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The stuff that always gets Matt is the simple stuff: the way if you forget to change one of the bathroom lightbulbs, eventually the other will go dark, and maybe that wouldn’t be a problem if you’d remembered to have lightbulbs in the dry-rotted cabinet under the bathroom sink, but you didn’t, because you never can keep the right wattage straight in your head. And then that leaves you wondering how you can be halfway decent at math (which you are) if you can’t recall the mundane details of a grocery list.
Matt doesn’t know if he’s more than halfway decent at anything.
It's no good trying to run all this stuff by Landry, though Matt does. Landry’s Matt’s ride-or-die (as Landry himself likes to put it, kind of oddly). But Landry doesn’t know how to change a lightbulb or fix a dripping faucet because he has two parents at home who perfectly split the difference on Getting Stuff Done. His mom cooks and his dad is handy and also a cop and so basically, they’re the American Dream, right down to having a son who wants to be a rebel but hasn’t figured out how to do that just yet.
Yeah, if he’s being honest, Matt doesn’t understand the band. For one thing, he can’t help but wonder why Landry doesn’t just pick a lane—heavy metal or Christian music. But Landry swears that the Light of Christ reaches farther than Matt’s puny mind can understand.
Maybe he’s right. Matt’s too tired to make sense of it, and right now, he’s standing under the hardware store fluorescents, making sense of exactly jack-squat.
Today it isn’t lightbulbs. It’s a curtain rod.
Grandma got confused a couple of days ago, thought she heard a “wild dog trying to get in this here house, Matthew, and what would I tell Joel when he gets home?”—anyway, she tore the bracket clean out of the wall and now her bedroom window doesn’t have curtains.
Matt sighs. She’s been having more spells lately. Talking about his grandpa—a mostly good, though gruff memory, distant as Dad now, just dead instead of deployed.
“Yo, benchwarmer!”
It’s Bradley Cole—the carrot-top defensive end who isn’t exactly in the inner circle of Panther football, the golden god-tier occupied by Jason Street and Tim Riggins and Smash Williams, but who is a hell of a lot higher in the social food chain than Matt can ever hope to be. Matt ducks his head, praying that Bradley is addressing some other water-carrier.
But it’s after seven o’clock at night, and the store’s about to be closed. There's no one else to hide behind.
“Hey,” Matt says, half-raising a reluctant hand.
Bradley’s not alone. There’s a couple of guys shuffling along behind him, Dolia and Santino, and wonder of wonders, Riggins is with them. OK, so maybe it’s not a wonder, but to Matt’s observer’s eye, Number 33 is a lone wolf. A lone wolf, or Jason Street’s shadow. Sometimes, somehow, both.
Riggins doesn’t say anything to Matt, probably doesn’t even know his name, but Matt feels the wolf-stare cutting clean through him.
“Trying to build his way to some field time,” one of the other guys says, and Bradley laughs.
To Matt’s relief, they move on quickly. They’re looking for something in the garden section. Hose lengths, apparently, to rig up to a keg. So stupid it’s actually impressive. Figures. Matt is vaguely aware of the kind of parties that go on from Friday nights to Saturday mornings on-season, and pretty much any day of the week during summertime—he was born and raised in Dillon, after all. He is never invited to those parties. Now that he’s playing varsity, Landry thought that might change. But Matt knows that “playing” is a technicality. He does team drills at practice, but nothing major. Nothing but the bare minimum, quarterback-wise. He’s not coming off the bench for this whole damn year, and it’s more than likely that, after Jason Street graduates, someone will transfer from another school or something, and sail right in over Matt’s head.
Matt turns his attention back to the rods, the brackets, the array of gold-finish, nickel-finish, painted wood. It’s all too expensive, and even if it wasn’t, it would be futile. He forgot to measure the window before he came.
Idiot, he tells himself. It’s his dad’s voice. Sometimes Coach Mac’s. Coach Taylor, newly ascended to glory, doesn’t talk to Matt much, though he’s a lot nicer off the field than some of the others. Nicer from afar, that is—it’s not like Matt talks to him, either. Coach Taylor’s a family man, got a wife and a daughter who both have pretty hair in shades of honey and gold.
Gold. Like the finish he’s not going to choose for the curtain rod he can’t actually buy.
“Hey. QB2.”
Matt starts, looks up. It’s Riggins. Riggins has the world-weary nonchalance of a twenty-five-year-old, and the lazy unpredictability of a jungle cat.
Matt doesn’t know how to talk to him any more than to Coach Taylor.
“Uh—”
“Whatcha looking for?”
It’s a trick—it has to be. First-string players don’t take note of the freshman underlings except to humiliate them. Landry has explained this in detail, as if it wasn’t already obvious to Matt.
He ducks his head.
“Curtains, huh.” Riggins answers the question for himself. “Decoratin’.”
“It’s for my grandma,” Matt mumbles. He almost whites out a second later. His mouth clearly hates the rest of him. Admitting something like that before Tim Riggins and everyone—or actually just Tim Riggins, because Bradley and the others are an aisle away now—is the worst kind of social suicide.
Matt’s been respectfully intimidated by Tim Riggins since Matt was in first grade, and Tim was in third.
You’d think he’d know better than to cop to the fact that he was shopping for his grandmother.
“Huh,” Tim says again. “OK, so. What’re the dimensions?”
“W-what?”
“The window.” Tim looks at him like he’s an idiot. Which, to be fair, he is. Matt shrinks under the river-green stare. “How big is the window.”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t measure it.”
Matt shakes his head.
“Is it deep?” Tim holds one massive tackle-ready hand in front of the other, miming a box in thin air.
Matt tries to think. It’s like he doesn’t know the house at all, the house he’s lived in basically his whole life. He was five years old when Grandpa Joel died, when they moved to help Grandma—or to let her help them—
“Yeah,” he says, at last. “Yeah, I guess there’s a little depth.”
“OK.” Tim rocks back on his heels, unexpectedly satisfied. “Get a tension rod. That one there. Don’t need the brackets that way.” He pivots, starts walking away. “Sayonara,” he says, over his shoulder.
Matt’s an idiot. Again. He should have thought of that himself—a workaround for one of the myriad problems that are his to deal with each and every day—but he didn’t. He needed Tim Riggins to tell him. Something about being alone, deciding alone, whether it’s meal plans or cleaning solutions or electric bills, turns Matt’s brain into mush.
Maybe there’s supposed to be some compromise between the unattainable life that Landry has and the paralysis Matt feels. On the bench or off it, he’s invisible, except at home. And there? There he has to be all things to all of Grandma’s spells, all of the time.
It’s a lot. Something’s got to give.
He blinks, pulls the rod down, and then remembers who he’s indebted to.
He turns to say thank you, but Tim has melted back into Riggins, and Riggins is long gone.