Mercy Rule

by Tom Leveen

  “There are thirty-six,” Danny says. He’s not laughing now. “Plus two out for the season with injuries. That’s varsity. JV has twenty-eight, but the juniors on varsity can be moved down to play JV, so the roster changes sometimes.”

  Pete pulls himself up to a sitting position, and we both stare down at Danny. His eyes look closed, but it’s kind of hard to tell in the dark.

  “How do you know that?” I say.

  “Especially high?” Pete says.

  Danny doesn’t answer. Pete shrugs.

  “Okay, so what’s that guy’s name … the quarterback guy?”

  “Brady,” I say. “Brady Culliver. They call him B.”

  “Because that’s all they can spell,” Danny says.

  “How do you know his name?” Pete asks me.

  “I listen.”

  “Okay, so he’s on the list,” Pete says. “Now who’s the other one?”

  “Donte,” Danny says. “Donte Assjack Walker. I’m not sure that’s his middle name, though. I’m just making that up.”

  Pete thinks this is hysterical.

  “The other players just call him D,” I say. “I’ve heard that, too.”

  “Wait a sec,” Danny says. “So Brady is B. And Donte is D. So together, they’re … B and D?”

  “Um, I guess?”

  “Which is short for ‘bondage and discipline.’ You know that, right?”

  “Short for— huh?”

  Whether it’s because he’s high or just that he understands the joke, Pete starts laughing all over again and tells me, “Just Google it. But not at school. Or where your parents might find it.”

  “Okay, well, that tells me pretty much all I needed to know. Why do you hate them?”

  The two boys look at me like I just asked if the earth was round.

  “They’re just football players, not kitten assassins,” I say.

  “Meaning, they don’t kill baby cats, or they aren’t kittens who do assassinations?” Pete says. “Because that could be a really cool anime or something.”

  “They’re just people. Same as you.”

  “Objection,” Danny says. “I beg to differ. People have basic inalienable rights. Or they’re supposed to. The right to self-expression, the right to wear what you want. The right to be left alone. Things like that. So maybe they are people, but let’s not pretend they’re the same as us.”

  “Danny, you’re so mad, why are you so mad? You’re all hostile about these guys when you don’t know anything about them.”

  “I don’t know any … ? Excuse me? Are you joking?”

  “Danny—”

  “Listen to me.” Danny gets to his feet as if towering over me will make his statements true. “I studied this shit. In February 1960, four African American kids sat down at the ‘white’ counter in a café. And the white folks weren’t super happy about that. Over the next week, a bunch more black kids showed up to support those first four kids. It was all part of the Civil Rights movement, and it was within our grandparents’ lifetime. Got it? Now— you know who showed up to try and throw those kids out of the café? The football team. Not the drama department, not the artists, not band, not choir. Not the chess team, not the debate team, or the math club, or yearbook, or Sat School tutors. The football players. So what does that tell you?”

  “That it was 1960 and people were being stupid?”

  Danny stares at me for a long time before grunting and throwing his hands up in the air, letting them crash back down against his leg.

  “Are you truly that naïve?” he says, and wanders a few steps away, pacing in circles.

  “You asked,” I call after him.

  “Ah,” Pete says, waving him off. “He’ll be fine. He’s just high.”

  Pete cracks himself up with that one, except he’s the only one laughing. I sit back with my hands behind me and elbows locked, crossing my ankles and knocking my feet together.

  “I gotta leak,” Pete says. He gets slowly to his feet and wanders into the darkness.

  Danny stops pacing and stands a few yards away, arms folded and chin down.

  “You’re mad at me?” I say.

  “No. I mean, maybe, but— no. Frustrated. Ready to beat the shit out of something.”

  “I hope you don’t mean me. Because I can take you.”

  “Because I’m a skinny little faggot?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “If I hear you talking like that again, I will seriously put the hurt on you, Danny.”

  Danny snorts. Is he smiling? Hard to tell in the dark. Probably not. Still. Pete shuffles back out of the darkness. “Ha,” he says. “You didn’t even see me coming, did you? I know what I’m gonna be for Halloween now. I’m gonna be a ninja. I got the weapons and everything.”

  “You have ninja weapons?” I ask.

  “Of course I have ninja weapons!”

  “Like what?”

  He shows off two or three useless martial arts moves. “I’ve got nunchaku! And shuriken! Hikeeba!”

  “Isn’t that when you don’t do something you were supposed to?” I ask. “Shirking your responsibilities or something?”

  “Shuriken, not shirking.”

  “I give up.”

  “Perhaps you would enjoy the taste of … my nunchacku! Waaaa! Watchah!”

  “You are such a doofblatt.”

  “What’s that doofblatt stuff?” Danny says. “Where’d you get that from?”

  “My friend Zach.”

  “Oh, your friend Zach, huh? And how is your good friend Zach?”

  I start to say I don’t know, because I don’t. I haven’t seen him around. Except Danny’s tone makes me mad, and I’ve kind of had it with him tonight.

  “All right,” I say, and stand up. I brush grass off the back of my shorts. “That’s it, I’m out. You are being a huge pain in the ass, and I don’t have to sit here and take it. Love ya, bye.”

  “Hold on,” Danny says.

  “No. I’m not going to hold on. I asked you to stop doing things you’d have to apologize for, remember? But here you are doing it all over again. I don’t even know why I came out here with you guys. It’s just about getting high and hating people. I don’t get it, sorry. I’ll stay home and read a book or hang out with my brother and his friends or … stick knives in my face.”

  “I hate them,” Danny says abruptly.

  “My brother’s friends?”

  “The people at school. All of them. I hate them. You were right about that. They say and do all kinds of heinous shit and nobody ever calls them on it. I think you know that’s true. Somewhere inside, you know that. You don’t have to hate them, too, that’s cool, whatever, but I would love it if you’d at least pretend for me once in a while.”

  He shakes his head a bit, looking at the ground.

  “That’s all,” he says, and sits straight down, cross-legged, with a big huff.

  Pete looks from him—

  to me—

  to him—

  to me.

  “Jesus,” he says, finally, pulling out cigarettes. “Would you two have sex already?”

  I cross my arms. “No. I’ve got another idea.”

  FINAL SCORE

  Wildcats

  12

  SPARTANS

  06

  We’re a Happy Family

  BRADY

  Coach has a dining room table. But it’s covered with real estate brochures. Skim through a couple on my way to the kitchen. Big houses. Five or six bedrooms. Outdoor floodlights. Gravel yards raked out perfect.

  I want one someday.

  Coach brushes past. Smacks a hand on my shoulder. “Come on in, Brady, have a seat. You ever had Monica’s pasta sauce? You can stand a fork in it.”

  I sit down. “Sounds good.”

  Coach’s daughter walks in. Sits across from me. Smiles. “Hey, Brady.”

  “Hey.”

  “Glad you could make it.”

  I don
’t know what she means. Maybe just being nice. Or maybe she’s really glad. Coach’s daughter is hot. That’s just the way it is. Which sucks. Not me, not nobody, is gonna move in on her. Still. I like that Coach’s wife sits me across from her at the kitchen table. Amy’s got a tight blue sweater on. Hair’s pulled back smooth in a long ponytail. Good thing no one can see my lap while we’re sitting down. I got a huge rager.

  Monica puts spaghetti on the table. I smell oregano and garlic. Get a bunch of spit in my mouth from it.

  Coach rubs his hands together real quick. It’s a signal. I know what it means. We all bow our heads a little.

  “Thank you for food, thank you for guests, thank you for family,” he says. “Amen.”

  We say amen. Closest to church I ever get. Never seen a Bible here. But there’s a small stone cross on one bookshelf in their living room. Coach never talks about God or Jesus or anything. Don’t know why they do this dinner prayer. Don’t care. Pray all night every night if it meant coming home to this.

  I want to live here. Even if it meant Amy would be my sister and we could never hook up. That’s okay. It would be worth it. Can’t ever hook up, anyway.

  Coach dishes out pasta. It’s so freaking good.

  “Slow down, Brady,” Monica says. But she’s smiling. Like she likes how much I like it.

  Start my second bowl. Coach says, “So how’re the grades?”

  “Okay,” Amy says. Takes a drink of iced tea. Wraps her lips around a straw to do it. I have to shift in my seat to keep my rager from pinching in my jeans.

  Amy keeps talking. “I need to write a paper tonight for English on some werewolf or something. Pretty boring.”

  “Beowulf?” Monica says.

  “Sure, I guess,” Amy says.

  Monica shakes her head. But she smiles, too.

  Coach says, “Well, that’s great. But I was asking Brady.”

  “Oh. Oops,” Amy says.

  Coach bumps his elbow into mine. “So?”

  He doesn’t sound mad. But he wants to know for real. I think he can find out for himself if wants. Could ask at the office. Just wants to see how I’m gonna answer him.

  “They’re okay,” I say.

  Coach picks something out from his teeth with his tongue. Doesn’t say anything. I know what that means when he doesn’t say anything. On the field or in the locker room or in his office or at his own dinner table. It means Try again.

  I don’t have a rager anymore.

  “Better,” I say. Take another big bite.

  “Hmm,” Coach says. That’s all.

  Amy saves me. She asks me, “So what’re you going to be for Halloween?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Loser.”

  “What’re you gonna be?”

  “Oh, a volleyball player.”

  Everyone laughs. Amy helped take the team to Divisionals last year.

  “Loser,” I say.

  “Come on,” she says. “Come up with something. But not football player. I mean, how lame would that be.”

  We all laugh again. I almost start crying. Because this is what it’s supposed to be like. This is it. I just want this.

  Is that so wrong, Mom? I just want this.

  “Maybe, uh … Superman,” I say.

  “Oh yeah! Then I could be Wonder Woman.”

  It takes less than a second to imagine her in tight blue underwear and a tight red top. That’s all I know about Wonder Woman. My rager comes right back.

  Did she mean something by it? Like we should go out together as a superhero couple? But I can’t ask. Not here. Maybe at school. But Coach still wouldn’t let that happen. No way.

  He’s not looking at me. But I can tell he still sort of is.

  I focus on dinner. Hope for my rager to go down.

  DANNY

  With the money I’m making from Pete, I buy one of those prepaid cell phones. It’s not much, but it’ll text. I use it to ask Pete for a ride. When I tell him where, he gives me a bunch of shit about it, but I don’t care. I’m just a lucky sonofabitch that Cadence will still talk to me. Jesus, she’s right. I’ve got to stop putting myself in positions where I have to apologize to her.

  Maybe that’s why she told me to come to her house for dinner. When she said last week that she had an idea other than sex, suffice it to say that dinner was not what I had in mind. But what if it means she’s starting to like me differently now? I can’t not find out.

  No one notices when I leave. Or if they do, they don’t say anything. Dinner smells good, too. Well, whatever. Anything Cadence makes will be better. I know it.

  Cadence’s house is small. Smaller than mine. It’s in an older part of town, the type of place where I expect to see cars up on cement blocks, or graffiti on every sign. As it turns out, I only see a couple of blue-marker scrawls on a light pole, on top of a square of darker gray paint where the city has already covered up previous graffiti. But while most of the yards we drive past aren’t exactly manicured, there’s no trash in the street. Most of the properties have fences—short chain-link or flimsy wood. Some are even white picket. Many of them also have plastic lawn chairs, or dilapidated benches, or upturned milk crates on their porches.

  “What’s your plan, hotshot?” Pete says as he stops the car in front of Cadence’s house. There’s a short wooden fence encircling the front yard. It’s in good shape, but unpainted. A detached garage sits about ten feet from the house. Red light illuminates a drawn shade on the garage door, and I think there’s movement inside, but I can’t tell.

  “Hell if I know,” I tell Pete.

  “You owe me ten Adds for this.”

  “Five.”

  “Ooo, bargaining now.”

  “It’s a seller’s market.”

  Pete smirks. “So you need a ride later or you staying the night?”

  “Golly gee. Probably a ride, I’m thinking.”

  “Cool. Well, get on in there.”

  I open the door, but don’t get out. “What the hell am I doing here, man? Must be a masochist.”

  “I don’t know, dude.” Pete starts to light a cigarette, but stops; I asked him not to smoke until after I got out, so I wouldn’t stink when I got inside her house. “If you like her, you need to make a move. Just, you know … say something to her. Say words!”

  I slide my legs out of the car and stand up.

  “Words are for suckers.”

  I shut the door. I can hear Pete laughing inside.

  He drives off while I follow a concrete path up to the front door. Cadence’s dad opens it as I climb the wooden steps up to her porch.

  “Howdy,” he says, and pushes open the screen door with a hand the size of my skull. We’re the same height, but he’s shaped like the Kool-Aid Man.

  “Hi,” I say. I step into the house.

  He lets the door shut behind me. The front room is narrow and long, running almost the length of the front side of the house. Straight ahead is the kitchen, and I don’t see anyone in it, but I can smell some kind of spicy meat cooking.

  “Danny, right?” Cadence’s dad says.

  “Yes. Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir. I’m Chuck. Dinner’ll be ready in a minute. Have a seat.”

  He’s not being a dick, exactly. But he doesn’t smile at all, either. I guess I have no room to bitch.

  I turn to face the living room, and only then do I see Cadence. “Oh! Hey. Didn’t see you.” I don’t know what to do with my hands. They shoot into my pockets, but that doesn’t feel right, so I cross my arms, and that feels worse. Fuck.

  “I find that hard to believe,” she says, grinning.

  Cadence is sitting on a purple couch, bare feet propped on a white coffee table. Magic pours from her lips—no, bubbles. She’s dipping a pink wand into a blue bottle of bubbles and blowing them into the living room.

  Her smile makes me wonder if she’s on something, and her antidrug bit is just a cover. No one looks that peaceful for real.

 
; Do they?

  “Sit down, you look spooked,” Cadence says.

  “No,” I say automatically. “I mean, no, I’m not spooked.”

  “It’s okay,” Cadence says. “We’re still sort of recovering.”

  “From … ?”

  “This wasn’t always the best neighborhood,” Cadence says. “It was really downhill for a while, when I was little. But it’s coming back. People are working. Starting to care again. There’s places not far from here where you probably don’t want to be after ten or eleven at night, but mostly it’s okay.”

  “Oh.”

  “You live in a nice place, don’t you?”

  “It’s okay.”

  Compared to her neighborhood, yes, it’s a nice place. A place where people can spend thousands on decorating their god damn garages, filling them with stuff so they can’t even park in them anymore. So what? Guess what a chocolate-covered turd tastes like.

  What’s happening inside, that’s what counts.

  I sit on the edge of an easy chair, then wonder if it’s “Chuck’s” and move to a wooden rocking chair instead. I do not rock. No pun intended.

  Cadence’s mom walks out of the kitchen, drying her hands on an orange dish towel. I know it’s her mother not just because that would be logical, but because they damn near look like sisters.

  “Danny?” she says, smiling. “I’m Audry. Nice of you to come over.”

  “Thank you, nice to meet you.”

  “We’re about ready, if you want to come grab a plate. You ever make your own quesadilla?”

  “No, uh-uh.”

  “It’s fun. Come on in here.”

  Cadence and I both get up. She points to the kitchen doorway. “Guests first.”

  “Ladies first.”

  “I’m not a lady. I’m a mature young woman.”

  Audry says, “I’d like to weigh in on that!”

  “Mature young women first,” I say.

  Cadence bolts in front of me, and—I smile. She’s the only thing in the world that can make me do that. I just don’t want her to know, in case things don’t work out.

  Automatically, I start to watch her ass as she walks ahead of me, but caution is the better part of lust, and I lift my eyes very fast so Audry won’t catch me checking out her daughter’s body.