by Carl Deuker
At the end of practice, he had us form a circle. “You guys got to get your own rap,” he said. “Every good team has one. So come on, loosen up, find your voice.”
I’d seen teams do that. They’d get in a circle and somebody would start something, and the rest of the guys would shout back. It always seemed sort of weird yet sort of fun. The Seahawks did it. Almost all the college and professional teams did it. But who would lead us?
We rocked a little, back and forth, and then Hunter’s voice rang out. “What time is it?” Guys kept moving, but nobody answered. “It’s butt-kicking time,” he shouted. Then he did it again, only this time everybody answered.
“What time is it?”
“It’s butt-kicking time!”
“Who’s going kick butt?”
“We are!”
“Whose butt getting kicked?”
“Their butt getting kicked!”
“What time is it?”
“It’s butt-kicking time!”
I don’t know how long we chanted. Probably just a minute, but during that time every player was all in. Finally, Coach Lever yelled, “Yeah!” Practice had ended, but it felt like a beginning.
For the next two weeks, Coach Lever stamped more of his personality onto the team. The warm-ups and drills were fast paced. When we broke into position groups, all the assistant coaches and parent volunteers had notebooks laying out exactly what they were supposed to do. I could tell Mr. Gates didn’t like it, because he argued about something in the notebook, slapping at it with his hand. Coach Lever made a motion with his hands that seemed to say You don’t like it, you can leave. Mr. Gates frowned, but he didn’t leave.
Coach Lever handed out crazy prizes for everything: little toy G.I. Joes; a pass for ten minutes in a hot tub with Kate Upton. Even the wind sprints at the end of practice were almost okay. “Don’t give up,” Coach Lever would shout as we ran. “Don’t ever give up!”
One thing I didn’t like: while all the other receivers ran a variety of pass patterns—slants, curls, down-and-outs—I ran nothing but deep stuff. That must have been in Coach Lever’s notebook too. I caught a decent number of those long balls, but when you don’t run anything over the middle, guys notice. “They’re going to sew Wuss instead of Ripley on the back of your uniform,” Colton said, grinning, and the other receivers laughed.
One day after practice, I managed to work myself over to Coach Lever. “You can send me over the middle,” I told him. “Last year I backed off, but I won’t this year. I’m not afraid.”
He waved that off. “You’ve got speed, Brock, and that’s a gift. I watched the film of the Bothell game. You’re our vertical threat. You work on that, get that timing down. We’ve got Colton and Ty and a bunch of other guys for plays over the middle.”
“But I want to make the tough catches too. And I can do it. I won’t chicken out.”
“That’s good to know. And if the time comes, I’ll call on you. That’s a promise. Until then, keep flying downfield, all right?”
When spring football came to an end, Coach Lever called us around. “You guys can be really good. How good is up to you. Go to camps, lift weights, practice hard, and come back in August ready to rumble.”
We let out a cheer and then lined up and shook hands with Coach Payne, whose eyes got teary as he said goodbye. When I turned to head for home, Mr. Gates’s voice stopped me. “Hey, Brock, come back here a minute.”
I jogged back. He put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a shake. “Hunter’s going to be attending quarterback camps around the country in June and July, but he’ll be back in Seattle in August. We’ll be looking for you at Gilman Park. You’ll be there, right?”
Mr. Gupta had asked everybody on the chess team to stop by his room when school let out for summer break. Black and white balloons were tied to the corners of a table. On the table sat a chocolate cake that had been frosted to look like a chessboard. Mr. Gupta had made an animated PowerPoint presentation that had boulders jumping up and down with the words CHESS ROCKS! tilting this way while “We will, we will rock you!” looped through the wimpy computer speakers. The whole thing was nerdish beyond belief, but I ate a piece of goopy cake and laughed at the PowerPoint. Anya was there, which made it better, but Richie didn’t show.
After about fifteen minutes, Anya got a text from her father, who was waiting in the parking lot. Once she’d left, I gobbled a final piece of cake, shook Mr. Gupta’s hand, and took off.
The quickest way out of the building was through Suicide Alley and then out a side exit. I’d avoided using that hallway—it was the older guys’ last chance to muscle anyone, and the last day had a reputation for being rough. But now—fifteen minutes after the final bell—Suicide Alley seemed safe enough, and using it would save me time.
Still, before heading down it, I took a long look. I saw one person. Was it Richie? All I could see was his back, but it looked like him. He was ahead of me by thirty yards, and I was about to call out when a bunch of football guys—Hunter at the front—came spilling out of a side hallway. Had they been a minute later or a minute earlier, nothing would have happened.
But they weren’t.
“Hey, Fang, what’s up?” I heard one of Hunter’s friends call out, pointing at Richie and then sticking out his teeth like a vampire and grinning. Richie put his head down and tried to push by them to the exit.
Colton put out his arm to stop him, and a moment later Hunter and a bunch of guys were on him. They lifted him up off the ground and carried him to the exit door. I wanted to yell out, but my throat was so tight, I could barely breathe. And I was afraid that if I tried to stop them, they’d turn on me, too.
I ducked into a classroom doorway and leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths while trying not to make a sound. But I couldn’t just hide; I had to know what was happening.
I peeked out as someone pushed open the door leading to the back parking lot. At the top of the stairs was a garbage can overflowing with candy wrappers, yogurt cups, and half-eaten lunches. I watched as Hunter kicked the lid off and looked at Colton. On some invisible signal, the two of them flipped Richie over, dumping him headfirst into the garbage. Colton then tipped the can onto its side, Hunter gave it a quick, hard kick, and it rolled down the dozen steps, picking up speed as it went. The garbage can rolled across the pathway and didn’t stop until it reached the grass. Hunter and Colton and the rest of them grabbed each other, laughing hard, as Richie crawled out. His hair, his face, and his shirt were covered with wet slop. In the trees, crows started cawing like mad and flying from branch to branch.
I thought Hunter and the other guys might do more, but—maybe because of the crazy way the crows were acting—that was the end. “See you next year, Fag,” Hunter yelled down at him, and then the whole bunch walked away.
After taking a few deep breaths, I stepped out from my hiding place, then walked down the hallway and out into the sunlight. When I saw Richie, I pretended to be surprised. I don’t know how good an acting job I did, but it didn’t matter. He was working so hard to get the slimy crap off his clothes and face and out of his hair that he didn’t notice me.
He pulled gunk from his neck, threw it on the ground, and then spit a few times to get something out of his mouth that was making him gag. When he finally looked up and saw me, his eyes were filled with fury. He glared for a moment, and then he pointed his finger at me. “Hunter Gates did this. But this is the last thing he’s going to do to me. You’re his friend, so you tell him that for me. You tell him he does one more thing and he’ll pay. You tell him.”
“I’m not his friend, Richie!” I protested.
“Yeah, you are. You’d lick his boots if he asked you. You know you would. So you tell him.”
“I’ve never been his friend.”
He wiped his hands on his pants. He looked like he was about to say more, but instead he turned and stormed off. He went about twenty feet and then turned back, pointing his finger at me as if it were a gun. “Tell him
, Brock. For his own good, tell him.”
After he’d vanished around a corner, I sat down on the steps and put my head in my hands. I’d been sitting there for five minutes or so when the door behind me opened. I looked back and saw Ms. Fontelle, the dance teacher, exiting the school.
She smiled. “Why so glum, chum? You’re out for the summer.” Then her eyes went past me and she saw the garbage can on the lawn with wrappers and soda cans tumbling out. “Did somebody get canned?”
It took me a while to answer. “Richie Fang,” I finally said.
“The violinist?”
“Hunter Gates and some other guys on the football team got him.”
She frowned. “Just once I’d like to get through the last day without something like this.” She paused. “Is Richie okay? He wasn’t hurt, was he?”
“He’s okay.”
Ms. Fontelle looked into the distance, staring at nothing. Finally, she turned back to me. “Look, I’m headed to Sea-Tac in two hours. Spain and Portugal. My guess is that over the summer all this will blow over. That’s what almost always happens. But if this starts up again in September, you report it to Mr. Spady. And you tell him to talk to me. Okay?”
I nodded.
She smiled. “You’re Troy Merrick, right? I had your sister Megan a few years ago.”
“No. I’m Brock Ripley.”
She gave me a puzzled look. “Well, have a good summer, Brock, and I’ll see you in the fall.”
Dog Walker. Lawn Mower. Flowerbed Weeder. Those were the jobs I came up with when I brainstormed ways to make money during the summer. I designed a flyer, made twenty copies, and posted them on telephone poles around the neighborhood. And who called first? Our next-door neighbor with her crazy beagle. “You’ll love Snuffles. She’s a sweet dog. If you could walk her for an hour every morning, that would be great.”
I was never going to love Snuffles, but making money for taking a walk was a good deal, even if I did have to clean up poop.
Most mornings I walked Snuffles down to Gilman Park. The first few days, I tried to get her to fetch a rubber ball, but what she truly loved was garbage cans. So I’d lead her around the park, letting her sniff each trash can for a couple minutes before heading to the next one.
While she was sniffing, I’d find myself looking out over the soccer field, thinking about Richie. I hated myself for hiding while he was being stuffed into a garbage can. I wanted to go back in time and stand up for him, even if it meant I got the same treatment.
The first few days of summer, I texted him, but he never replied. A couple of times on the weekend, I walked over to his house. Both times, his mom’s car was in the same spot in the driveway, growing dirtier and dirtier. All the curtains in all the windows were drawn; the front door was tightly shut even on hot days, and an eerie silence hung over the entire place.
I knocked on the front door, but no one answered. I walked down the driveway to the shed and knocked there. No answer. Had they gone on vacation? Or had they just gone away?
It wasn’t even July fourth, and I was bored. My dad was back to full-time work at the bank; my mom analyzed ridership trends for the Metro bus system, and summer was always her busiest time. I had the dog walking in the morning and a couple of weeding jobs had come through, but nothing steady.
The weight room at school was open. So after I walked the beagle, I lifted weights and ran intervals at Crown Hill, but that still left my afternoons empty. Coach Lever wanted us to sign up for football camps. That’s what Hunter and Colton and most guys would be doing.
I didn’t want to fall behind, so I went online and searched. There were some local camps, and they weren’t too expensive, but all of them were in Bellevue or Woodinville or Shoreline. How would I get to them? I didn’t want to ask my dad to do extra driving, and my mom was way too busy. Then I remembered that in August I’d be working out with Hunter and his father. That would have to be my camp.
“Hey, isn’t this your friend?”
It was a Saturday morning in mid-July. My dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading the Westside Weekly, a local newspaper that was packed with ads. His finger was tapping on a short article with the headline CROWN HILL STUDENT TAKES FIRST.
He slid the paper over to me and I read the article, my mouth breaking into a smile. “Yeah, that’s Richie. He built an eco-friendly model of our school, everything green. Solar panels and daylighted creeks and natural light in the classrooms—stuff like that. He added a new wing powered entirely by renewable energy. His model is incredible—I thought he was going to win. Now he gets to go to a national competition.”
“You should go see him,” my dad said. “He seemed like a good kid, even if he did act crazy at the Lakeside game.”
“I’ve been a couple times, but he hasn’t been around.”
“Probably they were down in Portland. Go over to his house and congratulate him.”
I went that afternoon. There was a beat-up white car in front of the house, and I heard salsa music coming from the front room. I walked around to the back and saw that the shed door was wide open. “Richie,” I called out. “You there?” He came out, a broad smile on his face that reminded me of the old Richie. “Congrats,” I told him. “I knew you’d win.”
He tried to shrug it off. “It was no big deal. The big deal is Pittsburgh in December. There’s scholarship money for that one, and they display the winning model at this great museum that used to be a mattress factory.”
“Come on. You won. Be happy.”
His smiled got even broader. “All right. I’m happy.”
We bumped fists, and I peered over his shoulder. “Are you still working on it?”
“Repairs. My dad drove it to Portland in a rented van. I put foam all around it, but it still got banged up pretty good.”
“You feel like a break? We could go to Gilman and kick a soccer ball around.”
He checked the time on his cell phone. “Okay, but I’ve got to be back in an hour.”
We didn’t talk much, just booted the soccer ball back and forth, running a little this way and that, stopping the ball with our chests or our feet, heading a ball now and then, breaking a sweat and feeling the right amount of tired.
After about forty minutes, we took a long drink at the fountain and then sat down under the maple trees that lined the perimeter of the park.
The day was warm, but not hot. Richie lay back on the grass, looking at the sky, so I did the same. For a while, neither of us spoke. But I knew what he was thinking about.
“How’s your mom?” I asked.
“Not good. She’s talking about hospice.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s when you give up. The doctors don’t try to cure you; they just make sure nothing hurts. She doesn’t want any more chemotherapy. My dad is totally opposed. ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ he says. He’s like a football coach.”
I stared up at the clouds, big puffy things floating across the sky. I thought of how my dad had said that for someone who was unlucky, he was lucky, and I knew he was right.
Richie sat up and spun the soccer ball on his finger. “My dad is on the phone with people in Nanjing all the time. He’s got a job lined up. If my mom dies, we’ll be gone in a month, maybe sooner.”
The thought just sat there for a while. “Would it be that bad?” I asked. “You lived there before, right?”
“We left when I was five. My Mandarin sucks. I can understand it okay, but I can’t read much. And all I remember about Nanjing is that the air sometimes got so polluted, I had to wear a mask when I went outside.”
Suddenly, my days were full. In the morning, I walked Snuffles, lifted weights at Crown Hill High, ran the track, and then ate lunch. If I didn’t have a weeding job, I’d make it to Richie’s house most days around one. I’d walk down the driveway and stick my head in the shed. He’d be inside, working on his project even though there wasn’t much that needed doing.
It turned out that the beat-
up white car belonged to a home health worker who stayed with his mom for two hours every afternoon. “She’s not a nurse,” Richie explained. “She comes in, sits in the front room, watches TV, and then, after a couple of hours, leaves. But my dad doesn’t want my mom to be alone, and he doesn’t want me to spend all day at the house. So for two hours every afternoon, I’m free.”
We spent the time at Gilman Park. We didn’t talk about his mother again, or my father or China or Hunter Gates or Crown Hill High. We just kicked the soccer ball around.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice when August neared. Mr. Gates had said that he and Hunter would be back at Gilman Park, and that meant they’d be expecting me to run pass routes for him.
Most of the time when I thought about Hunter, I just hated the guy. He was such a jerk—to Richie, to Suzanne Friend, and no doubt to a bunch of other kids. The Hunter Gates who strutted around like he was king of the world—I wanted nothing to do with him, ever.
But there was that other Hunter Gates—the Hunter with the great arm, the Hunter who knew where I’d be on the field before I did. When I caught passes thrown by that Hunter Gates, it was as if I were an eagle gliding over Puget Sound. Nothing else in the world felt that way.
On the last day of July, I downloaded the permission slip for football and took it to my parents. My mom repeated her condition about concussions, I agreed, and she signed. “Good luck,” my dad said, and then he signed too.
The next afternoon, as Richie and I kicked the soccer ball back and forth, I kept expecting to see Hunter and his father pile out of their car and take the field. What would I do then? How could I explain to Richie that I needed to work out with Hunter?
When they didn’t show, I was relieved. But when they didn’t show the next day, or the next, I got worried. What, exactly, had Mr. Gates said? August first? Or just August? I couldn’t remember.
As the days rolled by, I grew more nervous. What if Hunter wasn’t coming at all? Colton and the other receivers had gone to football camps. They’d been practicing with top-notch coaches while I’d been kicking a soccer ball around. I needed to catch a football, to catch lots of footballs, to get my feel back before tryouts. Since my dad couldn’t throw passes to me, and it didn’t look like Hunter was going to show, who could?