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Summary
As Pete’s eyes go round and unseeing at the unremarkable expanse of grainy hotel ceiling, he pictures instead, for that split wide open second, some of the moments that got him here. Just snapshots. Freezeframe fragments.
Figure 1: A shared hotel bed, the morning of the 1997 Northbrook Soccer Sectionals. Pete and a teammate. Pete tucked into the curl of his teammate’s body, a thicker, paler arm thrown over the dip between his hips and his ribs. Thin white bed sheets tangled between their legs. So limp in sleep their muscles haven’t remembered to be sore yet. Pete’s dumb sink-bleached hair irredeemably kinked. A half-chub digging into Pete’s spine. Alarm set to blare at 6:30 am. (“Sorry, dude,” his teammate says, after Pete’s elbowed him off and they’ve both cursed each other out and put shirts on. “I rolled over in my sleep and you’re like, the exact same size as my girlfriend.”)