No Dawn Without Darkness

  I quit the team. I’ve told everyone who asks, I quit. I wasn’t kicked off. It wasn’t because of my ankle.

  Newspapers, real newspapers from New York City, have interviewed me about all sorts of crap—my prospects as a high school player, how I was set to get a Big Ten scholarship offer (news to me), why I refused to do a Sportade endorsement deal, how my exercise regimen before the attack made me more likely to survive, details about my football career as a nobody wide receiver in a crap league in upstate New York.

  The announcer calls that West Nyack won the toss and has elected to receive the kickoff. I watch as Thad gets his guys into formation. They replaced me with Tim Yancy. Tim Yancy can’t run for shit.

  Obviously, I still care about the team. My brother’s the quarterback. I know all these guys. So, yeah, it bugs me that the coach picked Yancy. Yancy sucks.

  My ankle still looks like crap. They had to graft on some skin and the whole thing looks like a bad makeup job in a horror movie. Some of the muscle was affected, gangrene or something. I can walk, though I feel the weakness if I try to run on it. Still, Monday I go back to school.

  John Reisman catches the kick and is downed at the West Nyack forty-five. Not a bad place. Thad will try to toss a dart to Yancy. There’s the snap—too long in the hand, bro. And Yancy’s too slow getting out, he can’t get his head around to see the pass. The ball slides right through his fingers.

  My father is on his feet screaming that the ref screwed up. But it’s clear this is on Yancy. Thad and I drilled that pattern all season. I would have made that catch.

  But Dad’s yelling that a defender was offside, like Yancy didn’t clearly botch the play. That’s Dad. Completely wrong, and still shouting. He and Mom are down at the bottom of the bleachers, near the field. They’re always there, every game. Mom told me I could sit with them. I didn’t want to be so obvious.

  Turns out, Mom spent the whole time I was in the mall praying. She moved into her church. Dad got so sick of waiting for dinner he started eating out every night at the local bar. Thad stayed out with guys from the team, would eat at their houses.

  Everything’s changed now that I’m back. Even though Thad’s busy with college applications and interviews and tryouts, he sits with me to watch TV for a few hours every day. Dad still hits the bar during the day—with the settlement the government’s paying out to all the survivors, he has decided to take a “vacation.” I heard my parents fighting that first night. Mom tried to tell Dad that it was my money, that it was for college, but he argued that he’d been paying for me for fifteen years, and I owed him—but he’s home every night at five thirty. He’s stinking drunk, but he’s there. Every evening, Dad stumbles in, drops his butt into the seat at the head of the table, turns his bloodshot eyes to me, and asks how my day was.

  Mom’s doting on me twenty-four/seven like some invalid. She makes me lunch and brings it to me on a tray with a folded napkin. She comes into my room in the morning, opens the curtains, and says things like, “We should let some sunshine in. You miss sunshine, don’t you?”

  I’ve been taking walks to avoid being smothered. Mom doesn’t question it because the doctors told me I have to work my new skin to keep it flexible. I tried hanging out in a nearby park and just sitting on the swings in the cold, but I don’t like being exposed like that, so I’ve been hiding in the town library. The place is pretty shabby. I wanted to read some of those poems from Shay’s book, so I searched the shelves for Tagore, but the librarian said they don’t have any.

  Last night, my mother surprised me with a visit from her priest. Dad turned off the TV, and all four of us sat in front of the guy and chatted nicely while Mom spooned out wet slabs of lasagna. He was nice enough, said a short grace and thanked us for opening our home to him. After dinner, over pie, he said he just wanted to check in with me. I told him I was fine, that everything was fine. When he left, I went into my room and closed the door and just stared at the wall.

  Next play, Thad tries to run it himself, which is dumb because he’s seen that Ossining’s defensive line is like the Great Wall of China. He’s just showing off for the recruiters, hoping they’ll see he has guts. I think they’ll see he’s trying to show off.

  When I got out, Thad was weird. He’d heard that Drew was dead. Mike must have told him. Mike got out with the main group from the parking lot. I was transferred to a hospital for a few extra days because I tested positive for a blood infection. No one with any signs of infection was allowed back into the world until they were cleared by CDC staff.

  I’m guessing Thad is pissed because of what I said when he and my parents picked me up from the hospital—first words out of my mouth: that I was no longer playing ball. Football is all we’ve ever done together. There’s the stuff with Dad, but it’s not something we talk about.

  Third down and Coach tries to stretch the field by having Yancy run a fly route, but the defense goes for Thad. He doesn’t even try to throw the ball away and gets sacked. Not good to have this many screw-ups in your first possession.

  Kicker shanks the punt, and our offensive side leaves the field, heads hung low. Thad snaps the chin strap on his helmet, slams the thing onto the bench. West Nyack defense heads onto the field. Before Thad sits, he glances up. Mom waves and he nods back. He looks around a little more—he’s looking for me, I bet—but then he catches Jocelyn Blake’s eye and it’s clear he’s just setting things up for later tonight.

  The first night I was home, Thad came into my room late. I was still up. I’m having trouble sleeping.

  “What was it like?” he asked. He knew from the news that we had spent our last days in darkness—the government couldn’t keep the media from learning that. Little else has gotten out about our time under quarantine. We all had to sign non-disclosure agreements to get the money offered as a settlement. I only know of one person who didn’t accept the settlement—this girl Ginger who helped Shay get us all out.

  I could have told Thad everything. Maybe Mike already had, maybe this was just a courtesy call. I shrugged. “It sucked,” was all I could muster.

  Our defensive line is suffering. Ossining’s deep in our territory. They fake a pass down the right side of the field, hand off to the running back—who’s completely open, not a West Nyack player in sight—and he takes it in for a touchdown. The whole team seems screwed up without Mike and Drew to kick people into line. Mike’s taken a leave of absence from school, and his old life, it seems. I haven’t seen him since the mall.

  It’s weird how the mall seems like real life and this life, actual reality, feels fake.

  When they ended the quarantine, the blood infection had started to take me down. A guy in a hazmat suit pulled me out of the pet store along with the others Kris and I saved. I came to on a gurney under a tent with a woman in a hazmat suit dabbing my ankle with some gauze. I asked her what happened, and she said, “You made it, kid.”

  My ankle needed to heal, and I needed to rest, so they gave me pain killers and a sedative and antidepressants and whatever else they thought would keep me on that gurney. Those of us marked as potentially infectious were segregated in sealed tents—Kris was one tent over—but Shay, Claire, Joe, and even Ruthie—she made it, another person I saved—all stood outside my tent and waved to me through the see-through window in the wall in front of my bed.

  Ossining kicks it through the goal posts for the extra point and it’s our turn with the ball. Thad is overeager and blows an easy short pass. His focus is shot.

  After two weeks in the isolation tent, they transferred me by ambulance to the hospital. As it drove, I lay there next to some other transfer, watching houses flash past the window, and felt crushed. All this normal stuff—cars, a pizza place, billboards—how could I go back to this?

  I realized I couldn’t. There was no going back. Surviving meant I had to stop faking. Had to stop trying to be Thad or whoever else I’d been pretending to be. I want to be real, I want to feel alive. I know it sounds crazy, but
the thing I remember feeling most in the mall is that: alive.

  I felt like a freaking god walking out of the hospital. I knew who I was. I loved rock climbing. I loved a girl named Shaila Dixit. I had this crumpled note from Ruthie—a drawing of us in her car, her brother too, with Thank you scrawled across the bottom—and was wearing the T-shirt Kris had made for us: “No Dying” in red across my chest. Which is why the first thing out of my mouth was, I’m quitting the team.

  What’s got me confused is that every morning I wake up feeling more and more lost.

  The first quarter ends and we’re seven points down. I’m sure Coach is giving it to Thad over his crap passing game. A part of me wants to go down there and tell him to just chill, get his head back in the game. That it doesn’t matter who’s in the bleachers. If he just plays the way he’s always played, a scholarship is in the bag. But I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear crap like that from me.

  Who Thad needs to hear it from are his two best friends. But they’re gone. Drew forever and Mike, well, he’s just gone.

  It’s cloudy and the wind is the kind that sneaks around your jacket. I’m not used to being cold. The mall was always the perfect temperature, until the blackout when it was hot and then hotter.

  Evangeline Sawyer climbs the steps of the bleachers. “Weird to see you up here,” she says.

  “Best view is from the top row.” I try to keep my teeth from chattering.

  She looks around. “You going to Wes’s party later?”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by.” No way I’m going to that party.

  She smiles like she knows I’m not going. “Great.”

  She shuffles down the row on the opposite side of the stairs and meets up with her friends. I see them lean out to eyeball me. One of them is my ex-girlfriend Emma. I found out from Instagram that she’s dating Nate Taylor. We never officially broke up, but from the pictures, she started dating him right after I was locked down. I don’t care about that—I left her for Shay. It’s that she keeps texting me how sorry she is, and am I okay, and won’t it be great to hang out again during free period. I plan on spending all free periods in the crap library.

  My phone vibrates and I nearly drop it—I’m still getting used to having a phone again. It’s a text from Shay. Her family went on lockdown after she got out—she emailed me, but that was it. Her parents were smothering her in a good way. They all flew back to India for a week for her grandmother’s funeral. I have no idea what they burned—nothing got out of the mall that wasn’t alive. She was supposed to get back yesterday. This is the first I’ve heard from her.

  I hit the home button and see: Look down.

  There’s nothing under the bleachers.

  The phone buzzes in my hand. Shay again: Not under you. Down.

  I scan the bottom of the bleachers and see her leaning against the railing. She’s wearing some big, colorful scarf that whips around like a flag. Her hair swirls in front of her face, which has one of those henna tattoos on it again. I am up and running in a heartbeat.

  I nearly collapse into her. “Hi,” I say, out of breath.

  We lock eyes, lock hands, and it’s like the sun has come out.

  “Miss me?” she asks.

  “Like crazy.”

  I pull her to me, afraid that if I don’t kiss her she’ll disappear, and then our lips touch, and I know she’s real and I’m real, that this whole thing really happened, and that we’re alive and together and it’s not until she pulls back and says “You’re crying” that I realize I am.

  I run a hand across my face, but I don’t actually care. “You want to get out of here?” I ask.

  “I thought this was a huge game for Thad,” she says. “He’d kill you if you left. Plus, I’ve never seen a football game before.”

  So we stay. I explain to her everything that’s going on and she acts like she’s interested. And then it occurs to me that she might really be.

  “This isn’t boring for you?” I ask.

  She looks confused. “I asked you to explain it to me.” She nudges me in the shoulder.

  “I just figured this would be, like, way below you.”

  Winding her arm into mine, she says, “This is a part of you, and you are right here next to me.”

  The second quarter is more of the same from Thad. It’s like he’s screwing up on purpose. Next play, he calls an audible, fakes a pass, and tries to run it himself. The defense is right there and Thad slides head-first into the tackle—is he trying to get himself killed? I punch my hands deeper into my pockets.

  “Something wrong?” Shay asks.

  “Thad’s having the worst game of his career,” I say, kicking the pole of the bench in front of me. “There are scouts here from colleges and he’s blowing it.”

  “You haven’t talked to him yet, have you?”

  We’ve been emailing while she’s been away. It’s been really cool to just send everything in my head to her. She writes back these amazing stories making even breakfast sound like an adventure, and I’m just rambling like an idiot, but she never tells me to shut it. Anyway, this is how she knows I’m still not talking to Thad.

  “It’s hard,” I say.

  “No,” she says, “it really isn’t. You just go down there and open your mouth.”

  I gaze down the bleachers to where Thad has slumped onto the bench.

  “Okay.”

  It takes me a while to get to the bottom of the bleachers, and then I have to hop the fence to get onto the field and around to where the team is sitting. Some of the guys break into smiles and pat me on the shoulder. I say hi, bump fists and slap backs. It’s actually no big deal being down here.

  Thad is alone on a bench near the watercooler. I drop next to him.

  “You’re really sucking,” I say.

  He looks at me like I just fell from the sky, then goes back to staring at his hands. “Thanks.”

  “That first day in the mall, before we knew anything, Mike and Drew and me, we got this pick-up game of touch going with some guys from Tarrytown.”

  “That was right after the game,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You can imagine how Mike and Drew were looking for payback.”

  Thad smirks. “Drew knocked out some guy’s teeth in that game. Got a flag on the play for unnecessary roughness.”

  “The Tarrytown guys were all scared shitless of you. Wanted to beat the crap out of me for being a blood relation.”

  “So did they?”

  “They tried.” My jaw still hurts and I have a bruised rib from the episode. “Mike and Drew, though; they looked out for me.”

  Thad slaps his gloves against his palm. “I asked them to,” he says. “Before the cell phones were blocked, I texted Mike to cover your ass.”

  “I know,” I say. “Mike made it clear that I was not to leave his sight.”

  Thad stares out across the field, watching the defensive line continue to screw up. “He didn’t say a word to me when he came out,” he says. “I learned Drew died from the news.”

  Now I feel like an ass. “We were there with him, Mike and me,” I say. “Drew didn’t die alone.” I leave out the details. No one needs to know the details.

  Thad slaps his gloves again. Somehow the defensive line managed to hold Ossining off to a fourth down. Coach waves for Thad to get the offensive line together.

  “You going to Wes’s party?” he says, standing.

  “Nah,” I say.

  “You should go,” he says, grabbing my shoulder. “Bring that girl you’re sitting with. The guys are always asking me about you and I’m sick of making shit up.”

  “Maybe we’ll stop by.”

  He hefts his helmet and smiles. “Stop by or I tell Mom you coughed.”

  “Okay, jeez,” I say. “We’ll stop by.”

  I turn and feel the smile on my face. Glancing up, I catch Shay staring at me. Her face is a question and she holds a thumb up. I nod, and she flashes this I-told-you-so look.

 
On my way back up to her, I stop in front of my parents. My dad looks away from the players gathering at the West Nyack thirty yard line.

  “You all right?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Is it okay if I stop by this party after dinner?” We’re doing Thanksgiving at the church.

  My mom smiles like I’ve answered a prayer.

  “You need a ride?” my dad asks.

  “Thad’s got me covered.” No way I ride with him.

  “She looks nice,” my mother says. “Your girlfriend. From the mall, right?”

  I catch Shay’s face in the crowd. She’s watching the game. “She is nice,” I say.

  “Have fun,” my dad adds.

  I think he’s sober, or at least not drunk. It’s the nicest interchange we’ve had in a long time.

  I crawl back up the bleachers, really beginning to feel it in my bum ankle.

  “The talk was good?” Shay asks as I settle in beside her.

  “All good,” I say. “You mind stopping by a party later?”

  “Why, Ryan, dear, I thought you’d never ask.”

  L

  E

  X

  I

  CHAT WITH D-MASTER

  You free?

  Ugh. Mom attack. Gimme sec.

  Remind her how important connection with friends is for patients in recovery.

  She’s become very clingy.

  Give the woman a break.

  I know, I know. Sheesh, when did you become such a know-it-all?

  It’s just weird, you know?

  But good weird.

  I’ll see you at regular visiting hours?

  You bringing the Xbox?

  Wouldn’t dare show up without it.

  S

  H

  A

  Y

  For the thousandth time, Ryan says, “This is my girlfriend, Shay.” At first, the words excited me. I’ve never been anyone’s girlfriend, let alone been introduced that way to popular—and obviously very jealous— girls. But the excitement wore off fast, and now I feel like a trophy in Ryan’s story—the Triumphant Return of the Hometown Hero.