The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “It’s going to go very well,” I responded grimly.

  “Sure it is.” She nodded, now smiling, but it wasn’t anything like a nice, friendly expression. I thought of Gunnar suddenly, and his genuine, warm, happy smile. Yeah, hers wasn’t like that.

  “Let’s look at the list,” she said. Marley grabbed my binder by its blue cover, yanked it across the table before I could do anything to stop her, and then slammed it open to the first tab. She was right: there was a checklist of what to do at our first meeting.

  “I think I’m supposed to tell you about myself,” I said, trying to peer over at the page and to remember what I had read. “I’ll introduce myself. I’m Hallie Holliday, which is my real name and not a pseudonym,” I said, beginning the speech I had prepared, but then I stopped. “Oh yes, Linda already told you my name. Well, to continue, I’m from here, originally, but—”

  “No, you’re supposed to go over your rules, first,” Marley interrupted me. “That’s what it says on this list, not that you’re supposed to give me the details of your boring life. I don’t care about that. What are your other ground rules? Like, I know that one of them is that I can’t say fu—”

  “Right, that is one of my rules,” I said quickly. “Ok, let’s go over the other ones.” I glanced down at my notes. “Let’s see. We’ll both come prepared for each session together, ready to have a lot of fun learning. We’ll both work hard, and not hardly work.” Marley looked at me. “Get it?” I prompted, but she still just stared with the expressionless expression. Darn, that had been my best joke. I glanced quickly at my speech and mentally crossed off the other lines that said “***pause for laughter***” after them.

  “Fun learning,” Marley repeated. “Right.” She tapped the binder page. “I want to make sure to learn your ground rules and expectations for my behavior because that’s how we establish a relationship, Heather. Like, I’ll see that you’re serious about what you say, that you’ll follow through in enforcing stuff. That will make me trust you. Get it?”

  I nodded mutely. Yes, that was exactly what the binder had told me, almost like she had memorized it, but I had a terrible feeling that the tips inside that blue plastic cover might not work for me here and now. “It’s Hallie, not Heather,” I added.

  “So I’ll need to know more about your rules,” Marley continued briskly. “You said I can’t use the word fu—”

  “No, don’t say that,” I nodded.

  “But what about other ones?” she asked me.

  “Other ones?” I repeated suspiciously.

  “Obviously I’ll need to know what other words I’m not allowed to say. Like, how do you feel about ‘shit?’” Her voice had increased in volume. “Can I say the word ‘shit?’”

  “No,” I answered shortly and also quietly, to clue her into the fact that she shouldn’t speak so loudly herself. “No, you can’t say that.”

  She smiled her scary smile, all teeth like an alligator, and then continued to talk, even louder. “Ok, then what about…” And I was darned if she didn’t carefully enunciate every curse word I had ever heard in my life, and more than a few that I hadn’t, in a voice that carried throughout the room. “Can I say any of those?” she asked me. She now looked triumphant. “What do you think?”

  I thought that I wanted to run out of this tutoring center screaming, and never come back. I glanced around at the rest of the room, and it was interesting to see the reactions of the other tutors and students. Some of them were laughing and some of them had their mouths open, staring in utter horror. My personal reaction to her speech had been to turn so red that you could have cooked an egg on my face. I was furious and embarrassed and already failing. I was already failing in my first ten minutes on this job! I was being beaten by a fifteen-year-old girl, just like I had been back in high school.

  “That covers language. Do you have any other rules?” Marley asked. “What about how I dress? I know Tristan liked me to show skin. Remember that he was the guy who worked for me before you came along? He’s thirty-two, I think I forgot to tell you that. But older means experienced, right? And he really knew what he was doing.” Her voice still could have carried over to the Upper Peninsula.

  “Marley!” Suddenly, Linda was back at our table, eyes blazing in fury. She sharply beckoned to my student, her lips in a tight line, and Marley slowly followed her out into the hallway. Every person in the room watched and waited for their return, including me as I attempted to calm down and stop blushing. Simultaneously, my mind raced as I tried to figure out what to do with this vulgar, nasty juvenile delinquent. The binder hadn’t said crap about a student acting like this! I cleared my throat a little and the eyes in the room turned on me. I attempted to smile pleasantly, as if I dealt with foul-mouthed clients all day long.

  Actually, that was a helpful thought. We’d never had too many hostile customers in Holliday Booksellers, but when we did, my dad had believed in killing with kindness. I would try to kill this little witch with kindness. And if that didn’t work, I would just kill her.

  Our session was only forty-five minutes today, short and sweet, meant for us to get to know each other. I felt that I already had her number: she was a rude, self-centered brat, just like Gaby’s crowd from when I’d been in high school myself. For the thirty-three minutes that remained after Marley returned with Linda, I kept a fatuous smile on my lips and a sweet lilt to my voice.

  “Oh, you don’t have any of your math homework to do with me? What a shame! I’ll just have to come up with some algebra problems of my own,” I told her genially. “Wait! I already have some.” And I whipped out the worksheet I’d made at home and printed at the library, and slid it across the table to her.

  “What’s that? You never have to do vocabulary in your English class? Well, that’s wonderful!” I trilled. “That way you won’t get bored when you do it with me, here!” Swish over to Marley went the paper I had prepared with the list of words and definitions for her to memorize.

  Yes, I’d done my homework. I didn’t graduate from high school with a 4.4 GPA without knowing how to do that.

  I had no idea what Linda had said to her in the hallway, but while it hadn’t made Marley as sweet as I myself was pretending to be, at least it had made her sullenly quiet. She even pretended to try some of the algebra problems and to look at the vocab list. “Next time, we’ll read some short stories together,” I said cheerily, and she didn’t even hit me in the face like she probably wanted to.

  At the end of our session, she dropped the pencil in her hand and literally ran out, and I followed almost as fast. I thought that I should probably talk to Linda, to go over what had happened in my first forty-five minutes on the job, but I had zero desire to rehash it. So I ran away, too, right out to the Bronco in the parking lot, and I left a cloud of dust bigger than Gunnar had in my driveway when he had gotten away from me.

  When I got back home, I went straight out to look at the water. Today had been epic, I decided. Epically bad. If I had been a writer, rather than a reader of all the books in the shop, I would have put this down on paper, every excruciating detail. I thought would have called it, “Story of an F Bomb” or maybe, “The Tutor-Fails Files.” But really, I couldn’t chalk this up to my poor skills and inexperience. Maybe it was only my first day and maybe I wouldn’t ever be a good tutor, but that girl, Marley, was incorrigible. Horrible. Mean!

  By some miracle, and with some old rice that I had found in the back of the pantry cupboard, my phone had come back to life (to an extent) over the weekend, and I had stopped in the free Wi-Fi library parking lot and forced myself to call Linda on my way home. No, I learned, the prior tutor, Tristan, hadn’t done anything untoward with my student, and no, he hadn’t even been thirty-two. “Marley has a tendency to exaggerate. I’m sorry if things were difficult today,” Linda had said.

  “Difficult,” I had repeated, and nodded vigorously at my phone. Yes, I’d say things had been difficult.

  “I had planned to h
ave you with one of the other teenagers, a sweet girl named Naomi, but I thought putting Marley with a young woman who’s had so much success might inspire her,” Linda had told me.

  I hadn’t known what to say. Hadn’t Linda seen the “for sale” sign in the window of my family’s legacy? I wasn’t sure where she was getting that “success” idea. “Um, thank you,” I’d answered.

  I didn’t agree with that assessment of myself, but I did know that I was someone who didn’t like to give up. “Too stubborn to quit,” was what my dad had called me. “I’ll see Marley tomorrow,” I’d told Linda grimly, and she was so happy to hear that I wasn’t immediately quitting that it made me feel slightly better. That feeling lasted until I remembered Marley telling me that she’d had six different tutors already, and they were nowhere to be found. I sighed deeply. Well, whatever had happened to them, I knew where I was going: back to the tutoring center tomorrow, and I was going to have to be ready. Readier than I had been today.

  A movement in the water caught my eye. A head surfaced, a blonde head with a mask and a scuba regulator. Gunnar, because no one else would be diving over the sandy bottom of the lake in front of our houses. I still could not imagine why he would have chosen that spot, where there was absolutely nothing to see.

  As I watched, he tore off the scuba mask and threw it up onto the shore, almost like he was angry. He felt around his eye and I thought it was probably hurting there from the gasket pressing into his face where he had a slight bruise…a terrible bruise. I watched as he walked onto the beach and stood, shoulders slumped, also looking out at the water. I wondered what had made him look like that, like his day had been just as bad as mine.

  Chapter 4

  It was just so, so much color. So much overwhelming color. I squinted as I looked at her.

  “Say it with me!” Gaby demanded. She wore a Woodsmen-orange t-shirt, hat, earrings, and even lipstick. She looked like she had painted her mouth with a traffic cone.

  “Gab, it’s only two words,” I said. “I think I have it.”

  “It’s the cadence that’s so important,” she told me seriously. “Repeat after me: go!”

  “Go.”

  “Woodsmen!” she shrieked.

  “Woodsmen,” I stated, and Gaby sighed.

  “You’re not feeling it yet,” she said, disappointed. “Maybe after the game.”

  “I don’t get why you have the sound off when it’s starting soon,” I said, looking at her big TV where the announcers moved their mouths but nothing came out.

  “It’s very important that you only listen to Herb and Buzz, our local play-calling crew,” she told me seriously. “Those national TV guys don’t know squat, but Herb and Buzz practically gave birth to the team.” She turned up the old radio she’d brought out for us to hear their broadcast and kept the TV muted. “You listen to their pregame show, then their commentary for the four quarters, then their postgame report. Got it?”

  “Yes, I have it,” I said again. “I would have just turned on the TV. I had no idea there was so much specific detail involved in watching the Woodsmen.”

  “It’s a lifestyle,” she told me seriously. “Oh! I got you something.” She handed me a bag. “So that you don’t feel left out.”

  I pulled out a blindingly orange Woodsmen t-shirt and held it up to my chest. “Thank you!” I told her, but I did have to wonder how that orange was going to react with my hair. My mom had been a redhead, with silky, auburn waves that cascaded around her shoulders. My hair color was similar to hers, but tended on the side of—well, bright was a nice way to describe its hue. As my dad had said, no one would have missed me coming. His own hair had been a basic brown, but totally unruly and wild. He had kept it short, almost military-style, to control it. The combination of the red color from my mom and the volume and craziness from my dad had made my hair, uh, a look of its own. A force of nature, almost. As usual, today I had it back in a ponytail, because out of sight was (almost) out of mind.

  I pulled on the new Woodsmen t-shirt over what I was wearing and Gaby smiled happily. “I’m so glad you’re becoming a true fan,” she told me.

  That was a stretch, but yes, I had decided to give football a shot. When she had asked me over to watch the first Woodsmen preseason game with her, I’d hesitated, but then she’d casually mentioned that I would be the only guest. “I thought it would be fun for just the two of us to hang out,” she’d told me, and I knew it was because she thought I’d be uncomfortable being with her friends, the ladies in front of whom I had recently humiliated myself at the Silver Dollar bar. And I also knew that Gaby usually held huge watch parties for the Woodsmen games, so it was extra nice that she’d done this for me. I couldn’t say no.

  “Ok,” she said, rubbing her hands together now. “Here we go! This is the kickoff. Where they kick the ball off,” she clarified. “The Woodsmen will receive, meaning the Woodsmen punt returner will try to catch it and run, or he’ll call a fair catch and not run, or he’ll let it go out of bounds or through the end zone. After that, we’ll get the ball and the offense will come out, like the quarterback. And Gunnar! You’ll get to see him play.”

  Gaby kept explaining things, mostly about Woodsmen offensive strategies, but I interrupted as I watched Gunnar jog out onto the field with a large group of other large men. “So, what exactly is he supposed to be doing?” I asked. “Give me a quick rundown.”

  “He protects the quarterback, Davis Blake.” She launched into a speech that included phrases like “spread offense,” “shotgun formation,” “strong side,” and “tight end,” but I didn’t understand much except that she wasn’t talking about Gunnar’s butt with those last words. I had seen it several times when he went swimming, and “tight” was a great way to describe it. But in the game of football, this phrase apparently referred to a Woodsmen player with “Hidalgo” on the back of his jersey.

  I hadn’t actually spoken to Gunnar since the night he’d driven me home from the Silver Dollar, but I had spotted him from afar a bunch of times, swimming, walking around his property with a small crew of people, and standing at the end of his driveway next to a woman making sketches on a large pad of paper. I had waved then, as I drove past on my way to the learning center, and the woman with him had waved back. He had nodded slightly and I had wondered what they were doing. Although there were plenty of cars and trucks coming and going from the Feeney place every day, I hadn’t heard another word about surveys, property lines, or anything like that, so I was hopeful that problem was now over. I could strike one thing off the list of stuff I needed to deal with. The long list.

  “Oh!” I said, as Gunnar and a guy on the other team collided like two tanks ramming each other. Well, no wonder his back had been injured! I had been to a few football games in high school, one or two because I’d felt like I was obliged to live out that part of the American experience, but it had never looked like that. This made me think that someone was going to die or something else terrible was going to happen. I glanced at Gaby, to see if she was concerned, and she was leaning forward, sitting on the edge of her royal blue couch and nodding at the screen.

  “Great hit!” she told Gunnar on the TV. I tried to appreciate the skill behind the violence.

  Gaby kept explaining things throughout the game and I kept watching, not really enjoying it, but more as if this was a car crash and I couldn’t tear my eyes away. It was violent and awful, from what I could see, but I could also see that Gunnar knew what he was doing (Gaby’s continued commentary helped me understand that, as did the remarks by the announcers on the radio, Biff and Howard or whatever their names were). Gunnar’s reaction time seemed fast enough to me, despite the disparaging things I’d said about it. His speed, too, and his strength—the guy seemed to have it all.

  “He’s really good!” I told Gaby as the first half came to a close. There were two halves, she had informed me, which did make sense knowing what I did about geometry.

  “Who are you talking about? Gu
nnar?” She stared at me, astounded. “Of course he’s good! He’s on the starting line for the Woodsmen, and if they’re not the best team in the league this year, I don’t know who will be! Gunnar has always been at the top in his position. He’s not just good, he’s superior.” She launched into a long thing about left versus right tackle, and what every guy on the offensive line did, and why every Woodsmen player on it was underrated yet amazing, as we went to make dinner.

  Her kitchen was a little hard for me to take due to its extremes of color and pattern. Gaby wasn’t afraid of bright stuff, that was for sure. Besides the orange that she wore from head to toe in honor of the Woodsmen, her whole house was filled with different vivid shades, like the paint on the cabinets in here which she informed me was “amethyst.”

  “I just had them done,” she said, removing a low-carb, cauliflower pizza crust from a purple shelf. “I know it’s not a good idea for resale, but I just couldn’t take any more neutral!”

  No, the cabinets weren’t neutral anymore; no one could call them that. “Are you thinking of selling your condo?”

  “I’m not sure. I had this idea that I might be moving…” She trailed off and drew a little bit of her lip between her teeth. “But that isn’t working out like I thought it would. Speaking of real estate, there were some great showings of your building last week. I would expect an offer soon.” She smiled at me. “Isn’t that awesome?”

  “An offer? Wow.” I took a deep breath. “Wow.”

  “Isn’t that good news?” she prompted again.

  “It’s…yes, very,” I said slowly. “Thank you for all your work on it.”

  “It’s my pleasure! But it’s really a team effort at Sterling Standard Realty. Shep—my boss,” she corrected herself, “I mean, Mr. Sterling is so helpful. I’ve learned so, so much from him. He’s wonderful.”