Just A Game

by Dustin Stevens

  Beth Anne swung the greasy spatula at his hand and said, “Would you stop stealing all the bacon? There’s not going to be enough left for the boys!”

  “That’s alright Mama,” Clay said, “I won’t be eating any anyway. He can have mine.”

  “Mine too,” Colt said.

  Beth Anne turned around from the stove and said, “You boys really don’t want any? I made it for you.”

  “No, you made it because the favorite’s home,” Clay said.

  “And has his last game of the season tonight,” Colt retorted.

  “Would you two stop that? How many times do we have to tell you we don’t have favorites in this house?” Beth Anne said. “And why don’t you boys want any bacon?”

  “Too salty,” Clay said. “I’ll have cotton mouth all day if I do that.”

  “Same here,” Colt said.

  “Make it tomorrow and I’ll eat a whole pound though,” Clay said, walking over and throwing an arm around his mother’s shoulder.

  “I expect every meal at Christmas to include bacon,” Colt added in.

  “You boys are really missing out,” Pop said, continuing to munch on the bacon. “I still have eligibility left and you don’t see me worried about it being too salty.”

  Clay and Colt looked at each other and rolled their eyes. They’d been hearing about their father’s remaining eligibility since a coach had mentioned it three years prior when recruiting Colt for Northwestern.

  “Can you boys at least have some eggs then?” Beth Anne asked.

  “Really Mama, I’m good with a protein bar,” Clay said.

  “Fruit and yogurt for me,” Colt said.

  Beth Anne playfully tossed the spatula in the pan. “So what am I doing this for?”

  “For me,” Pop said, kissing her on the cheek and pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Besides, you boys all come home and I get to eat.”

  “Mama been starving you again, Pop?” Colt asked.

  “If I get anything to eat at all, it’s a good day,” Pop said.

  A laugh went up around the room as Clay filled a plastic bottle with sweet tea and tossed a couple of protein bars and bananas into a bag. “Call up’s in fifteen minutes, I should be heading out.”

  “You saving our seats for tonight?” his mom asked.

  “Blanket’s in the truck,” Clay said and headed out through the door.

  A moment later the porch door swung open and Colt bounded down the steps and half jogged behind him.

  “What’s up?” Clay asked.

  “Nothing,” Colt said, “just need to grab some stuff out of my truck.”

  “Ahh,” Clay responded. “Folks sure are in a good mood this morning. Especially Pop...happiest I’ve seen him in a long time. Guess that’s what happens when the favorite comes home.”

  Colt got to his truck, pulled open the door and paused for a moment. “It’s Friday, it’s Parents Night, he gets to watch you play quarterback in the Blue and Yellow one last time. I highly doubt my being here has a damn thing to do with it.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “Superstar, the strings are there for a reason! Use them!” Goldie called out, climbing from his Trans Am as Clay did the same from his truck. His own sleeves were tied tight under his armpits and up on top of his shoulders, exposing the entirety of wiry and toned arms.

  Clay glanced down at his own sleeves, lightly bunched between his shoulder and elbow. “We don't all have the guns you do, Goldie. Just be too embarrassing for me and my noodle arms to stand next to you.”

  “While that is probably true,” Goldie concurred, adding a half strut into his step, “you are the damn quarterback and it is time you acted like it.”

  “I’ve made it this far, I think I can go it one more day,” Clay countered.

  “All the more reason,” Goldie said. “You’ve been the starting quarterback for three solid years, yet you’ve dated the same girl and played the ‘Gee, heck’ humble card the entire time. Sickening, I tell you.”

  Clay chuckled. “What do you think would have happened if you’d been the quarterback all these years?”

  Goldie paused for a moment outside the locker room, then pulled the door open and stepped inside. “Ah hell, best we not think about that. A guy could go into system overload thinking about everything that could have been with that one.”

  “You mean like VD and illegitimate children?”

  “I was thinking notches in the bedpost and nights out at the lake,” Goldie said, “but you’re probably not wrong either.”

  “What’s up, guys?” Clay said to the other seniors, already in the locker room and clustered on one of the benches. Around them most of the team had assembled, all wearing their blue game jerseys.

  “Living the dream,” Matt said.

  To his left Marksy smirked and said, “Yeah, something like that.” Beside him on the bench was a half-empty bottle of Pepto Bismol. A faint trace of pink lined the corners of his mouth.

  “Did you hook up with that foreign exchange chick again?” Goldie asked. "At least wait until after the season."

  Marksy grabbed a towel from the bench beside him and threw it at Goldie’s head. “No, smartass. Anybody else get sick from that dinner last night?”

  The guys all looked at one another and shook their heads.

  “Great,” Marksy mumbled, picked the towel up and used it to wipe his mouth.

  Clay glanced up at the clock on the wall and said “Three minutes. Shall we?”

  The other seniors all stood and Rich said, “Let’s do this, one last time.”

  “A fact I’m sure breaks your heart, right Clay?” Matt asked.

  Clay scowled at him and said, “You guys know I hate this rah-rah stuff.”

  Goldie came up behind him and clasped his hands down on Clay’s shoulders. “Come on now, you’ve got to embrace it. Just like the sleeves. This is your last chance, live a little!”

  Clay shook his head and smiled as the team filed out the back door into the hallway. The underclassmen stood to the sides and allowed the seniors to get to the front, falling in behind them.

  The seniors walked through the wide hallways, the students parting and pressing themselves to the side as they passed. Together they led the team around the gym and down the front hallway, stopping to form a large circle.

  At exactly seven-thirty a shrill whistle blew through the school and a drummer began pounding out cadence on a snare drum. A moment later the twelve member pep band fired up their instruments in a full rendition of the Huntsville fight song.

  Many students clapped and cheered, funneling their way towards the front foyer and surrounding the team.

  Halfway through the song a deep and throaty yell could be heard and a moment later Coach Stanson emerged through the students, dancing a jig as the crowd laughed. He continued into the middle of the players, who all laughed and clapped as the band finished the song.

  The crowd quieted down for a moment and Stanson sang out, “Running cross the field later on tonight!”

  Immediately the team picked up the chant and continued, “Huntsville Hornets looking for a fight, We got hunger and we got speed too, Look out Lions ‘cause we’re coming after you!”

  Stanson took over and sang, “Running down the field later on today!”

  Again the team picked up the chant. “Damned old Lion tried to get in our way, We said ‘Lion you’ve got to move, There ain’t enough room for us and you!”

  Stanson jumped in one last time. “Walking off the field at the end of the game!”

  “Damned old Lions are full of shame, Cause we beat ‘em hard and we beat ‘em right, Another Hornet victory later on tonight!”

  At the conclusion of the last verse the drummers beat their instruments and the crowd cheered. Stanson raised his right hand high in the air and all of the players followed suit. “I shouldn’t have to say a lot to you guys today. You all know what tonight is and what it means. Have a good day, stay focused, and I’ll see yo
u all back here at 2:00 for the pep rally. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Win on three...one, two, three!”

  “WIN!” the team shouted in unison, the crowd cheered again.

  A moment later the crowd dispersed in various directions, almost all of them dressed in Hornet blue and yellow.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Mrs. Brubaker cued up the DVD to scene 17 and pressed play. Gary Sinise and John Malkovich popped up on the screen, reprising their roles as George and Lenny in the most recent Hollywood version of Of Mice and Men.

  Goldie leaned back in his seat three rows in front of Clay and said, “Is this the oldest TV left in Ohio?”

  Clay glanced up at the ancient Panasonic with turn knobs and a large box tube off the back. “You said that yesterday. And like I told you then, just be glad we’ve got a DVD player.”

  Goldie smirked and turned around as Mrs. Brubaker shuffled to the corner of the room and turned off the lights, then took a seat at her desk. The class was in their third straight day of watching the movie, a treat for having recently completed the novel.

  Clay sat in the back row and scanned the room. Goldie, Matt and Lyle were all in the room, along with Megan, Sarah and Rebecca. Beside him sat Natalie, who glanced over to make sure Mrs. Brubaker was busy grading before sliding her desk over several inches under the guise of getting a better view of the screen.

  “This place looks like a damn scene out of Glee doesn’t it?” she whispered.

  Clay looked blankly at her, offering nothing but a few slow blinks.

  “Is that look because you can’t believe I said that or because you have no idea what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” Clay whispered, then smirked. “What the hell is Glee?”

  Natalie again stole a glance over to Mrs. Brubaker and said, “We’ve got to cure you of this indifference of yours to television.”

  “I’m not against television. I watch football regularly.”

  “You’re such a guy sometimes,” Natalie said.

  Clay raised his palms upward and said, “Am I supposed to apologize, or...?”

  Natalie rolled her eyes. “Glee is a show on Fox about a glee club at some high school in northern Ohio. I say we look like them because the football players wear their jerseys and the cheerleaders wear their uniforms all the time.”

  She threw a hand to the room where the players were all in blue jerseys with yellow numbers and the cheerleaders wore blue uniforms with Hornets emblazoned across them in yellow.

  “Hmm, maybe,” Clay said. “Like I said, never seen the show. Besides, we’ve been doing this around here for years. Heck of a lot longer than some show for sure.”

  “We’ve been doing a lot of things around here for years, doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be,” Natalie countered.

  Clay smiled an exhausted smile. “Can I ask you a favor?”

  Natalie turned and rested one elbow on her desk and the other on the back of her chair .“Shoot.”

  “Just once, just for one day, go with it. Embrace all this,” he waved a hand at the room, “stuff. This weekend I’ll come over and we’ll sit on the porch and talk about next year and Thanksgiving. We can even watch Glee. But for today, just one day, be a part of it. For one day be a resident of Huntsville.”

  Natalie pursed her lips a bit as a look of hurt passed over her face. “You don’t think I’m a resident of Huntsville?”

  Clay scanned the room to make sure nobody could hear their whispers and said, “Yes and no. You’re a resident for sure, but hardly ever do you live here. The other night was probably one of the only times I’ve ever got the impression any of this even mattered to you.”

  “Of course it matters to me, but it doesn’t mean I should close my eyes and ignore the reality of things.”

  “Which is?” Clay asked.

  “That a lot of what this town does and stands for is a little hokey. It lives and dies on what the high school sports team of the month is doing.”

  Clay turned and matched her pose. “Yeah, maybe that is a little hokey. But at the same time, doesn’t it also make it a little great? We get to be a part of something, no matter how short lived, that truly matters to a lot of people. How many people go through their whole lives never feeling that way?”

  Natalie opened her mouth to speak, then closed it and slouched back a bit in her seat. “You know, I’ve never thought of it that way.”

  The corner of Clay’s mouth turned up in a smile. “I hadn’t either until just recently.”

  Natalie matched the expression. “Never thought I’d see the day where you got into all this stuff too. You’ve never been one to seek the spotlight or embrace the frivolity of superstardom.”

  “And I’m not now either,” Clay said. “I guess I just decided that I wanted my last game to be my way, to go out on my terms. And one of those terms is having my best friend there in the moment with me, not scrutinizing it from afar.”

  Natalie smiled again and looked down at the strings of her hoodie. “Of course. I’m always right there with you.”

  Clay turned back in his seat and watched a few seconds of the movie.

  Natalie did the same, then leaned towards him a few inches and whispered. “You could have just asked me that though, you know.”

  A smile traced Clay’s face. “Yeah, but what fun would that have been?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Pep rallies were such a common thing at Huntsville High, there was even an amended class schedule for them. After lunch, all three classes were cut from forty-four to thirty-two minutes. Combined, it added up to thirty-six minutes set aside at the end of the day.

  Six minutes for everyone to convene in the gym, thirty for the rally itself.

  When the bell schedule was altered, the normal timers were turned off and the bell rung manually in the office. The ones announcing the beginning and ends of the sixth and seventh periods and the start of the eighth were rung by hand. The final bell was the sound of the band coming through the halls on their way to the gym.

  Clay had been staring at the clock on the wall for over fifteen minutes when the rat-a-tat of a snare drum started not far from his class and a moment later the deep reverberating beat of a bass followed it. This continued for several seconds before the entirety of the band, not just the pep band as with the morning call up, joined in.

  By the time the Huntsville fight song was at full tilt, students were streaming from classrooms and the sounds of lockers opening and closing filled the halls. The band was not very large by traditional high school standards and as it moved through the hall and died down, the sound of chatter soon filled in.

  Clay found Matt just outside his classroom and a moment later Marksy joined them. Chelsie ran by and waved her pom-poms at them, smiling as she fought her way to meet the cheerleading squad in the gym.

  “You ever get that déjà vu feeling about these pep rallies?” Marksy asked as the three of them walked side-by-side through the hall, a swirl of people moving around them in both directions.

  “Little bit,” Matt confirmed.

  “I’m getting more of a ‘can we just play the damn game already’ vibe,” Clay said.

  “Amen to that,” Matt said.

  “Agreed,” Marksy echoed.

  They hit the corner by the cafeteria and were joined by Goldie. He fell in step beside them, held out his left arm and said, “Are these sleeves tied up high enough?”

  “Any higher and they’d be a turtle neck,” Clay deadpanned.

  Matt snorted as Marksy added, “Do you really think there’s a woman left in this school that hasn’t seen your arms?”

  A cocksure smile grew on Goldie’s face. “Good point.”

  Ahead, the Little's stood shoulder-to-shoulder and waited for them. Most of the crowd had emptied from the halls into the gym and the band was again playing the school fight song. The sound of clapping and feet stomping grew louder as the group approached the gym, stoppi
ng outside.

  The six seniors grouped around the door and took in the scene unfolding before them. The student body filled the entire right side of the gym, nearly all of it bedecked in blue and yellow and on their feet. The band stood on the far side of the gym floor, two dozen members in perfect rows belting out tunes.

  On the near side of the gym the cheerleaders danced in sync with the music, their pompoms and feet rising in unison as they went through the dance that had accompanied the song for years. Lining the front of the bleachers, standing on the gym floor, was the rest of the football team. Many of them were grouped together, examining the crowd or watching the cheerleaders in awe.

  Coach Stanson appeared from along the wall and stood beside the seniors watching from the doorway. “What’s the good word?” he asked.

  “Coach,” a few murmured.

  “Excited to be here,” Goldie said.

  “Let’s play some ball already,” Clay added.

  The band finished the fight song and immediately the cheerleaders launched into a cheer.

  We’re the toughest, we’re the meanest,

  We’re the baddest team in town,

  Hornets, Hornets, mark it down!

  “Man, that’s deep,” Rich extolled.

  “Poetic,” Lyle agreed.

  The seniors snickered as Clay caught Natalie’s eye and made an apologetic face. She smiled and shook her head, forcing herself to clap along with everyone else.

  The crowd cheered as Coach Stanson stepped away from the seniors and walked out onto the floor. In his hand he carried a cordless microphone and flipped it on as he neared center court. A single flare went up through the speakers, settling into a dull hum as he raised it to his mouth.

  “Please, please, be seated,” he began, followed by the sound of muffled movement as several hundred bodies descended onto wooden bleachers. Along the front the players sat on the gym floor, many of them leaning against the bottom row or resting their forearms across their knees.

  “First of all, thank you all so much for being here today. Football is a sport where hard work and desire can take you a long way, but sometimes that isn’t quite enough. Sometimes when the chips are down and the game’s tied in the fourth quarter, you need that little something. That little extra boost to help you get to the next level. That’s what you all have been for us this year, and I trust that’s what you all will be for us tonight!”