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The whole damn week has gone wrong, from sixty-ish, to Voodoo Goddamn Tatum, to Tami picking up red plastic cups and crushed potato chips while whispering you to shreds, to this:
This, fifty-five sorry sons-of-guns running bleachers, while you try to look plain pissed-off instead of how you feel: like melting into a panther-blue puddle on the steps below.
“Least we’re not the ones wearing helmets,” says Mac. He’s the color of a ripe tomato. You feel hotter just looking at him. It’s ridiculous.
In answer, you only grunt.
You still haven’t made things right with Tami—maybe dying of heatstroke will take care of that.
They’re not talking. You knew it was a lost cause as soon as you heard the details—wrecked car, hooligan behavior. Riggins lopes past you, panting but not as winded as the heavier linebackers, and you catch his eye for a second, can almost see him sizing you up.
Riggins will run a thousand bleachers before he tells you what he knows.
Hell, you know Riggins had something to do with it, and you know Smash had something to do with it, but that’s about it. It takes violence and insubordination for those two to get along, but when it comes to something like this, they won’t turn on each other and they’re both as stubborn as a couple of mules. Nobody else is going to spill the beans if it means selling out the team captains, and tempting though it is to admire the kind of loyalty you've clearly grown from the scorched earth, you’re not going to give them the satisfaction of your mercy.
You’re not going to give anyone satisfaction today. It’s not a good day.
“Ten more!”
After a while, since they’re not going to give you what you want, you have to pull off some kind of graceful exit. (This is not practice for handling the trouble with Tami—nothing is practice for that.) When they’ve run forty, you call time.
“Go cool off. We’ll start tomorrow same way—oh, hell no, quit your bellyaching! Hit the showers!”
“Think they learned their lesson, Coach?”
“Gee, Mac, I don’t know. They seemed real sorry to me.”
You feel like taking a baseball bat to a car yourself.
The drive home gives you time to think. All in all, what smarts is that Tami was right. Right about everything, though you don’t need to worry about the whole of it—there’s some water that is well and truly under the bridge.
Crumbs well and truly under the table, if you want to get clever about it.
You sigh. You don’t much want to get clever. You want to go home.
When you tell her you’re sorry, it’s in a dark escape from the noise and fanfare. Just the two of you, and she is a cool breeze smiling over a relentless hour.
You tell her she’s worth it.
You kiss her and kiss her and ask to be her friend.