Bad Taste in Boys

by Carrie Harris

  “I’ll do it, Mom. Just give me time,” I said.

  “You say that, but you never do it. For all you know, he really likes you.”

  “He barely knows I exist. And he only knows at all because I bring him Gatorade.”

  “He’ll never know you exist if you don’t talk to him.”

  I loved my mother, but her constant pep talks killed me. It was hard to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “I. Will.”

  “Tonight,” she said firmly. “And I expect a full report on Sunday afternoon during family chat.”

  “No way. Not in front of Jonah. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  Jonah was my little brother. I’d have given myself a paper cut and soaked it in battery acid before I told him I liked a guy.

  “Good point,” she said. “Next week, then.”

  “All right.” I took another bite. I thought about bringing up the steroids and asking for her help, but what was she going to do? She wasn’t even in the country. It was my problem to deal with, whether I liked it or not.

  “I’m so sorry to cut this short, honey,” she said, “but I’ve really got to run. These papers won’t grade themselves.”

  “Love you, Mom.”

  “Love you too.”

  I signed off and shoveled down the rest of my food. Then it was time to go back to school for the game.

  Time to get my hands on one of those vials.

  “You’re the varsity!” screamed Coach, his forehead bulging. “They’re the JV! You should win this, you sissies! I don’t care if this is an exhibition game; I just want you to score one freaking touchdown for a change!”

  The night was not going well. I hadn’t been able to get into Coach’s office; he’d spent the entire afternoon blabbing on his office phone with his feet up on the desk, and I thought he might notice if I took some of the black-market drugs out of the cabinet right next to him.

  The Ho hadn’t shown up, so the team went onto the field without him. I’d set up my kit on the sidelines, totally distracted because Aaron was warming up about ten feet away. He noticed me watching him and did his little nod thing in my direction. Every cell in my body squeed in unison.

  Coach started screaming as soon as the teams lined up for the first play. It looked almost comical; on average, our varsity players had two years and about fifty pounds on the JV guys. But I still wasn’t surprised when the whistle blew and the JV overran our team like a herd of Pamplona bulls. Blocking had never been our strong suit. They hit Aaron really hard; I heard the whoosh! his lungs made when all the air was forced out. I wanted to beat the heck out of the JV guys for that, except I wouldn’t know what to do in a fistfight without a manual.

  “Get up,” I urged from my spot on the sidelines, clenching my fists so hard that I could feel my nails dig into my palms. “Come on. Get up.”

  He staggered to his feet. I had to resist the urge to cheer as he straightened his helmet. The players lined up again, Aaron calling out numbers that sounded completely random to me. Derek LaBianca snapped him the ball, and the JV team took him down again before he could get rid of it.

  With two minutes left in the half, the ball squirted out of Logan Smith’s hands, and every single guy on the field leapt at it. I shifted nervously as the refs began pulling padded guys off the mound of players and didn’t relax until I saw Aaron’s face. He wasn’t hurt, and he even had the ball.

  But after everyone else got up, Logan was still rolling around in the grass, clutching his hand. Coach didn’t ask if Logan was okay. Instead, he charged out onto the field and started yelling. I barely registered the words at first; I was too busy staring at Coach’s face. He’d been chewing ferociously on a pen, and his lips were stained with blue ink.

  “Jeez, Smith!” Coach ranted. “You look like one of Jerry’s Kids! What do you mean you got to sit out on the next play? Man up and get back in the game.”

  No one intervened, not even the referees. We sucked so badly that the officials didn’t even pay any attention. No one in the bleachers cared either; the only reason anyone showed was because the Key Club was giving out free Lady Gaga bobble heads at halftime. Normally, about five people came to our games, and two of them ran the concession stand.

  I walked across the field to stand behind Coach.

  “Excuse me?” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “I’ve got to clear him to play.”

  He whirled, flinging blue-tinged spittle into my eye. The guy was practically foaming at the mouth. “Grable. What do you want?”

  “He’s not allowed to play until someone checks him out.”

  I met his gaze without faltering, even though my eyes wouldn’t stop watering from the spit projectile. Coach got right up in my face and smiled so wide I could see every single one of his teeth. With the blue lips, he looked like an apoplectic clown. I hated clowns.

  “Of course, Grable. I’ll just let you handle it.” He rubbed his forearm like there was an itch he knew he shouldn’t scratch but couldn’t help himself. “I’ll let you handle it all.”

  I actually liked it better when he was yelling; the unhinged smile was way too borderline psychotic for my taste. But poor Logan still stood there, cradling his pinky and looking humiliated, and he deserved my undivided attention. It seemed like a simple fracture, but I took him to the EMT station at the end of the field just to make sure. I loved it when the EMTs agreed with me. And they did. They even let me splint it.

  I returned to the sidelines as the halftime buzzer sounded, and we made the March of Shame back to the locker room. I never bothered to follow the score, but I knew it was something along the lines of a bunch of points for them and no points whatsoever for us.

  Things didn’t go according to the standard protocol after that. Usually, Coach followed the team into the locker room, but this time he pulled Aaron out of line, whispered to him, sent him in, and stayed behind.

  “Grable,” said Coach, gesturing to me. “My office.”

  I was more curious than anything else, because I couldn’t see him finding fault with anything I’d done. He had to concede that I was right about Logan; I’d gotten him off the field efficiently and back in working order as soon as possible. What more did he want? If he asked me to shout encouragement at the players again, I was going to encourage him to stuff it up his behind.

  I followed him down the hall and let him fumble with the keys for once. It gave me time to ponder his last name, which was printed on a nameplate on the door and contained enough Zs to require three sets of Scrabble tiles to spell. Which would explain why everyone just called him Coach.

  He turned on the light and held the door for me in a rare gentlemanly gesture. When I walked into the office, the rack of vials sat right in the middle of his desk.

  I didn’t know how to react. Somehow, gaping seemed insufficient, but I still did it.

  “You need to do something for me, Grable,” said Coach, sitting down and pointing me toward a rickety folding chair.

  “What’s that?” I sat gingerly, tearing my eyes away from the vials. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they were B12.

  “Ho is delivering a baby.” Coach set a box of syringes atop the vials and pushed the stack toward me. “He was supposed to administer these tonight. Since he’s not here, you need to do it.”

  “What’s in the vials?”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “Of course it is, if you want me to administer them.”

  “Fine. They’re B twelve.”

  “Why aren’t they labeled?”

  “You ask too many questions, Grable. Just do what you’re told.”

  “Excuse me?” I shoved the rack back toward him and jumped to my feet. “You’re never supposed to administer medications from unlabeled containers. And anyway, I’m just a student trainer. I’m not supposed to give injections. We both know that, so don’t order me around like I’m an imbecile.”

  He just scowled at me. Like that was going to change anything.

  �
�If you don’t have anything legal you’d like me to do, I’d like to check on Smith’s pinky.”

  “Get out,” he said.

  I didn’t need to be told twice.

  I wanted to call Rocky and rant for a while, but I needed to check on Logan. We were low on players. Five guys were out sick, one had a strained groin, two had sprained their ankles at practice that morning, and Joe Wisniewski got a nosebleed if you looked at him funny.

  I took a deep breath before tapping on the locker room door. After a minute, Aaron stuck his head out.

  “What’s up?” He looked at me a little closer. “Something wrong?”

  I was still angry, but I didn’t want him to think of me as a hostile person. I took another breath and spoke as calmly as possible. “Can you send Logan out so I can take a look at his finger?”

  “No problem. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong, Kate?”

  It was the first time he had ever said my name. All the anger rushed out of me. I felt drained and breathless, like I’d just run a mile, and my heart started beating double-time. I couldn’t form any words, so I just nodded.

  “By the way, you’re doing a great job out there,” he said, leaning on the doorframe and smiling at me. “I’ve been watching.”

  “No wonder you keep getting clobbered. Quit doing that.”

  I couldn’t believe I said that. Well, I could, but I didn’t want to. I expected him to slam the door in my face, but he laughed instead. I wasn’t sure if he thought I was joking or was just too polite to point out what a moron I was.

  “Trust me,” he said before closing the door, “during a play, all I’m thinking about is not getting clobbered. I’ll send Logan out.”

  I’d just engaged in witty banter—how in the heck had that happened? Maybe I wasn’t as hopeless as I thought. My mother would never let me live this down.

  I kept replaying it in my head: the way he laughed at my joke, the way he looked at me like I was interesting and not just like he wanted to copy off my test. The situation had me all in a tizzy.

  Logan came out the door, and I grinned like a complete lunatic. He stared at me like I’d grown a third eye.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. What’s up?”

  “Oh. Nothing.” I beamed at him. “How’s the finger?”

  “Hurts.” He held his hand out. The tape was slipping, so we sat down next to the cart to repply it. My hands started sweating about halfway through. The elation quickly wore off and was replaced with a feeling of dread. Would Aaron expect me to flirt like that again? What would I say? Something told me he wouldn’t be interested in hearing random factoids about fungal infections.

  Now I was so worked up that I couldn’t stop shaking. I whacked Logan’s injured finger against my thigh by mistake. His face went white, but he didn’t say a word.

  “I am so sorry,” I said, wiping my hands on my pants. “Are you okay? Do you need painkillers? Ice? Gatorade?”

  “It’s okay.” He stood up. “I think that’ll get me through the game. Thanks, Kate. You’ve been really great.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I felt so ashamed. It was a minor miracle that I had managed to talk to a guy without making a total fool of myself, but I needed to chill. I had a job to do, after all.

  It was time to get back on the field. I reluctantly tapped on Coach’s door.

  “What?” he yelled.

  “Time to go back out, Coach.”

  He opened the door. “How’s the finger?”

  He had a tray of steroids in his office. Was he seriously worried about a broken finger?

  “Fine,” I said, and then I turned my back on him and walked away before I said something I’d regret.

  Not that I was going to let the steroid thing slide. No way. I actually felt a little protective now. Steroids could kill, and I wasn’t about to let that happen to any of my players.

  fter the game, my brother, Jonah, met me outside the locker room wearing a giant chicken suit. Every year, a freshman was chosen to be our team mascot, Birdy the Bantam. The costume had to be one of the most emasculating things in the known universe, particularly since Birdy was a girl and wore a cute little cheerleading outfit complete with yellow tights and pigtails.

  Jonah wasn’t usually the school-spirit type, but he had an epic crush on Kiki. Being our mascot allowed him to spend a lot of time on the sidelines ogling her and the other cheerleaders. I tried to tell him Kiki wasn’t attracted to giant cheerleading chickens, but he never listened to me.

  “Take me with you,” he squeaked. I thought he might finally be hitting puberty. He was fifteen, so it was about time.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He shadowed me to Coach’s office. “You’ve got to let me come with you to Kiki’s bonfire.”

  “I don’t think cheerleading poultry are allowed. Besides, I’m only staying for a minute to be polite, and then I’m going home.”

  “Please. Please, Kate.” He patted my arm desperately with his wings, trying to grab me, but the costume had no hands. “I swear; I’ll do anything. I’ll do all your chores for a month.”

  He sounded so desperate that I figured I might as well take pity on him; it wasn’t like I’d be there long enough for him to embarrass me anyway.

  I sighed. “Fine. Just get out of my way so I can lock this stuff up.”

  He obediently flattened himself against the wall so I could push the Gatorademobile up to the office.

  When I knocked, Coach yelled through the door. “I’m busy!”

  I sighed again. “Jonah, can you hand me that clipboard?”

  It took him three tries to pick it up due to his hand impediment. I grabbed the papers off the clipboard and shoved them under the door. They contained personal medical information, which couldn’t be left in the open.

  “Screw it,” I said, looking over the remaining supplies on the cart. “If someone wants the Gatorade that badly, they can have it. Let’s go.”

  Jonah squealed, jumping up and down and shaking his pom-poms. His skirt swished around his scrawny yellow knees.

  “Jonah, can I give you a piece of sisterly advice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you ever want to lose your virginity, don’t do that again. Ever.”

  He dropped the pom-poms. It wasn’t much of an improvement.

  When we tried to pull into Kiki’s driveway about an hour later, it was so jammed with cars that I had to park on the grass. Jonah bounced incessantly on the seat beside me. I already had a headache.

  “We’re not staying long,” I warned him.

  “You say that now, but maybe you’ll have such an awesome time you won’t want to leave,” he said.

  I snorted. “Yeah, that’ll happen.”

  But I did need to be appropriately social. Aaron would be here, expecting more of my quick wit. All I had to do was be myself, minus the overly intellectual jokes and random spouts of medical trivia.

  I felt sick. But if I didn’t show, both Kiki and Rocky would be upset. I had to go.

  As I reached for the door handle, Mike Luzier vaulted out of the bushes, slammed against the side of my car … and vomited profusely all over the hood. The mess splattered with a disgusting wet noise, spraying all the way across the car and dripping off the other side. The vomit was black and viscous, and I could smell it from inside the car with the door closed. It smelled like toasted crap.

  “Nasty!” Jonah squealed.

  “You’re cleaning that up,” I said, without missing a beat.

  “No way.”

  “Clean it up or I’ll have to go home right now and do it myself. And I’ll take you with me. No Kiki stalking for you.”

  “Come on! That’s totally unfair.”

  “You promised to do all my chores if I brought you with me,” I said. “Your first chore is to clean off the car.”

  I tossed a box of antibacterial wipes into his lap and got out
before he could object. Mike was standing next to the hood, wiping his chin. He looked much less dazed than one would expect, given the gymnastic regurgitory display he’d just put on. I wondered what god-awful substance he’d been drinking and why he wasn’t flat on his back.

  He mistook my scientific observation for something else. “Couldn’t wait for a repeat, huh?” he said, leering and breathing puke fumes right in my face. Then he looked around to make sure no one was watching and grabbed my butt.

  I was about to verbally ream him, but then Rocky and Kiki came down the driveway toward us. Mike immediately released me and backed away into the shadows. Apparently I was good enough to grope, just not in public. He disappeared so fast that I almost thought I’d hallucinated the entire thing.

  Then the breeze blew the smell of vomit past my nose.

  What a tool.

  I turned and pasted a smile on my face. “Hey, Rock. Kiki.”

  Midhug, Rocky looked over my shoulder at the lovely mess on my hood. “Oh my god, are you okay?”

  I waved my hand dismissively. “Mike Luzier. It was a puke-and-run.”

  Kiki snorted, covering her mouth. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be laughing.”

  “I don’t mind. I’m not the one who has to clean it up,” I said.

  Jonah had wrapped his hand in wipes and was dabbing ineffectually at the hood. He must have been able to sense Kiki’s eyes on him; he turned so red you could see it from fifty feet away.

  “I’d let you wash your car, but some idiot stole our hose. I can get some old towels for you, though.” Kiki started back toward the house. “And I’ll bring you a drink,” she called over her shoulder.

  Jonah was going to pee twice and die when she delivered those towels.

  “So did Mike say anything to you?” Rocky asked.

  “He asked if I wanted seconds,” I said.

  “He did not!”

  “Yep.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I took him up on it. Hooking up with him was the best moment of my young life. And barf really turns me on.”

  “You did not!”

  “I’m joking, Rocky.” I shook my head. “Of course I didn’t. I wish I hadn’t done it the first time.”