First Team

by Tim Green

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  His father glanced over as if in surprise. “What do you mean? Nothing.”

  Brock shook his head violently. “Not nothing, Dad. You left without saying good-bye to Laurel’s mom?”

  His father heaved a sigh. “Laurel’s mom and I . . . it can’t go any further, Brock. We had a misunderstanding.”

  Rain, fat as gumdrops, began to plop down on the windshield.

  “Why? What kind of misunderstanding?” Brock asked, panicked and desperate for a miracle.

  His father rubbed his beard. “It’s a grown-up thing.”

  That was it. That was all his father planned on giving him. They silently wound along the highway for the next few minutes, then into town. They passed the school and Brock could see the football field where they practiced.

  “No!” Brock startled himself with the shout.

  His father turned to look at him, his eyes flickering, voice soft. “Excuse me?”

  Brock slammed his hand against the glove box, then clutched his head in both hands. Rain began to patter against the glass. “Why? Why? I thought things were going to be normal here. That’s what you said!”

  His father set his jaw, flipped on the windshield wipers, and kept his eyes on the road. “Is normal moving into a castle and living like someone you’re not? Having a guy in a silly hat drive your boat? I’m not a horse. Neither are you.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Brock tugged his own ears.

  His dad’s fingers went white on the wheel. “Kim is a wonderful person, but she’s rich beyond belief. She gets whatever she wants, boats, houses, cars . . . million-dollar horses. But you can’t buy everything you want, Brock. You can’t buy love.”

  “She wasn’t trying to buy you. She’s nice. That’s all. They all are, and they’re on the inside of this place and we’re out. You? You don’t care. You walk around like a zombie. You don’t love anybody.”

  “Hey!” His father’s mask broke. He jammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road beside Bank Park. “I love you. That’s who I love. You know that! You’ve seen what I do for you. Don’t you ever say that!”

  Tears sprang from Brock’s eyes. “I’m not talking about me. I know you love me. I love you too, but we’re not the only people in the world, Dad. That’s not normal. You said things would be normal.”

  “You have no idea, Brock. You’re a kid!” His father looked so ferocious, so angry, that Brock had to get out. He flung open his door and just ran. Rain quickly soaked him. He ran through the park with its empty benches and gazebo, gloomy and dead without people or light. He ran toward the pier, remembering when they’d pulled into Three B’s with Laurel’s family, happy, a part of something.

  It made Brock sick. He heard his father shout his name, but he kept going, out onto the pier. The river slipped by, dark and unending. Brock stopped at the edge, rain spattering him now, and thought about just throwing himself in.

  He knew he wouldn’t do that. Still, it hurt. It hurt bad, all of it. Once again, running away to a new place didn’t seem so terrible. It hurt to be the new kid, but it didn’t hurt like this.

  He felt his father’s hands on his shoulders.

  “You’re right,” his father said.

  Brock turned to see what that kind of face his father had on. It wasn’t a mask. It was hurt too, real, and twitching beneath the eyes and cheeks.

  “I owe you an explanation,” his father said. “I understand what you were thinking, where you thought all this was going. I get that. It cannot be, but you do deserve to know why.”

  His father’s eyes glowed in the lights from the bridge. Rain danced on the river. Hair plastered his father’s new face, a face Brock knew wasn’t really him. Brock touched his own nose because it wasn’t real either.

  “Why?” Brock asked.

  “Because I can’t be what Kim wants me to be,” his father said.

  “But why?”

  A gust of rain swept over them. “Because of your mother, Brock. Because of your mother.”

  66

  Rain and tears dripped down Brock’s face. “Mom’s dead, Dad.”

  “I know that.” His father bit into his lower lip. “And I thought maybe I could start over, but I can’t. It won’t work. Kim is wonderful. But everything she did, everything she said, I only thought of your mother. That’s not fair to Kim.”

  “But Mom’s gone, Dad. I don’t like it either, but she’s gone.”

  His father clenched his hands into fists. “No. Not to me. She’s never gone.

  “Listen to me. We were together in everything, she and I, like pieces of the same machine. We worked together, fighting the bad guys, protecting this country. But we were best friends, too. We’d go to movies in New York, or walk along the river in Paris under the moon, or eat ice cream on a beach in Israel. And we loved each other so much. We had you.”

  “But . . .” Brock understood, but still he wanted to move forward.

  His father’s eyes pleaded with him. “Look, it’s like a soldier who loses his legs. His legs are gone, but he still feels them. They itch and they hurt and it’s like they’re really there. That’s how it is, Brock.”

  His father waved his arms and looked all around them, confused and angry. “She’s still here.”

  His father’s face trembled and he blinked and turned, no longer upright, no longer a concrete post or a bronze statue. He walked slowly off the pier, under the weight of the world.

  Brock followed him back to the car and got in. They rode back across the bridge to the Flatlands, both of them soaked to the bone.

  67

  The next day, Brock went to school like everything was normal, even though it wasn’t. When the bell rang and science class ended, Laurel left the room, but stood waiting for him in the hall with her hands full of books and folders.

  “Hi.” He stopped and leaned against the wall of lockers.

  “Hey,” she said. “Still friends, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He sounded as upbeat as he could, but he could tell everything was different. He wasn’t big on texting, but they usually sent one or two back and forth at night. Last night, there was nothing.

  “Okay.” She forced a smile and they bumped fists with no real enthusiasm.

  “See you at the game tonight?” Brock raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t like the whole town didn’t go to the varsity games.

  “Well, my dad’s coming in from Dallas, so I’ll probably sit with him and my mom.”

  “Your dad?” Brock couldn’t help his look of disgust. “That’s awful soon, don’t you think?”

  Laurel’s face flashed with anger. “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing.” Brock dropped his expression. “Just that I thought your mom . . .”

  “My mom what?” Laurel snarled. “My dad’s been begging to come back for a year and he has every right to see my brother play, unless someone made you Lord of the Universe and I just missed the memo.”

  “No, I, uh . . . ,” Brock sputtered.

  She tilted her head, spun, and walked away.

  When Brock turned, he saw Mak standing there.

  Mak put a big paw on Brock’s shoulder. “What’d I tell you about all that kissy stuff? You gotta focus, dude. We gotta get you on that first team.”

  Brock shrugged him off and headed for math. “Like that’s gonna happen, anyway,” he mumbled.

  Mak fell in alongside him. “It could. It’s a funny game. Funny-shaped ball. Never know which way it’ll bounce. You know . . .”

  “Don’t tell me.” Brock held up a hand. “That’s what your dad says.”

  Mak knit his eyebrows together. “How’d you know?”

  Brock snorted. “I just lost my inside edge, Mak. First team ain’t gonna happen for me this year. We’re two and zero, and I’m at the bottom of the barrel without a ladder in sight. My ladder just stomped off.”

  “Hey, Laurel Lehman and her mom aren’t the only
people who can help you make first team.” Mak put his arm up, blocking Brock’s path into their math class.

  “The bell’s gonna ring.” Brock was annoyed, but he stood still. “Okay, what friends do I have?”

  “Dude, seriously?” Mak looked hurt. “You got me.”

  “Mak, I love you like the brother I never had, but you’re from the Flatlands too. Your mom’s not president of the Mom’s Club and your dad’s not a former NFL player. The Koletskys aren’t going to be able to put any pressure on Van Kuffler to change either. No offense, but we’re both from the wrong side of the river.”

  Mak shook his head and lowered his voice. “I’m not talking about getting Coach to change his mind. I’m talking about changing it for him.”

  Brock narrowed his eyes. “For him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And how is that done?” Brock asked, unable to help sounding annoyed.

  “Have you heard Coach Delaney yelling all week about Isaac Subich?”

  Brock scratched his neck. “Uh, I guess.”

  “Sure, they make Ethan Kinney wear a number seventy-seven jersey in practice, pretending he’s Subich, so the offense can get used to looking for where Subich lines up so they can run away from him, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Brock said. “That.”

  “Yeah, that. Kid is an animal. They rattle his cage and let him out on Saturdays to play middle school football. I’ve seen him. He already shaves. He’s six feet tall and he’s got six quarterback sacks in the first two games. He knocked the Roseville quarterback out for the year with broken ribs.”

  “Okay, but what’s that got to do with me? I’m not even gonna get on the field to have to worry about this gorilla.”

  “You might get on the field if someone else gets carried off,” Mak said.

  “So, maybe Wally gets hurt,” Brock said. “You said that would happen against Moravia. He took plenty of shots, but he was fine.”

  Mak shook his head. “He didn’t take any free running shots from his blind side, though, not from Isaac Subich.”

  “Wait a minute.” Brock’s eyes widened. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  Before Mak could answer, the bell rang.

  68

  Mr. Jenson, their math teacher, groused at them to sit down and stop holding everyone else up. All through Mr. Jenson’s explanation of how to compute the area of circles and trapezoids, Brock had to wonder if he was right about what Mak intended to do about Wally. Finally, they got their homework assignment and the bell rang. Brock sat closer to the door, so he waited for Mak in the hall and they walked toward gym class together.

  Brock took hold of Mak’s thick arm. “Mak, you can’t do that. I appreciate you wanting to help me, but that’s just not right.”

  “Do what?”

  “Let this Subich kid crush Wally.”

  Mak frowned. “Well, I’m not talking about just letting him crush Wally, but people miss blocks. Stuff happens.”

  “Not on purpose, though.” Brock knew he was arguing against his own best interests, but he couldn’t help it. “Not to get someone hurt.”

  “No. Not on purpose.” Mak smiled. “I promise. That, I wouldn’t do, even to Wally. But it is football. People get hurt. My dad says football’s not a contact sport. Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport.

  “On the other hand,” Mak continued, “if something did happen, well, I don’t want you complaining about it. My dad would call that looking a gift horse in the mouth, and that you do not want to do.”

  Mak shook free and started down the hall, waving a hand back at Brock as he galloped away whinnying like a horse until his laughter exploded off the lockers.

  Brock’s head seemed to shake on its own as he followed his best friend to gym class. They didn’t talk about it after that, because every time Brock opened his mouth, Mak would cut him off.

  “No.” Mak held his hand up in Brock’s face like a stop sign. “Stop worrying. I told you, I’m not going to do anything wrong, but Subich is a killer and I’m not perfect, and, hey, my dad says all’s fair in love and war, and, buddy . . . this is war.”

  69

  On Friday night, Brock’s dad asked him if he wanted to go to the varsity game against Bradley West.

  Brock didn’t lift his face from the book he was reading. “Nah.”

  His father laughed. “What? Seriously?”

  Brock sat on the couch. His father bent over and, without looking down, unlaced his work boots on the front doormat.

  “What about a movie?” Brock asked.

  “Brock, you’ve talked about nothing but football since we got here. Football and Taylor . . . oh.” His father scowled and peeled off his boots before rising up and walking toward Brock. “I get it. Sorry, buddy.”

  “It’s not Taylor. I’m still rooting for Taylor, and the team.” Brock was thinking about Laurel’s dad, the former NFL player, but he didn’t want to tell his dad that. If it was over, it was over. No sense making things ugly.

  “Just need a break?”

  “Yeah,” Brock said. “A break.”

  “Okay, a movie,” his dad said. “I’ll make us something and we’ll go.”

  After dinner, they loaded into the car. They could see the glow of the stadium lights on the hill above town as they headed in the opposite direction for the county mall. They ate popcorn and watched an action flick about spies who infiltrated al-Qaeda to stop them from releasing a biological weapon in New York City. On their way through the mall parking lot, they could see that the stadium lights still glowed.

  “I wonder if they won.” Brock’s dad unlocked the car door and they got in.

  Brock was thinking about the movie instead of the football game. “How much of that stuff was real?”

  His father started the car. “What stuff?”

  “When they tracked that guy down like that? I mean, he had a new face, like us. Can they get you with your voice too? You said the government monitors all the cell phones and knows where everyone is.”

  “Well, they can know where everyone is. Everyone who uses a cell phone. They don’t know where everyone is because there’s just too much information.”

  “Can they get your voice like that, though?” Brock couldn’t help thinking again about Boudantsev, even though he didn’t want to.

  His father squinted one eye and tilted his head at the road. “I never saw it, but . . . I’ll say maybe. Technology changes every day. Everything’s digital. They’d have to gather a massive amount of digital information, I mean, massive, then filter it. That doesn’t even speak to the legal aspect of it.”

  “What legal aspect?” Brock asked.

  “We do have privacy rights.” His father flashed him a smile. “Under the Constitution. Remember that thing from history class? ‘We the people’? They’d have to get a court involved.”

  “But they could, right? I mean, you were in the government and you were doing things you weren’t supposed to do.”

  “I did what I was told, Brock,” his father said. “I trusted the people I worked for.”

  “Was that a mistake?”

  His father clamped his lower lip between his teeth before speaking. “Most people are good, Brock. Sometimes you get a bad one. If you live your life always worried about that one bad one, you never trust the good, and that’s no way to live. But this isn’t about the government, is it?”

  Brock shook his head, and he asked, “Are you worried about Boudantsev coming back?”

  His father sighed. “No. I’m not.”

  “Okay,” Brock said after a pause. “Thanks.”

  “You want to get an ice cream?” his father asked.

  They were driving through town and his father pulled over on Main Street at the ice cream shop. An older man with thin white hair and a mustache sat in a chair behind the counter, reading a paperback. He looked up, surprised to see them. “Game over already?”

  “No. We just got an early start
tomorrow,” Brock’s dad said. “I’ll have butter pecan on a sugar cone.”

  “You look like a football player yourself.” The old man nodded at Brock as he scooped up the butter pecan and handed it over the counter.

  “I am.” Brock pointed to the glass case. “Can I have black raspberry? A triple.”

  “Play for the freshman team?”

  “Seventh-grade,” Brock said.

  The man handed Brock his cone. “Big boy, you are. Good luck tomorrow.”

  Brock’s dad paid. Out on the sidewalk, they heard a roar from the hilltop stadium, then the tinny sound of the band.

  “Sounds good for the Crab Nation.” Brock’s dad licked his cone and got back into the car.

  Brock listened as the cheering continued, his hand frozen on the door handle. He closed his eyes for a moment before getting into the car and wondered if it would ever be for him. He opened his eyes as the cheers faded and looked in the backseat of his father’s car, where a pair of work gloves stained with dirt and grease rested, and realized—in this town anyway—how stacked the odds were against him.

  70

  The next morning a gloomy gray light seeped into Brock’s bedroom window. He blinked at the bright red numbers on the clock and fumbled to turn off the alarm. The chill and the patter of rain against the window made the nest of covers difficult to leave, especially for a football game. They ate breakfast, mostly in silence, and his dad dropped him off at the school to change into his uniform with the rest of the team. Bradley West Middle School was a long bus ride away, curving along the river and through the steeply wooded hills. They drove through the town in the rain, and it reminded Brock of the Flatlands. Old factories stared blindly with glassless windows and crumbling seams. The middle school field sat on a terrace of land behind the school, a crouching red brick building with a flat roof. Brock got off with the team and marched down onto the grass field with its mostly muddy center. The rain continued to fall steadily through warm-ups.