I looked at the bleachers and saw Maggie standing and cheering. I winked at her, not that she could see my eyes from behind my helmet.
Next, Luke was in at quarterback, me still at running back. I knew he would try to keep the ball out of my hands. But on the third play, he got ready to snap it, he audibled, and then he turned back to me to say he’d hand it off. I was ready.
Just like all my plays that day, this one seemed to unfold in slow motion. Luke jammed the ball into my rib cage, and I darted toward where the hole was supposed to open up in the line. But no one on my team was blocking. Instead, the offensive line let everyone pass, and six guys, most of them mammoth, bore down on me in unison. I had nowhere to juke, nowhere to spin, nowhere to move. They led with their helmets, and I was pummeled—in my ankles, knees, torso, and, with a blazing, blinding crash after my feet lifted off the ground, my head.
I went down, face grinding into the dirt, the crush of bodies steamrolling over me and staying there. I tried to yell but had no air in my lungs. I gasped beneath a thousand-plus pounds of sweaty football players and their bulky equipment.
Then all went dark.
Where was I? I was still on the field, but now it looked postapocalyptic: torn up, parched, overgrown with weeds in a hazy rusty light, as if the sun couldn’t make it past clouds of dirt in the air. Then came a twinge of déjà vu and a foggy speck emerging in the middle of my vision. The speck grew, moved closer, accompanied by a sound that suggested both laughing and crying. Voices came from all around me, behind me, where I couldn’t turn to look.
The spot got bigger and brighter and morphed into a face: male, but with skin pulled back and stretched out like shrink-wrap. He was grinning a big, wide, evil grin—like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, like Jack Nicholson as the Joker, like Jack Nicholson as the Green Goblin.
No, the Green Goblin wasn’t Jack Nicholson. That was Willem Dafoe. Or James Franco. Or Dane DeHaan.
For God’s sake, Jordan, focus!
The face, so close in front of me, began to burn along its jaw, flickers moving upward, the skin blackening and crisping before actual flames appeared. Blisters rose and grew and popped.
Gross.
The creature laughed, his eyes the only things unaffected by the heat.
Then the fire spread to … me. Arms, legs, head … it was white-hot and excruciating and …
Darkness. Again.
CHAPTER 6
Maggie
JORDAN DIDN’T MOVE. He was out.
I ran down from the bleachers, ducking through the fence to get onto the football field. Those assholes. It was obvious what had happened: Luke called a screen to the team but told Jordan it was a draw, so when the play started, the offensive line let the defenders past them, and Jordan got hammered and went airborne. The crack of the helmet-to-helmet contact was loud and sickening.
The coaches jogged out to him, and I tried to join them, but one of the boosters—Mr. Kilpack, the local pharmacist—intercepted me.
“Let them do their work,” he said, wearing a Mount Hope Gladiators polo shirt.
“Luke did that on purpose,” I seethed.
“Looked like a broken play from here,” Mr. Kilpack said. “Football is dangerous. But your fella will bounce right back.”
My fella?
“Concussions can mess up someone for life,” I muttered to Mr. Drugstore, not that he heard me as he walked away. Given all his other injuries, should Jordan even be playing football?
Jordan’s buddy Tico, who hadn’t been part of the play, emerged from the crowd in the middle of the field and trotted my way.
“He’s got little birds chirping around his head, but he’s okay,” Tico said, holding his helmet at his side.
“Thanks, Tico,” I said. “That Luke is a piece of garbage.”
“Well, I’m sure the recruiters were impressed by his decision-making skills,” Tico said, nodding toward the bleachers on the opposite sideline. Two men in suits just stood there, arms at their sides. We’d had our share of players picked up by big schools over the years, so scouts weren’t an uncommon sight, but no one would wear a suit in September in South Carolina. I was in shorts and a sleeveless top and could feel the sweat trickling down my back.
Through a gap in the crowd, I spotted Jordan slowly rising onto his elbows, his helmet off, his head swaying from side to side. One of the assistant coaches supposedly had a degree in sports medicine, but this town could have used a real doctor at this point. Who could examine him if anything really was wrong?
Mom always had wanted to be a doctor—a people doctor—but she fell in love with my dad and quit school. It wasn’t until I was born and Dad left us that she went back to school to become a vet. Her recent medical experience was greater with horses than humans.
I looked back to the bleachers, and the recruiters were gone. Practice was nearing its end, and Coach Garner ordered the players to run a few laps around the field before he helped Jordan to his feet. Jordan took a few steps and wasn’t favoring either leg. He also wasn’t holding his arms gingerly or wincing at all. The coach held Jordan’s helmet, and the two walked off the field. Finally, he slapped Jordan on the butt—I’ve never understood that particular ritual—and handed him his helmet.
“You looked great out there, kid,” Coach Garner said.
“Aside from imitating a crash-test dummy, sure,” Jordan replied with a forced laugh.
The coach took off, and Jordan made his way toward me with a wide, bright smile.
“You okay?” I asked, wanting to sound less concerned than I was.
“You should’ve seen the other guy,” he said, rubbing his hand over the back of his head.
“I did. He seemed fine.”
“Well,” Jordan said, “looks can be deceiving.”
I laughed and raised my hand—I wanted to rub his upper arm, tell him I was worried about him, but then the coach yelled over. “Hit the showers, Conners!”
“Yes, sir!” Jordan said.
“See you later?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve got to help my mom clean up the garden this afternoon, but maybe we can go get ice cream tonight?”
“I’d like that,” I said.
I thought of giving him a hug but opted instead to stand there awkwardly.
“Well, bye,” he said, and as he turned to walk toward the locker room, I noticed something I’d missed yesterday: the scar on the back of his head, about three inches of pink snaking through his hair like a river in a dense forest, with a few spindly streams heading off to the sides.
How much surgery had he had? What did they do? And whatever was done, could he now withstand such blows to the head? Could anyone? I might have to break it to him over ice cream that I wasn’t so sure about this him-playing-football thing.
But he wasn’t the only one who was damaged goods.
I had convinced myself that I had cancer.
No one had diagnosed me, but there was a lump in my breast that wasn’t there before we’d all been irradiated. That’s a bad sign, right?
I didn’t tell my mom because I wasn’t sure about it and didn’t want to freak her out. We were far from rich, and if I let my mom know about the lump, she’d max out her credit cards trying to get every available test.
Besides, sixteen was too young for breast cancer, wasn’t it? I didn’t know how my breasts were supposed to feel anyway. I hadn’t had them that long, relatively speaking, and I’d heard that one might be a bit different from the other. It’s not like while I was in camp I could read all about it on the internet. Now that I was back in town, I still couldn’t.
Then again, anyone who researches any symptom online will conclude that she or he has cancer, so maybe I wasn’t missing much.
Still, we lived in the latest place with a name that had become a synonym for nuclear disaster. Just because I wasn’t in the sick camp didn’t mean that I—or anyone else—wasn’t sick.
Well, this was a cheerful train of tho
ught that I was riding. I’d have been better off worrying some more about Jordan and his surgically repaired, battered head, poor guy. And thinking about his smile.
And then his frown when he learned that I have cancer and might die.
Maybe we could watch The Fault in Our Stars together.
Get ahold of yourself, Maggie. You’ve got a plan to diagnose yourself without bankrupting your mom. No point in doing anything or telling anyone till you’re sure.
I’d never wanted to be less sure of anything in my life.
CHAPTER 7
Jordan
THE WATER FELT good on my muscles and not only because they’d just been on fire. Seriously, what was up with that? I’d been hammered before but never with the side effect of a freaky flaming face setting me ablaze. That didn’t feel like a vision. It felt like … a freaky flaming face setting me ablaze.
As I came to on the field, what felt like fire gave way to the regular ol’ heat of the late-morning sun. I’d never been happier to view the sight of six guys who’d just pummeled me into oblivion.
My shower was long and hot. Usually I wasted no time getting in and out of the locker room—I wasn’t crazy about the whole communal-cleansing thing—but the other guys were still running laps.
In the sick camp, I had been cleared for exercise three months earlier but didn’t do much more than running. I yearned for a weight room so I could gain some bulk for football, but there was no gym. The physical therapy consisted mostly of stretching and running; I circled the camp’s perimeter over and over, gaining speed and endurance. I worked on my sprinting, though given that I was running alone, I wasn’t measuring myself against anyone else.
After finishing my shower, I examined my scars in the mirror. The one on the right side of my chest, where they’d gone in to fix my punctured lung and do whatever they did to my ribs, seemed to be glowing. Normally when ribs break, you don’t do anything for them. Two seasons ago, Lance Butler cracked a couple and was back before the final game. But when you puncture an organ or two—aside from my lung, the ribs gouged my liver—they have to open you up and put everything back where it’s supposed to go.
The zipper on my left arm ran from the elbow to the wrist, and the one around my knee was bright pink. My scars looked fresh. My mom told me that if I’d been in a real hospital trauma center, the doctors would have minimized the scarring, but apparently not military surgeons. Fat chance of finding a plastic surgeon at sick camp.
I was standing in my boxers by my locker when the rest of the team tromped in, their cleats clonking against the tile floor.
“Well, look who’s upright,” drawled Troy Cameron as he stopped between the banks of lockers. I’d known him since elementary school. He was a short, fat kid with a red bowl cut who’d grown up to be a tall, stocky kid with a red bowl cut. I once tried and failed to argue him out of pulling the legs off a frog.
Now I said nothing.
Luke stood next to Troy, both in full pads, helmets in their hands. “Maybe Jordan doesn’t know,” Luke said with pretend concern. “Troy here is the one who nailed you with that sweet head shot.”
“Knocked you clean out,” Troy chimed in.
Allow me to pause here and point out the obvious. I’m black—mixed race, actually, but to these folks, black. Luke and Troy are white. We’re in South Carolina. Mount Hope has a long, complicated history when it comes to race, and I’m sure you could read about it online, assuming where you live didn’t experience a nuclear meltdown and internet access isn’t cut off for no apparent reason. My town is home to a lot of white people and a fair number of black people, with some Hispanics, such as Tico’s family, thrown in to boot. We’ve all been living together for a long time, and sometimes “issues” come up, but mostly everyone knows who’s who and what’s what and gets on with life.
That is to say that these two big white dudes giving this charming black brother some grief wasn’t a racial issue. They were just mouth-breathing motherfuckers.
I turned toward Troy and said in my most sincere voice, “I forgive you.”
“Forgive me?” Troy said. “Oh, ho, I’m not looking for forgiveness.”
“Aw, I’ve seen you at church with your family in your cute suit and bow tie,” I said. “I’m sure God will understand.”
“God is telling me to splatter your brains across the floor, Conners,” he huffed.
Jesus, this guy. “Have a blessed day.” I smiled.
Luke stepped forward, his lips curling upward. “Do you forgive me?”
“Hey, man,” I said, “I know quarterback isn’t your position, so I can’t blame you for calling a shitty play that got your teammate injured. I’m sure those scouts won’t hold it against you, either.”
“You listen to me, you little bitch,” Luke said. “I don’t know what your problem is, but today was my day. They were here to see me. I’ve started at running back since I was a sophomore, and you’re not going to take that away from me.”
“You did pull off that nice scamper into the end zone, though. Oh, wait, that was … me.”
“Oh, man,” he said, licking his lips like he was about to eat a whole pig with the skin still on. “I’m gonna enjoy this.” He handed his helmet to Troy, took a step toward me.
The other players were all clustered around us now.
“You gotta be kidding, man,” Tico said. “My guy was just out cold and is standing there in his underwear, and now you’re gonna fight him?”
“Shut the fuck up, Tico,” Luke barked.
“Take off your pads at least, pretty boy,” Tico returned.
That’s my man—not about to back down.
Luke turned toward him, weighing whether he wanted to fight this battle on two fronts.
“Thanks, Tico, but I got this,” I called out, directing Luke’s attention back to me. I didn’t know what inspired me to do that or, then, to position myself with one foot forward, the other back, and my hands hanging down.
There wasn’t much room with lockers on both sides of us and a bench down the middle. Luke shuffle-stepped toward me, and I backed up.
Images of where I could hit him flooded my head, as if I’d made anatomical notes: ankles, knees, hips, stomach, elbows, throat, chin, face, ears.
He swatted out with one hand, trying to grapple my arm, and I angled out of reach, bouncing on the balls of my feet.
An odd calm came over me. I wasn’t thinking about how much I hated Luke right now or how badly Troy had hurt me. I just was observing Luke’s body, the way it moved, his stance, his center of gravity—and how slow he seemed.
When he swatted again, I grabbed his hand and yanked him toward me, and with my other hand, I thrust the tips of my fingers into the spongy base of his throat, lightning-fast. I let go just as quickly, and he stumbled to the floor, hacking a pained cough.
Luke wasn’t about to admit defeat, though. Instead, he returned to his fighting crouch. Fine. I whipped the side of my foot into his cheekbone, and he flopped onto the bench.
Troy jumped forward but couldn’t get around his big dumb friend to reach me. Instead, he threw the helmets at me, one after the other, leaving dents in the lockers behind me as I easily dodged them.
Luke rose up again. What a dummy.
He stood on my side of the bench, while Troy crouched opposite us. Troy wore a tentative expression, like a confused ox. Luke looked pissed and uncorked a right hook. I leaned away from it, let it pass, and pivoted to smash his fist into the lockers. He howled, then tried to grab me with his other hand, but I stepped backward again. I had room to do that one more time before I was up against the wall.
Luke moved to get alongside me, and I didn’t want that to happen. I was tired of fighting this guy. I leaped forward and kicked, the top of my foot colliding with the side of his knee. He fell, screaming, his leg bending in the wrong direction.
I turned just as Troy lunged toward me, so I dropped down and punched him between his chest pads and his belt. He gaspe
d, and as he grabbed his stomach, I threw an uppercut and felt and heard the crunch of his shattering jaw. He started making noises like a wounded large animal that needed to be put down.
I popped back up into ready stance, but there was no need.
“What the hell did they teach you over in the sick camp, Conners?” Coach Garner asked as he broke through the crowd. “Some kind of special-forces crap?”
I relaxed my muscles.
“He didn’t start it, sir,” Tico said over Luke’s shrieks and Troy’s moaning.
“No shit,” Coach Garner said through gritted teeth. “Who starts a fight in their boxers?”
“I broke Troy’s jaw,” I said, to myself as much as the coach. It was dawning on me that I was in deep shit. “And something tore in Luke’s knee, maybe his ACL.”
“Ya think, Conners? See, and I thought he was showing us a new yoga position.”
Coach Garner turned to Coach Winters. “Call an ambulance, if you can figure out how.”
He pivoted back to me: “In my office. Dressed. Now.”
CHAPTER 8
Maggie
WE HAD TO put Nerf down. The way he kept banging his face against the cage bars, he was going to destroy himself anyway. He just wouldn’t stop.
I’d lived in a vet’s office long enough to see dozens of animals put to sleep. But keeping it together for Nerf was tough.
I threw some treats out to him in the backyard, and as he nibbled at them, Mom slipped a catchpole, with a loop of cord at one end, over his head and pinned him to the ground. While he thrashed around, I held the syringe and looked for an opening. I had to move quickly as I injected him with a sedative and backed away. This potent medicine calmed him down enough to let us finish the job, with Mom handing me the catchpole as she applied a syringe of pentobarbital.
I whispered to him every loving thought in my head as his breathing slowed and eventually stopped, a puddle of urine spreading in the dirt as his muscles loosened.
The Warning Page 3