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  “I’ll look at The File, Ma. If you just let me finish what I’m doing here in peace, I promise I’ll have a look.”

  “Well then,” she said all huffy mock-­offended. In reality, she was kind of elated with this small progression. “I can tell when I’m not wanted. Should I just leave it here on the desk, then?”

  I was already back in mid-­sit-­up when she laid that on me, and I fell back flat again with the laughing. “Yeah, Ma, that sounds like an excellent idea.”

  I was hard at work again as she floated out of the room, dropping last words on me like a post TD spike. “You promised, Arlo.”

  Ah, hell. I did not lie to my mother. And when she snapped my name on the end there in just that way she had, it was like signing a pact in blood.

  I was sweaty and winded sometime later when I finally could not outwork, outrun, outsmart my promise.

  The File was patiently, smugly lying there when I dropped into the chair at my desk.

  I opened it.

  I said I would, and I did. There.

  I closed it again with a thwap.

  What the hell was that? What happened there? Okay, it was brain slices, as promised, so what?

  What was I, a coward all of a sudden? This was moronic.

  I opened The File again, held my stare on the slices for a full eight-­count. One sample had what looked like diarrhea seeping out from between brain folds, while another had large crusty black patches like from frostbite. Still another one was covered all over with scars, growths, as if the lucky owner of that brain got to walk around with mushrooms and maggots filling up his head. Then the next page showing brains, some like shriveled apples, some like old milky pumpkins, some of them like they’d had a whole party of cigarettes stubbed out in them. Others looking like—

  I slapped it shut again. I had not lied to my mother; I had not folded to the fear.

  And I was not one of those guys in the pictures. Never would be. No disrespect, but you had to be a certain type of athlete to wind up in that state, a certain type of person. Fine, maybe Lloyd’s brain did look like that, a little. In spots. Because he played like a maniac, like he wanted to be hurt. But I was not that type of person. I played hard, but I played controlled, and I played smart. Football is a hard game that rewards smart. A guy does not get a brain like that if he uses it correctly in the first place.

  “Hey!” was the shout right in my ear, with the slap across the back of my head. “There it is. What are you doing with my file, ass?”

  Lloyd grabbed The File off my desk like the big winnings off a poker table and glared at me as he walked out of the room.

  Lloyd wanting The File? Well. That certainly was an occurrence on the WTF side of unexpected.

  I had wondered if he might get a little freaky without football. But already he was showing enough unrecognizable weird to be worrisome.

  The Good Life

  I had been aware of Sandy for some time before we got to high school. We didn’t go to the same junior high, but hers wasn’t far from mine and our circles were not far off from each other’s and she was deadly cute and I was big. So we knew each other, like “Hey” when we passed on the street. Just like that, “Hey” with the smiles, and at some point she added a little sort of military salute wave and that did it, gaffed me with a giant fishhook.

  So when we got to high school, there was more of that, and more often and in the same hallways, so we were getting there.

  But there wasn’t there until football took us all the way there.

  I was on the team already, the jayvee as a freshman, which brings some cachet with it, and we were on the field for preseason practice.

  And she was there for cheerleader tryouts.

  Not as an applicant. As a protester.

  Like everybody else on the field, I was paying at least as much attention to cheerleader tryouts as I was to the business of football. Guys were missing tackles, missing blocks, dropping passes or throwing them to places miles away from where they could be caught. If it weren’t so dangerous, it would have been funny. It was funny anyway.

  After a while I saw her, there in the stands close to where the head cheerleader was screaming at the new recruits, holding up a sign that said: YOU MUST BE JOKING, GIRLS.

  I was torn big time now. Concentrate on the football. Pay attention to the jumping, cartwheeling, lovely go-­teamers flying around in my peripheral vision. Or laugh at the adorable little radical trying to mess up the wholesome sideline tradition that had been in place for generations and was quite possibly the key to America’s uniquely successful breeding program for producing better and better athletes.

  I managed to do all three, because I was always a gifted multitasker.

  But when the cheerleaders started yelling things at Sandy, and Sandy started yelling things back, my laughter won out over both football and legs.

  It was the kind of thing that made Sandy stand out. She could have easily been mistaken for another good-­looking girl going out for the squad, while she was just determined to tell the squad where to jump.

  “Why would somebody do that kind of thing?” I said as I trailed her home that afternoon.

  “I don’t know,” she said, walking on without looking at me. “Why would a girl with even a scattering of brain fragments allow herself to be thrown high in the air by other girls and let the whole football team gawp at her little panties under her little skirt?”

  I was closing the distance between us on the sidewalk.

  “Nobody gawped,” I said.

  “Everybody gawped. That’s what the spectacle is all about. You gawped.”

  “I never gawped.”

  “You gawped.”

  “How would you know if I gawped? Unless you were gawping at me.”

  “I never gawped at you.”

  “Maybe you should. Would you like to?”

  Like a receiver with great footwork losing a defensive back, she took a quick cut down a side street I was almost certain was not hers. I stood there on the corner watching her walk away.

  “Go home and gawp yourself,” she said without turning her head.

  “Oh-­ho,” I said, laughing, admiring her work, then quickly looking around to see if anybody had witnessed it.

  ***

  “So what have you got against football?” I said to her the next time I saw her, by which time I had had a lot of practice pretending she was already my girlfriend.

  “I love football,” she said, staring at the large café mocha I had placed on the spot right next to her, on the low wall that ran along the front of the school grounds. She looked at the coffee for a fairly long time, contemplating it, and I was anxious about it because I had seen this on TV when the male penguin brings a stone to the female penguin, to try and formalize their relationship. If she takes it to the nest, they’re good. If she stares at it and then just walks away in front of the whole colony, then he might as well just go throw himself in front of a speeding orca. There were hundreds of other students around.

  “What’s this?” she said finally, waving at the cup with one of her flippers.

  “It’s, I don’t know, a gesture.” The penguin surely didn’t have to deal with a discussion about the gesture.

  “What are you, a penguin?”

  She’d even watched the same program. Please, Lord, let her take the coffee.

  After letting the clock tick down to almost zero, she lifted the cup. I practically threw myself onto the wall next to her.

  “How do you know I even drink coffee?” she said, peeling the lid off and drinking the coffee.

  “You didn’t seem like somebody who did not drink coffee,” I said.

  That must have accomplished something, right there, because she turned my way, looked right into my close, gawping face. She smiled just short of softly and breathed me all mocha right down to my toes.

  Muscle Memory

  I didn’t take it seriously enough.

  All before high school, sports,
and especially contact sports, were a cinch. I was big and I was dedicated, and by the time I made the jayvee as a freshman, I thought everything would just be waiting for me along the road to success, all I had to do was scoop it up as I went along like a video game character gathering up coins or zombies while hopping on to each next level.

  But there was a difference. There was an important difference.

  I watched from the sidelines for the first two and a half games, but because I was a freshman with respect and patience and knew my place, that was all fine. Except that we lost the first two and were well on our way to losing the third, so maybe patience would have its limit. The game looked a little faster, a little tougher than what I had known in Pop Warner, but no more than I had expected. I had grown up getting belted around by Lloyd, and so I was conditioned to expect the other guy to be stronger, faster, meaner than me. But one thing I learned from watching this team was that all that training had done the job. I was as good as the other linebackers we had. That wasn’t bragging, it was just a fact. I knew my time was coming and so did they.

  Coach finally got fed up and put me in late in the third quarter of that third game when the cause was already lost. I knew my stuff, knew the positioning and the schemes, and so I did not embarrass myself when I got my chance. I was nearly in on the play, first play, second play, both short-­gain end runs where I made no tackles, little contact but no mistakes.

  After the opposition got the first down, they went back to the running game. This time, though, I saw the patterns emerging, saw the play unfolding, got into my spot. And it was the right spot. Their offensive line made our defensive line look like an open gate, spreading a lane for their big running back to burst through. However, he was bursting right my way, and this was going to be the end of this nonsense.

  I lined up, planted, and drove like a bull, timing it perfectly.

  But the tight end came across from my right side and nailed me an instant before the ballcarrier arrived, and I heard the great embarrassing oooff come out of me as my rib cage collapsed around my internal organs like a crunchy cartilage shrink-­wrap.

  For take-­that and remember-­this good measure, the running back veered slightly off his course to stomp over me, stepping right on the side of my helmet on his way to a big, big gain while I lay on my side watching and covering up. I had, immediately, a kind of headache I had never had before, never knew existed before. It was all on the right side, started near where the spine meets the skull, and shot forward like a net of piercing electric shocks beneath the scalp. It pulsated, jolt-­jolt-­jolt, and caused just the right eye to twitch in rhythm with it.

  That was the instant. That was when I learned the difference. I had never in my sports life experienced being blown away, being stomped, being punished, being nullified like that before. I had received many beatings, courtesy of Lloyd, but nobody else ever beat me until then.

  No more kid stuff. Raise your game, Arlo Brodie, or get out of the way.

  No way was I getting out of the way.

  ***

  Conditioning.

  “You’re out of shape, dude” was the first sentence of this particular lesson.

  “Shut up, duuude” was my response.

  It wasn’t the greatest of starts, but it wasn’t the best of circumstances, either.

  The other guy, a sophomore called Dinos, whom I only recognized because he had a weirdly big head, was beside me, panting and sweating as we drove as hard as we could into a tandem tackling sled. Standing on the back of that sled and pouring disgust all over our effort was the junior varsity coach, Mr. Kasperian. After the end of that depressing third straight loss to begin the season, Mr. K kept the most underachieving units of the team on the field for some punishing remedial drill work.

  “Brodie!” Mr. K screamed in my ear. “Look at you, Brodie! The quarterback is running in circles and doing backflips while some stupid fat left guard twirls you around like you’re in your little tutu on top of a damn music box.”

  “No kidding, dude,” Dinos said, close enough that I could hear him over all the guys laughing at me. “You’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Both Dinos and the coach had every right to be doing this to me. Despite my best effort, the sled kept doing doughnuts, carving one bog circle in the turf as Dinos outmuscled, outdug, and outplayed me worse as every second passed and my stamina faded well ahead of his.

  I was ready to request the firing squad when I finally made the tiniest progress. The sled started going less circular, more like a sweeping sickle pattern, as I started gaining on Dinos’s effort. Then it got even straighter, and the coach made a vaguely positive screamy noise, and then we were even, and we stayed exactly even as we drove exactly evenly for ten, then fifteen yards upfield.

  He was easing up to make me look better. “Cut it out or I’ll kill you,” I growled at him.

  “Don’t you ever want to go home?” he growled back.

  So I gathered what I had, and I hit that sled with fury and desperation.

  Caught Dinos off guard, which was satisfying as the sled started circling in his direction for a change.

  “Good, Brodie, good!” the coach screamed. “That’s more like it—dig deep, find the will!”

  I did, and so did Dinos, and it probably served as inspiration that the two of us were looking right at each other and bellowing as we drove that sled and that coach right off the edge of the field and onto the old cinder running track that circled it.

  The two of us were panting so heavily it was almost like some ancient religious chanting thing. We were both bent at the waist, hands on hips, when the coach came up to us.

  “Better,” he said, sounding so controlled and different from the sled-­riding guy I had to look up and be sure it was him. “More like it, guys.”

  “Thanks,” Dinos said, and I noticed that his wind was coming back to him much quicker than mine was.

  “Now,” Mr. K said, “over there with the footwork group.”

  “Ah, Coach . . . ,” I moaned.

  Mr. K nodded slowly. “Fair enough,” he said. “Wind sprints it is, gentlemen.”

  When the coach had gone, Dinos turned to me. “The only reason I’m not going to kick your ass is that I know this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it does me.”

  He was right, too.

  Dinos

  Stamina.

  Before jayvee I never thought endurance was a big deal for athletes who weren’t marathoners. And I frankly never thought of marathoners as athletes so much as skinny masochists with lots of time and no real skills.

  It would not have dawned on me that a defensive lineman or a fullback, whose job involved a lot of individual, intense moments, separated by huddles, would have any use for distance training. As long as you had good balance, explosiveness, and muscle, you had all the ingredients for excellence.

  Higher-­level football straightened me out on that. If you are competing with everything you have, colliding with packs of guys who are as fast and strong and ferocious as you are, you find something out after about the third down from scrimmage. Huddles are not rests, and if you don’t train for endurance you’re not going to last.

  I wondered if Lloyd ever got that. If maybe he flatlined as a player when he failed to recognize that just being a ferocious hitter wasn’t going to be good enough.

  After the embarrassment of another loss, Mr. K stepped up the punishment of postgame drills on Monday. He forced us to be committed to every block, every tackle, every sprint. The energy level was nuts. The bellowing and barking made the field sound like a zoo. Things were going to be different for this team. They were going to be different for me. Even if I was close to puking.

  Finally Mr. K seemed almost satisfied and called it a day. I was following him off the field when a runner on the track jabbed my back with his elbow as he passed.

  It was Dinos, and in a few seconds he was thirty yards on down the track.

  I turned my head and saw that th
e coach was watching from the locker room door. I looked back at Dinos.

  I started running. Broke out fast, to make up ground, while he continued around the quarter-­mile oval at a medium jog. The crunch of the track made it impossible to sneak up on anybody, so by the time I had come up to him he was ready for me.

  “Are you lonely or something?” he said as our strides fell in sync.

  “No,” I said. “But you looked like you were.” Night was starting to come down. The sound of us just emphasized the absence of anyone else around.

  “I appreciate that. But I’m sure you must be exhausted. I’ll be fine, so feel free to peel off when we circle around by the locker room.”

  I responded by running along with him as we chugged past the locker room again. And again.

  “Okay, I’m impressed,” Dinos said when we passed the mile mark of our run together.

  “Well, that’s all I need,” I panted through shorter breaths, “’cause that’s what I’m here for, to impress you.”

  “Ha, very good,” he said smoothly. “At least what you lack in stamina you make up for with good sense.”

  He shifted down a gear, then another, and we started walking the last half lap.

  “I’m not out of shape,” I said.

  “Well, you’re out of a certain kind of shape, and you know it. But because you now know it, you’ll be fine soon enough. Better than most of the guys around you, that’s for sure.” We had turned off the track and were walking into the locker room, where every last guy had cleared out.

  “I don’t know. Did you see the way that practice went today? Guys are getting it now, don’t you think?”

  He shook his head. “You could tell that some of them meant it. But I bet the fire goes out of most of those slugs before the week is over.”

  “Not me,” I said, quick and defensive.

  “No, probably not,” he said, grinning at my enthusiasm. “And anyway, I figure it’s to my advantage the way it’s going. I wasn’t going to get a whole lot of playing time based on natural ability. Now, I’m confident I can train my way right up the depth chart.” Instead of heading to his locker, he went to the door that led to the weight room.