by Eric Kester
… siblings share 50% of their DNA.
“Christ, Wyatt, hurry your ass up!” Crooks screamed. My leg was awake now and I sprinted back to the huddle and buckled on my helmet en route.
I didn’t have time to fully translate Nate’s cryptic message. But as I looked at Brett, his entire body caked in mud and the gash in his forearm oozing blood, I thought about how I—me—Wyatt—was 50 percent Brett. Coursing through me at that moment was a surreal surge of power. It wasn’t that I suddenly thought I could be as athletic as Brett, but I now knew the scientific truth: Buried somewhere inside me was at least some of Brett’s talent. This wasn’t a guess or a desperate hope. It was science.
“Alright, fellas,” the head ref shouted to us once the injured player was off the field. “Fifteen seconds on the clock, starting on my whistle.”
“You heard ’em,” said Brett, crouched in the center of our huddle. “It’s do-or-die time. I want everything you have left. Too far for a field goal, so we’re going with a 33-44 waggle right. Let’s go—we’re winning this thing.”
Brett broke the huddle and we jogged up to the line. The ref blew his whistle, and the clock started counting down.
I crouched into my stance and looked up into Leopold’s black eyes. In my peripheral vision, I could see Brett crouch under center. But something was off. I could see it in his eyes.
Suddenly, Brett took a step back from the center. “Austin, Austin, 47-Chicago!” he shouted.
A second passed as our offense deciphered Brett’s audible.
“What the hell?” the guard next to me wondered aloud. And I was thinking the same thing: Was Brett seriously changing the play to the tackle-eligible pass?
I was the tackle eligible.
It had to have been a mistake. But then again, Brett didn’t make mistakes. Not when the game was on the line.
The clock ticked down to five … four … three …
“Hut-HUT!”
Our center snapped the ball to Brett and I shot out of my stance. Crooks’s repeated instructions to Trunk about the tackle-eligible pass echoed in my head: Before you run your pass route you MUST chip block Leopold so he doesn’t get a clean run at Brett. You MUST slow down his rush.
I took two steps forward and in an instant I was upon Leopold. I lowered my shoulder, went square for his enormous chest—and completely whiffed.
I stumbled forward a bit as Leopold dodged me like a matador dodges a bull, but all I could do at this point was keep running my route. I’d made it about ten yards downfield when I glanced back at Brett. I saw Leopold fully outstretched and flying helmet-first into Brett’s jaw. Then I noticed Brett’s throwing hand. It was empty. The ball was already in the air.
I looked skyward and there it was, a foot away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Blakemore’s safety charging at me. The pass was high and slightly behind me, so I swiveled my shoulders around and reached back to the ball with one hand, which was all I could get on it. Using some instinct I never knew I had, I flicked my wrist and batted the ball up, popping it back into the air. It sailed forward in a small arc over the oncoming safety’s head, and I continued my full-body swivel into a complete 360-degree spin. My forward momentum was still carrying me ahead, and when I completed the spin, the ball finished its parabola and fell into my hands.
I scampered the final ten yards into the end zone. Touchdown.
* * *
What happened next was mostly a blur.
I remember the stadium fog horn blaring in celebration. I remember getting absolutely leveled by about a dozen teammates jumping on top of me. But what I remember most was an image that haunts me to this day. Back on the thirty-yard line, through the mist, was a motionless body sprawled out in the mud. Hovering above it was the silhouette of a giant. He stared down at the body. Then he nudged the body with a prod of his foot. Brett didn’t move. The giant unbuckled his chin strap and walked off the field.
More guys pig piled on top of me. They screamed exuberant nonsense. They told me they fucking loved me.
Panicked, I wriggled free from the bottom of the pile and looked back at the thirty-yard line. Brett’s limp body was gone—vanished into the fog.
“Hey!” a voice suddenly rang out behind me.
I spun around.
“You did it,” Brett said. “You did it.”
Then we hugged.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
There was no question who got to ride shotgun to the postgame party. Maddox had been sitting in the passenger seat of Archer’s pickup truck as it idled in the parking lot outside the locker room, but when Brett and I approached, Archer quickly hopped out, smiled wide at me, and said, “It’s all yours, big man.” I wanted to ride in the bed of the truck, though, so Brett took shotgun while I stood in the back with my hands laid flat on the roof for balance. Behind me in the truck bed a few of my teammates sat and cracked open beers, but I stayed standing when Maddox revved the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. I stood facing forward the entire way, taking in the exhilarating rush of wind and speed. Through the soles of my shoes I could feel the powerful torque of the truck’s tires biting into the gravelly and twisting seaside road as we climbed up and up through the salty fog to the highest point in Grayport. Until that night, I’d never actually been to the town lighthouse, knowing it only as a distant and probably haunted pillar of solitude standing eerily atop a tall and jagged cliff. The Grayport football team knew it well, though, because they always held their victory parties on the field of crabgrass between the lighthouse and the ocean cliff.
Maddox parked the truck alongside the dozen or so cars that had arrived before us. The guys who didn’t see much game action leapt nimbly over the wall of the truck bed, but the rest of us were so battered we waited for Brett to let down the tailgate so we could gingerly slide our butts off the back until our feet softly touched the ground. From the other side of the lighthouse you could hear beers cracking, bonfires crackling, and people laughing. My teammates shuffled slowly toward the party, but Brett and I lingered behind the pack. I don’t know if this was intentional or simply because our broken bodies had synced our hobbles to the same speed. I was happy either way.
“You look like shit,” Brett said after a moment.
He was both kidding and not. When I looked at myself in the mirror after the game, I saw an entirely new person. My puffy red cheeks had turned white and hollow. Purple bruises and welts were smattered across my body. A partial imprint of someone’s face mask was tattooed on my right biceps, and on my neck were five small bruises the shape of fingerprints from a play in which Leopold grabbed my throat, lifted me off the ground, and slammed me into the mud.
“Yeah? Well, you look like a rottweiler’s chew toy,” I shot back playfully.
I heard Brett sigh, but even through the darkness I could tell he was smiling. I was, too.
You’ve probably heard all the talking heads on TV and in newspapers complaining about football: the violence, the injuries, the pain. But sometimes I’m like, did anyone ask us—the actual players—how we feel about it? Yeah, the pain doesn’t feel good, but it sure as hell feels meaningful. It’s a pretty raw and immediate connection to the guys you line up alongside. And sure, everyone feels pain, but that’s like saying everyone on earth knows a language so therefore the whole world should understand each other. This pain is a specific language, felt rather than spoken, understood only by football players. If you’ve ever played, you know what I’m talking about: The random joint, for example, throbbing so intensely you surely screamed in pain when you injured it or at least remember the play vividly, only you didn’t, and you don’t. The sharp yet somehow unspecified stinging in internal organs so obscure you’re only now aware of their existence. I don’t know if I’m putting it into words the right way. But I do know that as I limped next to Brett, I was feeling what he was feeling. If pain was the price of admission, I’d pay it every time.
The party was already rocking when
Brett and I finally made it over to the plot of grass behind the lighthouse. In the center of the lawn was an old picnic table that bowed under the weight of a dozen cases of beer. Buried somewhere in that tower of cardboard boxes was a portable speaker blaring out tunes. Scattered around the lawn were six or seven small bonfires with clusters of kids sitting in foldout beach chairs, telling stories and jokes. A soggy football fluttered around randomly from person to person, from teammate to teammate, from football player to nonplayer, from guy to girl—it seemed like everyone got their hands on it at some point or other.
I inhaled deeply. The fires smelled crisp and alive and a little like cinnamon. It was nice up on the cliff, where the lighter fog embraced you rather than strangled you. We were also above and upwind from the shore, where the stench of rotting fish assaulted the senses.
Brett scanned the lawn and caught sight of Maddox, Archer, and a few other guys sitting around the bonfire closest to the cliff. We started dragging ourselves in that direction when this dude—I think his name was Jeremy—staggered up to us. I recognized him from my trigonometry class. He always sat next to me in the back and gazed at the ceiling while occasionally stroking his thick, tangled beard, which was kind of disgusting and kind of badass at the same time. He always wore flannel and always reeked of pot.
Jeremy stopped in front of us and held his arms out wide. “Dude!” he said, grinning directly at me.
“Hey, man,” I said.
Jeremy’s entire right hand was buried in a bag of cheddar Goldfish, which somehow stayed fastened to him like a glove. He looked like Winnie the Pooh with his hand stuck in a jar of honey.
“Dude,” he repeated. “Dude.”
Then he lurched forward with surprising quickness and hugged me. “Dude,” he whispered softly into my ear, patting me on the back with his Goldfish hand. “Thank you. For everything.”
“Uh, you’re welcome?” I could feel Jeremy’s wiry beard scraping against my cheek. I caught eyes with Brett and he shook his head, smiling.
Jeremy released me and staggered backward. “That catch, man … that fucking catch. It was like—it was like a goddam religious experience, if religion wasn’t a man-made construct used by the top one percent to subordinate the masses. Here, have some Goldfish.”
Jeremy yanked his hand from the bag and jiggled the Goldfish package in what I think was supposed to be an enticing manner. I didn’t really want Goldfish—they felt weirdly inappropriate in my new social context—but I didn’t want to offend Jeremy so I formed a small cup with one hand and held it out. Jeremy tipped the bag at a 90-degree angle, dumping out the entire thing. The waterfall of crackers began spilling out of my hand, so I quickly added my other hand to form a larger vessel. Jeremy tossed the empty bag to the ground.
I wasn’t sure what the play was here. I couldn’t just smash my face into the pile of crackers like some sort of barbarian, so instead I stood there awkwardly, holding about a hundred Goldfish in my hand bowl.
“Dude,” Jeremy now said to Brett, slapping a hand on his shoulder. It was weird seeing Brett, usually so sturdy, stagger slightly on impact. “D’ya wanna know something about my man Wyatt Parker here? Did ya know that we’re in the same geometry class?”
“Trigonometry,” I mumbled.
“Oh yeah?” Brett replied politely to Jeremy.
“Yup, same exact goddam class, if you can believe it. So anyway, this is gonna blow your mind into stardust, but…”
Suddenly Jeremy stopped midsentence and stared down at my hand bowl of Goldfish. His eyes grew wide. “Holy shit, you’ve got Goldfish! Mind if I have some?”
Before I could answer he took a small handful and popped them in his mouth.
“So anyway,” he said as he noshed the orange crackers. “This whole semester, right, I’m like, Oh, there’s that kid Wyatt who sits next to me. But then tonight he makes that catch—that catch, man—and my brain stands on its head ’cause I now realize that this whole semester Wyatt hasn’t been sitting next to me—I’ve been sitting next to Wyatt.”
Jeremy took another large pinch of Goldfish from my hands and tossed them in his mouth. As he chewed them he looked back and forth between Brett and me with an intense, expectant smile, like the weight of this revelation was supposed to make us collapse and possibly piss ourselves.
“Yeah, that’s, uh … that’s nuts,” I said.
“Naw, man, these are Goldfish,” he said, taking another handful from me. “Hey, anyone ever tell you guys you’ve got, like, the exact same eyeballs? I’m talking exact same. Both sets are round, for instance. Both as green as the night sky. Only yours,” he said, looking at Brett, “yours are like two different sizes. But I’m kind of digging them, if I can be totally honest with you. They’re kind of like a ‘fuck you’ to the establishment, you know?” He took another scoop of Goldfish from me, polishing off the remaining bit. There was a thin layer of Goldfish on my palms, and I dusted it off on my jeans.
“I think I hear Maddox calling us over,” Brett said. “Nice meeting you, uh…”
“Jeremy. The name’s Jeremy. But my friends call me Jeremy.”
“Okay. Right. Nice meeting you, Jeremy.”
“Anytime,” he said. “And Wyatt, thanks again for the catch. And for the Goldfish. For everything, really.”
Our short trek across the lawn to the bonfire was the most incredible walk of my life. I could sense every eye on me, and for the first time ever I was proud of the way I looked. Every welt, gash, and lump was like a badge of honor. I felt enormous, but in a powerful way, like my XL chest and stomach were cavernous chambers that could inhale more life than anyone else. It was like my body finally made sense, you know? Like it had been placed in its proper context. Not once but twice someone came up to us, knelt before me like I was a king, then chugged a beer in my honor. A moment later, I was surprised by an aggressive butt slap from a random girl who said, “Nice catch, stud.” Near the bonfire, a couple of guys were reenacting the last play of the game. The guy running the pass route was rocking one of the replica Brett Parker jerseys that vendors sold outside the stadium. On the back of the jersey below PARKER he had used duct tape to stencil a makeshift 6 in front of the 7 to transform Brett’s number into mine.
Only one beach chair was open around the bonfire, but Brett quickly settled which of us would take it.
“Hey, I gotta go take care of something real quick,” he said to me quietly. “You going to be okay here?”
I nodded and eased myself into the foldout beach chair. It was nothing more than two swatches of coarse fabric stretched over a cheap tin frame, but as I sank my aching body into the seat I thought how I might never get up from this heavenly throne. You might say it felt like a religious experience.
Archer lounged in the chair to my right, and across from me sat Maddox. His girlfriend was sitting on his lap, and her extravagant curtain of blond hair made his shoulder-length flow seem tame in comparison. Her name was Pristine. She was a nice girl—or at least I figured she must’ve been because she was one of Haley’s good friends. I quietly wondered whether Haley was at the party.
On the ground next to both sides of Maddox’s beach chair were cases of beer poised like holstered guns ready for lightning-quick access. My butt had barely touched the seat when Maddox shot his hands into the cardboard boxes, grabbing cans and tossing them to each person circled around the bonfire.
My stomach clenched: The only thing I wanted less than a beer was my teammates thinking I was too scared to drink. Even my old daydreams of attending a Grayport victory party included this horrible moment where I’d be forced to choose one side or the other. As Maddox distributed the beers I legit had no idea whether I’d take one or not. All I knew was that either way I’d be disappointed in myself.
Maddox rapidly completed one pass after another—bang bang bang—in a clockwise motion. Then it was my turn to catch the toss. He snatched a can from the box and sent it tumbling end over end in my direction, but soon I saw that
his intended target was actually the kid to my left, who caught the can easily. I’d been holding my hands up ready for the pass, so I quickly put them down and pretended not to notice or care that he blatantly skipped me. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or offended. I wriggled uncomfortably in my seat as he finished distributing the beers.
When Maddox had completed the circle, he grabbed a beer for himself and cracked it open. But he didn’t take a sip. Instead, he cleared his throat.
“We should probably toast the guest of honor,” he said, holding up his can. “I mean, if it wasn’t for Wyatt we wouldn’t even be out here celebrating tonight. Actually, we’d probably still be out here, but it’d be depressing as hell.” Maddox chuckled softly, then fixed his eyes directly on me. “I’ve got no clue how you’re able to run lugging a pair of balls the size of Jupiter between your legs, but you made a hell of a play when the rest of us couldn’t get anything going.”
“You mean when you couldn’t get your ass open,” Pristine teased.
“Hey, if those bastards weren’t double-teaming me all night I would’ve made the catch,” Maddox countered.
“Babe, the only thing you could catch tonight was a cold.”
“Well, my throat is feeling a little sore if you want to inspect it…”
“Ugh, grow up.”
“How about you grow down?”
“God, you’re even dumber than you look.”
At that, Maddox and Pristine began aggressively making out. The rest of us glanced around from person to person in an awkward silence.