Losers Take All

by David Klass

  We stood there in silence looking at each other. And then her mother shouted again: “Becca, Meg keeps calling you. It’s some kind of emergency.”

  Becca hurried into the house, and I hesitated and then followed. I stood silently in the living room as she frantically hunted for her cell phone. “What’s wrong?” she asked her mom as she ransacked the living room. “Did she tell you? Is she home?”

  “No, she’s at the hospital. She didn’t tell me.”

  Becca was pulling cushions off the couch, searching for her phone. “Is she hurt, is she sick, was it a car accident? She texts while she drives and I told her to be careful…”

  “Calm down,” Becca’s mother said. “Meg’s fine.”

  Becca found her cell phone under the couch and read something on the screen. “It’s Dylan,” she said. “Something bad happened.”

  25

  At the emergency room, we tried to get in to see Dylan, but the nurse at the front desk said he was with his family and the police and pointed to the waiting room.

  Frank arrived a few minutes later, out of breath and drenched in sweat. He’d gotten a text message from Meg and had run two miles to the hospital. I believe that my big friend had pushed himself as hard as any member of Fremont’s track team could have done. “How is he?” Frank demanded, red-faced and gasping. “Did they catch the guys?”

  “What guys?” I asked. “What happened? No one here will tell us anything.”

  “Somebody beat the crap out of him,” Frank told us.

  I remembered Rob Powers’s warning to me that the football team wasn’t amused by all the publicity we were getting. “Could it have been some of the football players?” I asked.

  They looked at me.

  “I hate our school,” Becca said.

  “I hope Dylan tells the cops everything,” Frank said. “I hope he names names.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” Becca asked.

  “Because he has to walk through the doors of Muscles High again soon,” I told her.

  “Things are going to change,” she vowed. “Enough is enough.”

  I glanced down the corridor and saw two cops walk down the hallway to the exit. In a minute, Meg appeared. She didn’t say anything but just waved for us to follow her.

  In the ER ward, Dylan was the only patient. The curtains around his bed were wide open. Dylan’s mom was usually a very calm woman, and I had watched her coast through three years of school board emergencies without ever once losing her cool. Now she looked worried and enraged at the same time. “Thanks for coming,” she said in an unsteady voice as we entered.

  Dylan’s father—a tall and gentle guy who ran a small travel agency in town—was standing by the right side of the bed, and Meg moved to a spot on the left. Dylan was lying on his back with his neck in a protective brace and what looked like the biggest Band-Aid ever on his nose. There were cuts on his face, his left eye socket was badly bruised, and his right wrist had been immobilized in a splint. My friend wouldn’t be hitting any killer Ping-Pong backhand slices in the near future.

  “Hey, buddy,” Frank rumbled, concern and anger clear in his deep voice. “You look awesome.”

  Dylan looked back at us, and I think they’d probably given him some pain meds because he smiled. “I feel pretty awesome,” he said.

  “What the hell happened?” Frank asked. “Who did this to you?”

  “Dunno,” Dylan told us. “After school, I was cutting through the Stevens.” The Stevens is the nickname of a little patch of forest near the back of our school. A stream twists through it, and according to local legend a young solider named Stevens was drowned in it during the Revolutionary War. It still carries his name two hundred and however many years later. “They came from behind me, fast. I heard footsteps but I never saw who it was. The next thing I knew I was on the ground, they’d pulled my jacket over my head, and someone kept pounding on me and laughing.”

  Then he stopped talking and began to cry.

  None of us knew what to do, as our friend lay there sobbing like a little kid. Tears squeezed out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks, and his nose started to run. His mother squeezed his hand, and his dad said to us, “Sorry, guys. You’d better go now.”

  We walked back to the waiting room and Meg came with us.

  “Could he tell the cops anything?” Frank asked her.

  She wiped away a tear of her own. “Just when and where it happened. The police are going to see if there are any footprints or other clues.”

  “He heard them laughing,” Frank said. “Didn’t he recognize their voices?”

  “He said it could have been anyone,” Meg told us.

  “It was football players,” Becca announced.

  Meg looked at her.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” I told Becca. “We shouldn’t spread that around until there’s proof.”

  “Who else could it have been?” she demanded. Suddenly the anger between us from earlier bubbled back up. “Dylan doesn’t have an enemy in the world. Tell me who else it could have possibly been, Jack. A motorcycle gang? How about a Viking raiding party?”

  Her sarcasm made Frank and Meg smile, but I said again, “You can’t accuse people unless you know for sure that they did it.”

  “I can accuse anyone I want,” Becca insisted. “You were the first one who mentioned the football team. They knocked out your teeth, too, remember? Why are you defending the people who just beat up one of your best friends?”

  “Great, accuse anyone you want,” I told her. “Maybe you want to call a newspaper reporter.”

  “Hey, guys, chill,” Frank said. “It’s not gonna help Dylan if you two go at it.” And then he asked Meg, “What happened to his arm?”

  “His wrist is broken. The doctor said it’s a common injury when someone is knocked over and tries to break their fall.”

  “What about his nose?” I asked.

  “They broke that, too,” Meg said.

  “Was that also busted in the fall?” Frank wanted to know.

  “No, that was a punch,” Meg told us.

  We were all quiet for a long moment, and then Shimsky’s voice rang out. He had stepped into the room behind us. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” he said.

  We turned to look at him. He was standing there nodding and almost looking pleased, as if he had always known this situation would flare up into violence.

  “Who said that?” Becca wanted to know. “Danton?”

  “Stalin?” I guessed.

  “John F. Kennedy,” he said. “You know what just happened, right? They just upped the ante and we have to hit them back even harder.”

  “What good will that do?” I asked him.

  “It’s not about doing good,” he said, and I saw Becca nod slightly.

  Percy arrived next, and two minutes later Chloe and Pierre showed up. Within half an hour, a dozen of our teammates were milling angrily around the waiting room. We might have been the Losers, but when it came to solidarity and friendship we were making a pretty strong team statement.

  * * *

  They operated on Dylan’s wrist at about nine p.m. He had something called a distal radius fracture, and they had to use two pins to stabilize the bones.

  “Remind me not to fly with him,” Pierre joked. “Every time he travels through an airport he’s going to be setting off alarms.”

  “I think these days they use titanium,” Becca said. “It doesn’t set off anything.”

  Suddenly Percy called out, “Everyone quiet down.”

  Dylan’s mother had walked into the waiting room, with a young and athletic-looking male doctor in blue scrubs. “That’s right, titanium’s a nonferrous metal,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t set off any alarms. I just wanted you guys to know that your friend came through the operation okay. His wrist is gonna be fine and his nose will heal up better than ever.”

  “They’re going to keep him here overnig
ht,” Dylan’s mom told us, looking and sounding a little better, “because he might have a low-grade concussion. He’s resting now, but he wanted me to thank you all for coming and hanging out. It means a lot to him knowing you’re here. He’ll be out of the hospital tomorrow and back on the soccer field soon.”

  We all applauded the good news.

  Dylan’s mom paused and gave us a smile. “In the meantime, he’s coming to watch the game on Tuesday, and he said he wants you to lose this one in his honor.”

  As if in response, a chant started that I doubt has ever rung out in a hospital waiting room before: “Losers, losers, losers forever!”

  The young doctor looked around, a bit mystified.

  “Let’s lose this one big for Dylan,” Meg called out.

  “Not just big but ugly!” Pierre seconded.

  Frank’s deep voice boomed: “It’s time to show the world just how bad we can be!”

  26

  The news about Dylan was apparently exactly the kind of new fuel that was needed to keep our story roaring along as a trendy social media event. Internet loudmouths reacted with fury. Angry tweets and posts about the beating soon included Dylan’s name and picture, and the rumor that the attacker had been a member of the football team.

  It rained hard all weekend and there were no soccer practices, so I kept to myself and stayed far away from the media—and Becca. But I followed the chatter on the Web, and it felt strange that most of the people posting comments about us had never even been near our town. They still seemed to take our situation very personally, as if what was going on in Fremont touched something in their own lives, and what had happened to Dylan outraged them. Becca was right—there are a lot of people out there who hated the sports cultures of their schools and towns, and we had struck a nerve.

  The Star Dispatch on Saturday had a news article about the assault on a Fremont student, with comments from our town’s police chief that there was an investigation under way. On Sunday morning the paper’s sports section ran a piece about our upcoming game against Maysville, and how hundreds of people were expected to attend. There was no sign of Dianne Foster’s article about the Logan family, and I began to hope that either she hadn’t written it or her story had been overshadowed by the attack on Dylan and would never be published.

  I visited Dylan on Sunday afternoon. He was home from the hospital and enjoying his newfound fame. He was getting e-mails and texts from people he didn’t know, and some of them were sending him flowers and chocolates. A fan in Greenwich Village with the username Jockhater had sent him two dozen cookies from a fancy city bakery. He had a black eye and his wrist was now in a plaster cast, but he was in high spirits. “I gotta get my wrist broken more often,” he told me. “Do you want a white chocolate chip or a brown sugar butterscotch?”

  I asked him about the police investigation, and he told me that he wasn’t supposed to talk about it. But since we were old friends, he confided that the cops had searched the Stevens and found a few footprints.

  * * *

  On Monday the heavy rains continued. Two police cars were in the parking lot when I arrived at school, and rumors flew around about students being called in for questioning. I also heard that the school system had hired a private investigator to figure out who had posted the original video, and that Muhldinger was furious that his football team had been linked in unsubstantiated rumors to a vicious assault.

  Becca didn’t show up at school, and Meg told me she was a little sick and had stayed home to try to recover for our Tuesday game. Our soccer practice was rained out so I went home right after school. I was feeling a little sick myself, so I headed up to my room and lay in bed watching the rain lash the windows.

  I have a small room that looks down on our neighbor’s garage. My bed faces the one window, and then there’s just space for a dresser, a desk, and a chair. I’ve had this room my whole life, and a lot of the stuff in it is from when I was a kid. The Tonka fire engine my grandfather gave me when I was five is parked on top of my dresser. Above its ladder is a photo of my brothers tossing me back and forth across a leaf pile when I was seven. In the picture I manage to look both thrilled and scared to death, which pretty well sums up my relationship with my two older brothers.

  Then there’s some newer stuff. In computer club, Frank, Dylan, and I had built a robot with big hands that could navigate shoulder blades and spread suntan lotion on a person’s back. We’d named him Sandy, and he’d won first prize in a robotics competition. Sandy waited on his treads on my night table, next to a framed photo of Becca. I had taken the picture of her on a windy day not long after school started and I liked how she was laughing and trying to push her hair out of her eyes.

  Thunder shook the house, and lightning flashed so close to my window that it glinted off the metal frame of Becca’s photo. I wondered where my father was—his crew couldn’t work in such a storm. He hadn’t said more than a few words to me all week. He’d spent a lot of time away from home and when he came back he either stayed in the family room watching the tube or went down to the basement and hit the heavy bag. On Saturday night he’d quarreled with my mom, which was very rare. I’d heard them shouting back and forth—him telling her that he just needed a little space, and her answering that he could take all the space he wanted, but he was also a husband and a father. There was real anger in their voices, and it made me think of Becca and what she was going through with her own parents.

  I hadn’t talked to her all weekend, and I was tempted to call or at least shoot her a text, but every time I glanced at my cell phone I remembered what she had admitted to during our walk, and how she had lashed out at me later in the hospital. She was the one who owed me an apology, and she wasn’t exactly burning up the phone lines delivering it.

  Thunder crashed, rain pelted the windows, and I lay there feeling dizzy and disoriented and wondering why this strange soccer season was splitting me apart from the people I loved the most.

  * * *

  Tuesday dawned bright and sunny. I came downstairs earlier than usual, but my father had already left for work. His crew likes to start early and he’s always one of the first ones on-site. I saw that he’d had cereal and coffee—his bowl and mug were in the dish rack. And he’d read the newspaper and left it behind on the table.

  Then I looked closer. Side-by-side photos of my dad and me filled up half of the front page of the sports section. The headline on the feature article read: “A Tale of Two Logans.” The photo of my dad was from his playing days, and he was suited up and wearing number 32. The picture of me was from our first soccer game, and next to my dad in pads I looked ten years old and as thin as a pencil.

  I sat in the silent kitchen and read the article from beginning to end. It was well researched and sharply written, but I thought it belonged on the Opinion page rather than the sports section because it had such a strong point of view. It painted a picture of an out-of-control school run by a bunch of sports lunatics who were trying to impose their will on a helpless student body. It noted Fremont’s many sports championships but mediocre test scores, compared the school’s whopping athletic budget to the relatively small amount it spent on the library and computer center, and contrasted the high number of athletes who won league and county sports honors with the few National Merit Scholars.

  Muhldinger was described as a “nonteaching audiovisual specialist” who had been catapulted into the job of principal because he was a kick-ass football coach. According to the article, there was plenty of resentment among the Fremont faculty that a man who had no claim to being a serious educator had been promoted over their heads. The article described how he’d tried to pump up the sports culture even more by requiring seniors to join a team, and how some students really hated this. According to Dianne Foster, the school’s sports-crazed policies had created a unique and dangerous situation at Fremont—what she called a school divided against itself.

  That was where the article stopped talking about my school
and started talking about my family. My father was described as the ultimate jock to ever come out of the ultimate jock school. She listed his records, including the most yards gained by a Fremont football player in one year, the most yards gained in a career, and his best-ever time in the mile run. If he hadn’t been injured in college, Dianne wrote, my dad would have gone pro. Reading his achievements in the newspaper made me a bit proud, but it also filled me with dread at what was coming.

  Sure enough, the article jumped to my brothers and their own impressive sports achievements. And then it started to talk about me, and how I had never played for any Fremont team. It described in surprising detail how I had been pressured into informally trying out for football and gotten my teeth knocked out. And it told how Muhldinger had met with me in his office, offered me a place on his varsity and even tried to give me my dad’s old number—and when I turned it down, he’d socked a hole in his door.

  I sat there wondering which of my friends had told the Star Dispatch reporter these private things. Did they think they were doing me a favor by giving her inside details? Muhldinger would think I was the one who’d provided this information to the reporter, and my dad would, too. I forced myself to finish the article.

  So the son of the best athlete to ever play for Fremont decided to fight back and start a very different kind of team than the one his father starred on. Ironically it took a phone call from Tom Logan to allow that team to be birthed. Apparently, the legendary star of the Fremont football dynasty had no idea that he was stirring up an insurrection.

  In just a few turbulent weeks his son’s team has called into question the values of a public school system that chooses to glorify a sport known to cause brain damage rather than try to improve the minds of its students. This afternoon, when the Losers take the field, they will find themselves in the spotlight for a very important reason. Fremont provides a cautionary lesson in what happens when a school loses its way—it’s now a community with wildly clashing values, an institution divided against itself, and most intriguingly, a tale of two Logans.