by Eric Kester
I flipped to the back and copied the answer down on my paper, but my victory was short-lived when I remembered that my math teacher, Mr. Kenner, made you show your work instead of just writing the final answer.
He said it’s so you can get partial credit on incorrect answers. Partial credit—what a stupid concept. Though I should admit in the past I used to actually like the idea. I definitely benefited from it on occasional math tests, but I think more than anything I liked the general concept of partial credit because it’s so rare in Grayport. Everything feels so damn consequential here, so binary, so black or white. People here only care if you win or lose—doesn’t matter how you played. You either had a good day catching fish or a shit day. For a town named after the color of its perpetual overcast skies, there were very few shades of gray.
But I’ve since turned on partial credit, and now I think it’s BS. All partial credit means is that you started out right, but then you took a wrong turn. Who cares if you were good if you don’t stay good? Your final answer on a problem shows where you stand on it now, in the present, and your “work” on it is merely the past. You can’t just throw out some garbage answer and expect your past good work to make up for everything.
In the living room, my dad let out a thick, wet burp. A contestant on Wheel of Fortune announced that he’d like to try to solve the word puzzle. I glanced up at the TV and saw the board the contestant was working with:
SP_ _ _ _ CLEA_ _ _ _
“SPIDER CLEAVAGE!” my dad shouted at the TV. “Gotta be spider cleavage!”
The contestant told Pat Sajak his answer. I couldn’t quite hear it, but whatever his answer, it was wrong.
“Sorry,” Sajak said. “The answer we were looking for is SPRING CLEANING.”
“Christ, Sajak,” my dad groaned at the TV. “You’re a real prick, you know that?”
For a guy who wasn’t religious, Dad sure said Christ a lot. When I was a kid I once asked him why he didn’t go to church with us on Sundays, and he said the only time I’d ever see him in a church would be at his funeral. I wonder if when your time comes, God takes a look at your entire life and gives partial credit.
A few minutes later I heard the familiar noise of Dad crumpling his empty beer can—a sign that he’d finished the last one he had brought with him to the couch. Dad lumbered into the kitchen. He didn’t even look at me—just went straight for the fridge.
“Where’s the food?” he snapped after a moment. The white light from inside the fridge illuminated the newest wrinkles on Dad’s angular face. He looked so old and drunk.
“What do you mean?” I replied weakly.
“There used to be food in here. What happened to it?”
Oh, it went out for its Tuesday night art class at the rec center. Where the hell did he think it went? We’d eaten it. Brett and I didn’t have money to buy groceries, and with the boat being docked, I don’t think Dad did either. There were a few condiments, a jar of dill pickles, and a six-pack of beer. That was it.
Instead of closing the fridge door, Dad just stood there awhile, staring into the nothingness. The fridge hummed softly, so content and unaware of the danger it was in. In the living room someone bought a vowel. I kept watching Dad stand there, hand on the fridge door, frozen as a statue. It always amazed me how slowly he inhaled and exhaled when he was drunk. At times I’d swear he wasn’t breathing at all. Then suddenly, as if someone flicked a switch in Dad’s head, he burst back to life and slammed the door shut with such violence you could hear the glass condiment bottles shatter inside. He turned to the counter and yanked the toaster from the counter and slammed it into the floor so hard it literally bounced like a spiked football. With wild, seething eyes he swung open the fridge again and desperately groped for a can of beer like it was a grenade that’d save him from some invisible approaching army. He cracked it open, then, rearmed, limped back into the TV room and continued watching contestants spin the Wheel of Fortune.
Poing-g-g-g-g. Poing-g-g-g-g. Poing-g-g-g-g.
I got a roll of paper towels out from under the sink. The splattered ketchup bottle made the inside of the fridge look like a murder scene. I started by wiping the remaining beer cans clear of ketchup and shards of glass. Otherwise, Dad was going to cut his hand when he grabbed the next one.
I was about halfway through the mess when I heard the creaking from the top of the stairs.
When Brett got to the bottom, he looked at me by the fridge, then looked down at my notebook on the kitchen table.
He didn’t say anything, so I did. “Do we have any more paper towels?” I held the cardboard roll up to him. “Ran out.”
No answer, and if he shrugged I didn’t see it. He walked to the coat rack next to the bathroom door, stepping over the toaster without even looking down at it, without even acknowledging it, like it was just another piece of furniture, like it’d been there broken on the floor all these years.
I don’t know where Brett was headed, and I knew if I asked him, he would give his typical answer: “Out.” From what people say around town, I think “Out” usually just means he’s going with a couple of teammates to grab some pizza at Primo’s—they gave him free slices there during football season.
“Foil.”
I looked up at Brett as he slid an arm through his jacket.
“What?” I was confused. Foil wouldn’t help with this mess at all.
“F-O-I-L,” he spelled out. “First-outside-inside-last. That’s the order you multiply the parts in that binomial.”
I wanted to say thanks but instead I said, “Oh, cool.”
And then Brett darted across the kitchen and left the apartment. That was the nice thing about the table being off to the side—made for an easier escape out the door.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
The next evening at the pep rally I was standing on our auditorium stage in my crusty polyester suit with the rest of the starters, and I could see Haley sitting in the audience staring right at me. Okay, maybe not right at me, but she was most definitely looking in my general direction. Okay, maybe she wasn’t looking in my general direction as much as she was looking down at her phone, but she was certainly facing in my general direction, and it was easy to telepathically feel her passionate longing for me.
My job during the pep rally was simply to stand there and not be awkward, and I was doing an absolutely fantastic job of screwing that up. I had no freaking clue what to do with my arms. Under the scrutiny of about two thousand fans and all the face-melting stage lights, my arms suddenly felt like doughy, dangling appendages that should’ve been naturally selected out of the human anatomy a couple millennia ago. I noticed that Brett and the other guys on the team solved this dilemma by standing resolutely with their arms folded across their chests, their impressive biceps and forearms flexed menacingly underneath their suit jackets. I couldn’t do this, though, because crossing my arms at my chest meant resting them atop the shelf of my gut, which, of course, I didn’t want to draw attention to, since Haley was staring right at me.
I had to think of something for my arms to do, so I decided to casually (and repeatedly) reach behind my head and scratch the back of my neck. I did this at a rate of once every way-too-often, as if on the list of top female turn-ons, just behind “confidence” and “big biceps,” is “a vague but terrible neck rash.” Ultimately, I settled on shoving both my hands in my pockets.
I surveyed the chaotic spectacle before me. A dozen marching band drummers thumped the auditorium into a frenzy with their rhythmic beat while a small army of cheerleaders—all with bouncing ponytails, perfect white teeth, and Brett’s #7 painted on each cheek—took turns catapulting each other high into the air. They’d practically scrape the ceiling and then plummet back down with a thrilling whoosh of reckless abandon and controlled elegance into a bed of their teammates’ arms.
Ever since I was a little guy I’d dreamed of standing with the starters at a Grayport pep rally. But now that I was up here, s
omething felt very off. For one thing, the location of the rally was all wrong. One of Grayport’s oldest, most random, and most beloved game-week traditions is for the cheerleaders to post signs around town saying that the pregame pep rally is scheduled for eight P.M. on Thursday evening in the Grayport High auditorium. But then, still following tradition, the cheerleaders would spend Thursday mornings covering up these posters with a bright yellow addendum stating, DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER, TONIGHT’S PEP RALLY HAS BEEN MOVED OUTSIDE. So like clockwork the entire town would gather each Thursday night at the beach and huddle around a roaring bonfire, its orange flames proudly defying the rain. I always loved how its plumes of gray smoke poured upward into the black sky. How the marching band drums didn’t compete with, but rather complemented, the crashing waves. How when a cheerleader was launched into the sky and disappeared momentarily into the mist, the whole town would gasp despite being absolutely certain—just as certain as we were that the bonfire would keep burning and that Grayport would win tomorrow’s game—that the cheerleader would come back to us, landing softly in the bed of her teammates’ arms.
It’d been like that every Thursday night of football season for as long as anyone could remember. But it was different this Thursday night. This time, the rain—the inclement weather—never arrived. Instead, a strangely serene climate floated in from the ocean and hovered eerily above our little town. The sky was bold and cloudless, and just before the pep rally, the setting sun illuminated the sky in brilliant streaks of purple, orange, and red. The bay was so quiet and still it looked like a painting. You could almost trick yourself into believing that the deep crimson color of the ocean was a reflection of the dazzling red sky, and not, as we all knew in our hearts, the red tide stalking toward us, choking our bay slowly and mercilessly.
So for the first time maybe ever, the inclement weather addendum wasn’t posted. The town packed uncomfortably into the auditorium, where we didn’t have to face the eerie, deathly calm outside. But you could still feel the suffocating unease inside the auditorium. At this pep rally, Grayport’s common enemy wasn’t Blakemore, but red tide—and that was one opponent where victory was far from certain. In the Grayport Gazette, Murray Miller devoted the entire front section to red tide, reporting the devastating news that the US Coast Guard had confirmed our bay was swarming with the poisonous red amoeba that would kill all the fish and, most likely, the little town whose economy depended on them. Murray Miller’s headline read simply: IT’S COMING.
This all made for a super uncomfortable vibe during the pep rally. On the one hand, the music and the cheering felt kind of silly when we knew that in just a week or two many Grayport families wouldn’t be able to afford meals. The importance of football is never questioned in Grayport, but in these circumstances we were forced to consider a horrible reality: that football is just a game. You could notice just the faintest restraint in the cheers. The drums were a little bit softer. The cheerleaders were tossed just a little bit lower into the air.
But then again there was also a sense of urgency connected to this game, this team. It’s like football became extra important because it’s nice—no, essential—that we have something that’s just a game.
It’s times like these when towns rely on their anchors, and that’s why Coach Crooks was the first scheduled speaker of the rally. A bodiless voice from the overhead speakers called him to the podium, and the old man crept to the front of the stage. He was our town’s ultimate symbol of survival: A veteran of three wars and dozens of state championship games, Crooks had seen it all. His body oozed (sometimes literally, which I won’t get into) with age and experience; his spine was as curved as a fishing hook, and he was missing most of his right pinky finger, which he’d lost in various moments of badassery that seemed to change with each retelling.
When he reached the podium, Coach Crooks slowly held up that mangled hand to silence the crowd. He then snatched a canteen dangling around his neck and took a loud, swishy gulp. From my view on the side of the stage, I could see his white whiskers glistening around his crackly lips. He slowly reached into the front pocket of his tattered denim shirt and pulled out a toothpick. He tucked it between what was left of his side molars.
There was a long pause. Then Crooks cleared his throat.
“You all know I’m not exactly one for long speeches,” he said, his gravelly voice echoing throughout the auditorium. “So, goodbye.”
Then he slowly turned around and shuffled back to his spot among the other coaches.
There was a confused silence in the audience, then an eruption of cheering and laughter. This “speech,” if you want to call it that, was so Coach Crooks, and the town loved it.
“Thank you, Coach Crooks!” the bodiless voice announced through the overhead speakers. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special treat. Please welcome Brett Parker to the podium!”
The auditorium was suddenly abuzz with shocked murmuring as everyone—even the players and coaches onstage—turned to the person next to them and whispered similar words of disbelief: Was this really about to happen? Was Brett Parker, the quietest, most inaccessible guy in town, about to address two thousand people?
I felt a wave of nausea hit me like a Trunk punch to the gut, and I could tell by the way the audience murmured and squirmed in their seats that they felt the same discomfort. I mean, who possibly thought this would be a good idea? Brett was not a public speaker. Sure, with all the shit going down, the town needed Brett more than ever, but we needed the Brett who we knew and loved, the guy who glided instead of ran, the guy who was always in control, the guy whose passes got better the worse it rained. We needed to keep our idealized version of Brett intact, the version of Brett that strode up to the line of scrimmage with a contagious confidence. The last thing we needed was this version of Brett, the version that was now timidly stepping to the podium with his head down.
At the podium, Brett reached into his pocket and pulled out a neatly folded piece of paper. He opened it up, and from my vantage I could see the paper trembling in his hands.
The auditorium fell so deathly quiet you could’ve heard the toothpick drop from Crooks’s mouth.
I cringed. God, get me out of here.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” Brett began. His voice was low and quiet, but it was also as sharp and clear as his piercing green eyes. I think the entire auditorium was holding its breath. “And,” he continued, “I keep coming back to book six of The Iliad.”
Wait—what? The Iliad? The epic poem by Homer? Back when we were in elementary school and back when our parents were still together, my mom would read to me before bed while Dad and Brett reviewed his playbook on the other side of our attic room. At first Mom tried reading me Charlotte’s Web, but Dad was having none of that shit. So he had Mom read me The Iliad, the two-thousand-year-old story about the Trojan War. It was pretty awesome learning about all those badass warriors like Achilles and Hector, but man, some of those battle scenes were pretty brutal for an eight-year-old to hear: “The metal point of the spear,” my mom would read to me, “penetrated under his brain and smashed his white jawbones. His teeth were knocked out, his eyes filled with blood and, gasping, he blew blood through his mouth and nostrils. Okay, Wyatt—sweet dreams!”
Brett had never read The Iliad, as far as I knew. Maybe all those nights he wasn’t listening to Dad, but to Mom as she read to me.
“In book six,” Brett went on, “the Greek army is advancing on the shores of Troy like an unstoppable force. Actually”—Brett suddenly corrected himself—“the Greeks weren’t like an unstoppable force. They were an unstoppable force, and everyone in Troy knew it. They looked out at the ocean and knew their city was doomed. There was no question.”
I’d been staring hard at my sneakers, wishing for all this to be over. But I couldn’t help peeking up at the audience. No one was snickering. Some were still fidgeting in their seats. But the majority was rapt with attention. The unstoppable force, the
advancement on the shores—clearly Brett was alluding to an opponent even more powerful—and relevant—than Blakemore High.
“So Troy is panicking. They’re preparing for the worst.” Brett’s voice was starting to crescendo. “And Hector, their best warrior, he’s not foolish enough to tell his people that everything’s going to be okay. That would be a blatant lie. It would be unfair to them.” Brett paused and looked down at his notes, as if he was considering his next words carefully. The paper was still trembling.
“But what he does tell them is that true honor, the kind that defines you, doesn’t mean fighting to win. It means fighting when you know you’ve already lost. It means going down with a spear in the chest, and not a spear in the back as you run away.” Brett’s pace had picked up considerably. He had stopped looking at his notes and instead stared hard into the audience, his green eyes fierce and challenging. He was getting into it. And so was the audience. You could feel the energy in the room building.
“’Cause Hector knew that what matters most is not how many times you get knocked down”—and here Brett glanced at me—“but how many times you pick yourself—”
“YEAAAH, number seven! Tell ’em, boy!”
Two thousand heads swiveled at once to the back of the auditorium to the source of the shout. There, in the last row, was the last person to wear #7 for Grayport football. He was slouched way back in his chair. His head was tilted up, his legs were splayed wide apart, and his left hand gripped what appeared to be a glass bottle in a brown paper bag.
No, god. Please no, I thought to myself.
Brett glanced up nervously at Dad, then back down to his notes. “Um, because, what Hector … well, Hector—”
“You tell ’em, boy!” Dad shouted again. The outline of his body in the back of the dark auditorium looked like a silhouette so sharp it was cut from metal. He took a swig from the bottle and wiped his mouth clumsily with his sleeve.