody talked about. It’s still there, even five years later—though now it’s not so huge and the edges have smoothed.
But in your life, there are no holes. Your house is just a house like anybody else’s. And you’ve got nothing to talk about.
“I’ve just been a little tired,” you tell Curtis.
“Reid and Hightower!” Coach is hollering. “Get your asses in gear! Time to get back to work!”
The two of you start running back.
“Cox! Try to get the goddamn ball in the air this time.”
As everybody lines up you can see Curtis’s eyes on you. Impersonal now; you’re just an object he has to track and follow.
“Blue thirty-four!” Cox shouts. “Blue thirty-four! Set…Hut! Hut!”
You sprint forward and cut inside. You can feel Curtis shadowing you, but the ball is spiraling toward you. You stretch out your hands, ready to feel the clean smack of the catch.
It doesn’t come. Curtis gets a hand up; the two of you get tangled up somehow and you both come down in a heap on the grass.
Curtis gets immediately to his feet; he’s in his usual between plays half awareness and barely gives you a glance as he scoops up the ball and tosses it back to the center.
You lie outstretched on the turf and wait for your breath to come back into your lungs.
“Reid!” Coach hollers. “You don’t jump up and get moving, you better be able to show me some bone sticking out!”
So you get up, panting; Curtis has already trotted back to the line.
You follow. Alone and empty-handed.
After practice on Friday, Curtis asks if you and Dobie want to go grab a burger or something.
“Sure,” you answer, although you’re not really hungry. There’s nothing else to do, and, besides, there’ll be plenty of people down at the Dairy