Gut Check

by Eric Kester

  Archer lifted his beer. “Um, cheers?”

  * * *

  We settled into the evening after that. I mostly listened to the conversations and laughed at everyone’s jokes. We recapped the game, exchanged stories about Coach Crooks’s batshit ideas, and then somehow got into an argument about whether it would be easier to fight a duck the size of a horse or one hundred horses the size of ducks. We pooled together $35 for Maddox to eat a worm, but after he gulped it down we emptied our pockets and only came up with $8.56 between us. Maddox just shrugged and said the joke was on us because he liked the taste of worms.

  Nobody offered me a drink the entire night, despite it flying around liberally. I was both confused and relieved about this, but at some point those feelings evolved into a weird feeling of gratitude. These guys weren’t exactly the most sensitive dudes in the world, and they sure as hell weren’t above hazing underclassmen, but when it came to my aversion to alcohol, they got it. Like, they knew my family situation. They were there at last night’s pep rally. They saw Dad, saw how he acted with a bottle in his hands. They knew why I wouldn’t touch the stuff. They decided not to even put me in the awkward position of saying no to them, and for the first time in forever, I felt understood.

  But none of my teammates could help me when Haley came over.

  She approached our circle with a mix of confidence and apprehension. She was wearing a pair of tight jeans that countered her baggy Grayport Football sweatshirt, the cuff of which was pulled over her hand as a layer of insulation for the cold beer she held.

  “Sounds like a good time over here,” she said, using her free hand to tuck a stray lock of brown hair behind her ear.

  Pristine let out a small excited yelp, no doubt relieved to finally have another girl there to dilute the percentage of the group who ate invertebrates for fun. “Oh my god, Haley, you have to hang here awhile,” she pleaded.

  “Sure, okay,” Haley replied as she discreetly scanned the circle of dudes planted in our beach chairs around the fire.

  At that moment not one but two ideas hit me. She’s looking for an open seat, followed by, Offer her your seat! This inner voice was definitely a distant echo from my mom, who couldn’t stop herself from offering unsolicited love advice whenever I visited her on weekends at Aunt Jackie’s house. Remember to always be a gentleman, she’d say, totally proving that she had no clue about my world, a place where a guy could eat a worm and kiss a hot girl in a single sitting. And whatever you do, Mom would add dramatically, like she was about to drop some magical wisdom, remember to just be yourself.

  That one always drove me up the freaking wall. I’d been myself for the last sixteen years and it wasn’t working. “Being myself” wasn’t the solution—it was the problem.

  But it was all I knew. So as Haley stood uncomfortably on the outside of our circle of chairs, I instinctively went “full gentleman” on her.

  “You can have my seat, if you want,” I mumbled quietly.

  Haley didn’t hear me because when I get nervous I’ve got a real problem with volume control. It’s like my voice has a super wide range of volume settings that includes every decibel level except, you know, all the ones used by normal human beings.

  “Say that again?” Haley asked.

  Rattled, I swung the audio needle to the other extreme. “THERE’S A SEAT FOR YOU RIGHT HERE!”

  The entire group erupted in a chorus of amazed laughter and dramatic “Oh shiiiits!” Haley cocked her head at me and narrowed her eyes like she was mildly annoyed, but at the same time the emergence of a sly smile suggested a degree of impressed bemusement. “A little bold,” she said. “But I’ll allow it.”

  Then she glided over to me and sat directly on my lap.

  You know all that bullshit I spewed earlier about finally feeling confident about stuff? That was now gone, poof, nothing more than a wisp of smoke disappearing into the fog. I could feel all of my progress—first the catch and now my unintentional pickup line that had actually worked—start to feel choked out of me as my nerves brought with them a familiar shortness of breath in my lungs, making my panic even worse because I’m pretty sure it’s unsexy to die of an asthma attack at the mere touch of a woman.

  I was freaking out hard, so I can’t exactly say how many minutes Haley had been sitting on my lap, but I’d guess it was somewhere in the range of three minutes to three hours. Luckily she was chatting with the group and facing forward so she couldn’t see the beads of sweat pouring down my face as I concentrated every micro-muscle in my body to avoid any sudden movements that might cause the chair to collapse.

  The only minor distraction I faced was the fragrance wafting from Haley’s long brunette hair, which fell along the slope of her neck and lightly tickled my shoulder with each turn of her head. I’m not a total creep, so there’s really not much else to say about her hair other than it smelled like a blend of strawberries, honey, and happy childhood memories, all mixed with subtle notes of existential crisis from feeling tragically nostalgic for this beautiful and fleeting moment right here in the present. And vanilla—there was definitely some vanilla in there, too.

  Anyway, as Haley sat on my lap I realized that there’s a small but critical difference between “smelling” and “sniffing,” and it took a lot of concentration to stay on the right side of that razor-thin line.

  My focus deviated further when Brett, cradling a football in one hand and holding a folded beach chair in the other, approached our bonfire. He grimaced in pain as he slowly unfolded his chair and plunked down directly across from Haley and me. The flames dancing in the bonfire obscured most of his body, but I could still see Brett’s face flickering in the orange light. We caught eyes, and he gave a quick raise of his eyebrows and grinned, like “nice going with the girl.”

  The group kept chatting but Brett didn’t say much to anyone. Once in a while he’d pull out his phone and look at it with disinterest, but for the most part he stared absently into the fire, spinning his football slowly between his palms. It made me feel better seeing him act this way around his friends because it suggested that maybe all these quiet years between us, though strained, weren’t abnormal.

  After a little while Brett finally spoke up, startling nobody more than me by calling out my name.

  “Yo, Wyatt—heads up!”

  I glanced up to see Brett cock his elbow by his ear and then snap the football in my direction. The ball cleared Haley’s head by a good foot, and I flung one hand blindly into the air in a desperate attempt to snag the pass. The nose of the ball thwapped into my palm and miraculously stuck there. I pulled down the one-handed catch casually, even though my internal disbelief was as resounding as the burst of cheers around the bonfire. Haley had swiveled sideways on my thigh and now partially faced me. Her big white smile and excited clapping made me feel like I was floating.

  Archer had the loudest reaction. “Dude, why’ve you been holding out on this crazy skill for so long?” he asked excitedly. Then, to no one in particular he exclaimed, “This kid catches anything!”

  Pristine leaned back into Maddox’s chest and turned her head toward him. “You taking notes, babe?”

  “Come on, I practically invented the one-handed catch,” Maddox shot back.

  “Well, you do have a lot of experience using one hand…”

  “Yeah, a lot of experience doing this,” and Maddox held out one hand and gave Pristine the finger. They started to aggressively make out again. I tossed a wobbly pass back to Brett.

  “I dunno, man,” Archer said to a seriously preoccupied Maddox. “I think Wyatt has the softest hands in Grayport.”

  “Really?” Haley chimed in. “I think this needs verification.”

  She placed her beer on the ground and then plucked each of my wrists off our chair’s plastic armrests. She guided my hands palms-up onto her lap so my arms were now partially wrapped around her. Then she delicately traced her fingertips across my palms, sending a shiver through my entire being. My heart
also skipped a beat as I felt more thread pull apart in the chair underneath us.

  “Oh my god, they are so soft,” she said, still stroking my hands. “And really big, too.”

  I cleared my throat. This was it: the moment I’d been practicing in my head for like the past three years. “Well, you know what they say about guys with big feet…”

  Silence.

  “You mean hands?” Haley corrected me.

  “Oh, right.”

  “Hey, Haley,” Brett suddenly interjected. “Do you trust me?”

  “What? Uh, sure, I guess.”

  “Okay, then hold very still.”

  Before Haley could ask why, Brett whistled a pass on a sharp line toward the two of us.

  Haley’s yelp was still hanging in the air as the ball zipped just above the top of her head, cutting so close it skimmed through a tuft of her hair. I pulled my hands from her lap and caught the screaming pass about one centimeter from the top of her head.

  The group cheered and Haley laughed with relief and joy. I tossed the ball back to Brett.

  “Okay, next question,” Brett said to Haley. “Do you trust Wyatt?”

  Haley turned toward me, looked me up and down, and giggled at her little mock appraisal. “Yes.”

  “I mean really trust him.”

  “With my life,” she said.

  “Okay. Don’t move a muscle.”

  The football shot out of Brett’s hands, and within a second it had passed through the flames of the bonfire and missiled directly at Haley’s face. She screamed.

  THWACK.

  When Haley opened her eyes next, she saw my hands wrapped securely around the football, its pointed nose only millimeters from her mouth. I felt her entire body unclench in my lap. Then, without moving her head, she puckered her lips and kissed the ball on the tip of its nose. “Hello, you,” she said warmly.

  Brett and I kept playing catch like this for minutes that seemed to contain within them entire years, the ball like a spark traveling back and forth on an invisible wire that connected us more than words ever had. Haley kept yelping and giggling; each pass was as thrilling as the last, a real-life magic trick courtesy of the Parker Brothers. Again and again Brett delivered an impossibly precise pass into my hands, and Haley would shudder in a sort of primal excitement, digging her tailbone into my thigh and pressing a deep bone bruise I didn’t know I had until just then. The pain was intense, radiating, and amazing, a visceral connection to the game that had changed everything for me.

  After a little while I suggested that Haley throw the ball back to Brett.

  “Sure,” Haley said. “But I suck big-time at throwing spirals. Can you show me the secret?”

  “Yeah, totally,” I told her. “Is it okay if I, uh, if I put my hand on top of yours?”

  “Totally okay,” she said.

  Haley held the ball and I laid my hand softly on top of hers, adjusting each of her fingers here, here, and here across the laces in a perfect form that I had to learn from a YouTube video since Dad never taught me.

  “Okay, now when you throw,” I explained, “just let the ball spin a little off your fingers.”

  Haley cocked her arm and fired an absolute bullet to Brett. A perfect spiral.

  “Jesus,” I said. “That was a laser.”

  “Well, I had a good coach.”

  “You’re a liar,” I said. “You totally have thrown a football before.”

  Haley flashed a devious grin. “Maybe like one or two thousand times,” she said. “I live in Grayport. Isn’t learning to throw a football some sort of holy commandment?”

  “How could I forget?” I said. “Thou shalt sling inflated pigskins at supreme velocities.”

  A few hours before I would have never dreamed of being this comfortable with Haley, but now I felt a surge of … I don’t know, intangible certainty deep within me. It was similar to the rush I felt as I ran to the huddle for the final play with the knowledge that I had half of Brett’s DNA in my very foundation. Suddenly, I was certain that I’d catch every pass Brett threw me, certain that I could overcome any awkward moment with Haley, and certain that the threads of my chair wouldn’t break because they were woven in double helixes as strong as the DNA in my blood.

  The pace of our game of catch eventually slowed, and it ended for good when Brett put the ball down and mumbled about having to take care of something. We watched his shadow grow long in the bonfire’s glow as he limped into the darkness, off to do whatever mysterious things Brett did.

  When he was gone Haley turned to me. “Selfie time,” she announced. “A picture with tonight’s hero is going to set a record for likes.”

  Haley dug her phone from her pocket, but its battery was dead. My phone had a cracked screen and was older than the Stone Age, but it at least had a front-facing camera so I whipped it out and held it at arm’s length from the two of us. When I unlocked the screen, there was a text waiting for me from Brett. It was time-stamped from twenty minutes earlier, and Haley and I both read his message:

  STOP SNIFFING HER HAIR CREEPO

  “Oh, um … yeah,” I explained. I frantically smashed CLOSE with my sausage fingers. I then quickly opened the camera app. “Ready? One-two-three!”

  But the resulting picture was only of the top of our heads, because at that very moment we were plummeting down to a rough landing of wet grass and a heap of mangled chair.

  I landed spread-eagle on my back with Haley sprawled on top of me like I was a beanbag chair. She was bursting with the most pure and joyful laugh I’d ever heard.

  “You okay?” I asked, laughing myself.

  “I’ll survive,” she said. She flipped over so now she was facing me. Her face was inches from mine, and her hair fell like a blanket around the borders of my face, blocking out the entire world and leaving just the two of us looking at each other in our own private tunnel.

  “I promise I wasn’t sniffing your hair,” I whispered. “I was smelling it.”

  Haley giggled. “You’re cute,” she said. Then she leaned forward and softly kissed the tip of my nose.

  I felt a lot of things: tingling, numbness, and an oncoming asthma attack, to name a few. The most prominent feeling, though, was from someone’s shoe urgently nudging me on the shoulder.

  “Um, dude? Can I talk to you a second?”

  I knew the voice from outside our secret fortress was real, but I squeezed my eyes shut tightly in an attempt to will it out of existence.

  “Dude, Wyatt. For real,” the voice came again.

  Haley rolled off of me, unveiling a clear view of Jeremy standing above us. He somehow had a new bag of Goldfish.

  “I hate to, like, ration your passion and all, but I think you better go check on your bro.” He motioned over toward the ocean cliff, where Brett had walked off to. “I’m no doctor,” Jeremy continued, “but I was a veterinarian in a previous life, and in my professional opinion Brett is, like, the opposite of okay.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Brett’s body language was usually harder to read than Dad’s because his face wasn’t very expressive. He almost always wore the same hard-boiled look—didn’t matter whether he was stepping over the goal line for a touchdown or stepping over a smashed toaster on his way out the kitchen door. His strides were purposeful, even when he wasn’t sure where he was going. He was expressionless but far from emotionless. His dark eyebrows were typically furrowed above emerald eyes that didn’t just observe the world but fully absorbed it, allowing it to seep down into a place so private and so deep within him no tremor could ever reach the surface.

  Even with so few clues, I could always sense Brett’s mood, and it was easy to tell that something was off as I approached him standing near the edge of the cliff. Jeremy had told me that Brett was acting weird about a hundred yards north of our bonfire, and sure enough, when I trekked through the fog in that direction, there was Brett staring out into the ocean.

  It felt like a different wor
ld out there on the bluff. Even the bass of the party music was drowned out by the heavy thump of waves crashing into the jagged rocks fifty feet below. Asking Brett if he was okay seemed like way too personal a question—it felt weird enough going to “check on” my big brother, so I sure as hell couldn’t pat him on the back and be like, Hey, kiddo, why the bad vibes? So instead I didn’t say a word and just stood next to him, watching the sweeping pulse of the lighthouse beam as it revealed and then erased sparkling slices of silver ocean.

  “I’ve got a secret,” Brett said after a while. He kept looking ahead, like he was talking to the black horizon.

  “Okay…” I could feel my entire body scrunching up.

  “He’s not out there. He didn’t make it.”

  “Who? Dad?”

  Brett didn’t respond. The lighthouse beam swept across the ocean once, twice, three times.

  “No,” he said finally. “That little friend of yours—can’t remember his name. We told you he made it to the ocean, but he didn’t.”

  Was I imagining things, or was Brett slurring his words? I didn’t smell alcohol on him, and it was well known around school that Brett Parker, in his militaristic discipline over nutrition, never drank. But right now something was off. There had also been signs when we were sitting at the bonfire earlier—the way Brett stared into the fire with glossy eyes. I would’ve been more concerned if I hadn’t been so busy concentrating on Haley and resisting the impulse to wrap myself like a burrito in her delicious hair.

  I turned to look at Brett now. He was squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing his forehead. “I can’t remember his name,” he said in a low, quivering voice. “I’m trying, but I can’t…”

  It took me a moment to put together the pieces of Brett’s fragmented thoughts, and when I did, I was still confused about why he was bringing this up. He was referring to a time when we were kids.

  * * *

  It all started at my seventh birthday, when my aunt Jackie gifted me a doll. She didn’t give it to me until Dad had left my party to “do errands” (aka hit up the bar), because she knew that me having a doll would be so not okay with him. I wasn’t too psyched about the doll myself. He was one of those talking dolls, squeaking out phrases like You’re my best friend! and Hooray for play day! and, for some reason, Let’s recycle!