Losers Take All

  27

  Cars and SUVs with out-of-state plates started arriving two hours before game time. They streamed into our school’s parking lot, and friendly-looking strangers wearing a colorful assortment of hats, caps, and bandannas asked where the soccer game was going to be held. There were soon several hundred people milling around the south field, not to mention five TV trucks and a small army of reporters. Apparently our school could turn away strangers from practice, but it couldn’t control who came to our games, which were open to the public.

  Dylan joined us in the locker room in his uniform. He wasn’t going to play but he had come to lead us out onto the field. Teammates signed the plaster cast on his right arm, and the bandage on his broken nose had a big red-and-gold letter on it—not an F for Fremont but an L for Losers.

  I hadn’t said a word to Becca in days, but as we prepared to run out she caught my eye. “Sorry about that article this morning. I know it hurt.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t good.”

  “None of that stuff about your family came from me.”

  I looked back at her and shrugged. “It came from somebody.”

  “How’d your father take it?” she asked.

  “Haven’t seen him. But I’m sure he wasn’t too pleased.”

  “Time to go,” Coach Percy told us, holding his pith helmet under his arm. “There are a lot of people out there today, so it’s normal to be a little nervous. As Julius Caesar said: ‘No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.’” He paused and smiled at us, and then lowered his voice as if preparing to share a secret. “But Caesar also said: ‘If you must break the law, do it to seize power. In all other cases, observe it.’”

  I wasn’t sure what he was telling us to do, but I now knew who had posted the video of our team, and I was beginning to suspect that in his own polite way Coach Percy was much more of a dangerous revolutionary than Shimsky.

  With his strange words of encouragement ringing in our ears, we hurried down the narrow basement corridor, out the side door, onto soggy grass. As our team approached the large crowd on the south field, I spotted the cheerleaders finishing a kick routine. Beyond them, in a corner near a goal, Muhldinger and Mr. Bryce were conferring with the referee and the Maysville coach, perhaps discussing how to handle this giant crowd.

  We ran past a woman news reporter taping a stand-up. I heard her say, “Here come the self-styled Fremont Losers, whose claim to be the worst soccer team in America has captured—” but the rest of her words were drowned out by a roar.

  The throng of students, townspeople, and strangers had recognized us, and a cheer went up. At that moment Dylan, who was leading the way, broke into a jog but seemed to get his legs tangled up with Frank, who was following close behind. They went down onto the wet grass, and Chloe and Zirco, who were trailing, skidded into them and joined the pileup. I was in the middle of the pack and was tripped up and knocked down myself. One after another the Losers fell onto the mosh pit of flailing bodies, and I heard the woman reporter shouting to her camera operator, “Stay on it, Gus. Make sure you get that! What an entrance!”

  Mud-stained but smiling, the Losers untangled themselves and we ran to our bench as the big crowd laughed and cheered. I was a little worried about Dylan’s wrist, but it was in a plaster cast and apparently suffered no further damage.

  The Maysville squad was already on the field, all warmed up. Coach Percy sent me right out for the coin flip. We were playing a freshman team, and their captain looked about a foot shorter than me and kept peering around nervously. “How many people are here?” he asked.

  “We’re expecting more than five hundred,” I told him casually.

  “We’ve never had more than a dozen,” he said, and gulped. “Do cheerleaders always come to your games?”

  “They’ve come to all our home games so far,” I said truthfully.

  He blinked. “Hey, I think those TV cameras are shooting us right now.” He ran a hand through his hair and threw his shoulders back.

  I stood up a little straighter myself.

  The ref walked up, and Mr. Bryce and Muhldinger were trailing a few feet behind him. I heard Muhldinger grunt the words “ridiculous” and “travesty” to Mr. Bryce, who shrugged as if to say: “There’s nothing more to be done.”

  “Guys, let’s hold off on the coin flip,” the ref told us. “We’re moving.”

  Seconds later we were tromping across two hundred yards of wet grass toward Gentry Field. The football team, which had been practicing there, had just gotten the message, and they didn’t look too thrilled at being kicked off their home turf. They walked past us, heading the other way—to the mud of the south field. They were griping among themselves as they watched the crowd filling up the lower levels of red-and-gold bleachers.

  “Hey, Cathy, are you really gonna cheer for these geeks?” a helmeted player called out to a cheerleader.

  “Watch me on TV tonight,” she told him with an excited smile.

  I saw Dylan studying the football players as they filed past, examining their faces as if he could tell by their reactions which of them might have jumped him. Most of them, busy complaining to each other that this was ridiculous, weren’t even looking at us.

  Soccer goals were rolled in through the gate and set up in front of the football goal posts. Within twenty minutes the football field was limed for soccer with a center circle, penalty areas, and eight-yard boxes, and we were ready to play.

  It was a very strange thing to line up as the center midfielder in the heart of Gentry Field. This was sacred ground at Fremont—even our varsity soccer team had never played here. Around me, red-and-gold bleachers seemed to climb to the clouds. I’d guess at least seven hundred people must have been getting settled on those metal benches, with more trickling in. Gentry Field had been built right over the old football field where my father had set his records, and the track that circled the field was where he’d run his mile in four minutes and seventeen seconds.

  I’d been looking for my father since we first ran out and hadn’t spotted him. If he wasn’t there, it was the first sports event in the history of the Logan family that he’d ever missed. It felt strange to not see him—from my first T-ball game at age five, to every swim race, junior rec basketball scrimmage, and town track-and-field meet he had always been there, shaking a fist and shouting encouragement from the sideline.

  The ref blew his whistle and our game was on. The Maysville freshmen seemed intimidated at playing in a big stadium in front of TV cameras. They took two quick shots in the first five minutes, but one was right at Frank’s stomach—which he saved, probably because he just couldn’t get out of the way—and the other hit the top of the crossbar.

  Strange things started happening when Fremont touched the ball, to the delight of the boisterous crowd. A few of the odd incidents were clearly set up by our players, but most looked unplanned.

  Two minutes into the game Jenks tried to head a high ball that drifted out over the Maysville sideline. Backing up and watching the ball, he tripped over their team bench, flailed his arms wildly, and fell headfirst into a gray plastic recycling bin. The poor guy got wedged inside it, and I could hear his echoing voice calling for help like a kid stuck in a cave. We had to grab him by the feet and pull him out. When he emerged into sunlight he raised his hands over his head as if he had survived something horrible, and the crowd gave him an ovation.

  Ten minutes into the game the ball was kicked out of bounds near our sideline. I guess somebody on our bench switched it for a ball that had been doctored, because when Shimsky threw it in to Pierre and the big guy stomped on it, he put his foot right through it. Pierre spun around with his foot inside the soccer ball while the crowd laughed and the TV cameras rolled. The sour-faced old ref stopped play, pried it off, and brought in a new ball that he checked himself. He gave Pierre a yellow card and scolded us all: “Whatever you guys are doing, knock it off. This isn’t a comedy routine.” But he was wrong—
the big crowd was eating it up.

  Maysville scored a nice goal ten minutes in. A few minutes later Zirco scored on our own goal when he tried to clear a ball out of danger, lost his balance, and miskicked it. The ball caromed off Frank’s forehead into our goal as Frank staggered back like he’d been shot by a mortar. He got both his arms tangled in the mesh and flailed in front of the cameras like a giant squid caught in a net.

  But then a freaky thing happened—we started playing the Maysville freshmen evenly. Half an hour into the game the score was still just two to nothing, and we were very much in the game, mostly because of me. I’ve never felt faster than I did that day. Maybe it was the article in the Star Dispatch, or playing on Gentry Field, or the knowledge that TV cameras might film me and my dad might see it. For whatever reason, I was flying around that turf field.

  With five minutes left in the half their right wing dribbled by Becca, nutmegged Chloe, and had an open path to our goal. He angled in toward Frank, ready to score their third goal, but I raced back and made up about thirty yards. Just as he drew his right leg back to kick the goal I took the ball away from him.

  I sped straight up the left side of the field and no one challenged me. I had distributed so many passes that the Maysville players kept expecting me to give it to one of my teammates. Instead I held the ball and crossed midfield. Pierre was wide open on my left, but I had already given him half a dozen passes that he had muffed. So when the Maysville midfielder stepped up to challenge me I tried a move I had seen on TV. I faked the pass to Pierre with my right foot, stepped clear over the ball, and pushed it with my left in the other direction. Before their midfielder could adjust I was racing past him, deeper into Maysville territory.

  Their tough right fullback didn’t mess around—he went for a sliding tackle. He had already taken down two of our players with that move, but I saw him leave his feet and scooped the ball over him. Then I hurtled above his outstretched legs.

  Now only two defenders stood between me and their goalie—their sweeper and stopper looked determined to block me. They were standing in front of their penalty area, five feet apart. I knew I couldn’t dribble around both of them, so I kicked the ball between them and tried to split them and accelerate onto it. Their goalie came out with his arms spread wide, but I put on a burst of speed, squeezed between the two defenders, and toe-poked the ball just before the goalie slammed into me. The impact knocked me flat, and I watched from the turf as the ball slowly rolled into their goal.

  Normally when someone scores a nice goal on a solo run there’s a roar of approval from the fans, but as I got up from the turf I heard only scattered applause. I figured that most of the people had come a long way to see us lose, so they weren’t sure how to react to seeing us fight back and score a goal.

  The ref soon blew his whistle for halftime. I jogged to our bench, and Frank was the first to unload on me. “Jack, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I looked back at him. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re making us look bad,” he said. “By making us look good.”

  “I’m just playing soccer,” I said.

  “Well maybe you should have gone out for varsity,” Pierre told me.

  That got me angry. “Look, I started this team,” I told him.

  “It belongs to all of us,” Chloe Shin replied. “And this is our big day.”

  “Yeah, we were going to dedicate today’s loss to Dylan,” Meg reminded me. “Instead we got this!” And she nodded to the giant digital scoreboard overhead. The jumbo LED display was replaying my goal. There I was on the big screen weaving through Maysville traffic and out-hustling their goalie. “Maybe we’ll even win,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “Chill out,” I told them all. “We’re not gonna win. One goal is no big deal.”

  “Ego, ego, ego,” Shimsky chanted back mockingly.

  I actually felt my fists clench. “Shut up,” I told him.

  Becca stepped between us. “Let’s all chill.”

  But several of my other teammates took up the chant. “Ego, ego, ego.” I saw Frank mouthing the words, and even Dylan picked it up, looking right at me.

  I turned and walked away from the team and stood by myself with my hands on my hips. I was tempted to walk out of Gentry Field and let them stink it up as badly as they wanted to.

  Percy walked over to me. “Remarkable goal.”

  “Take me out of the game,” I requested.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “You’re our best player.”

  “I don’t want to be.”

  “You’re doing what you should be doing,” he told me. “As Shakespeare said: ‘To thine own self be true.’ We all have to act out our own part.”

  “Well, I’m not much of an actor,” I replied, “unlike some people.” He gave me a piercing look and walked back to the bench, and I stood there alone and tried to cool off.

  On the field, the cheerleaders were wrapping up their big routine. One by one they were chanting for members of our team. Since they didn’t know our names, I saw them glancing at cheat sheets. “Zirco, Zirco, he’s our man,” a willowy blonde shouted. “If he can’t do it, Shimsky can.” She cartwheeled away, and a brunette ran forward. “Shimsky, Shimsky, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, Shin can.”

  I looked around the stadium, and the faces and shouts seemed to swirl. I imagined my father at eighteen, finishing his glorious mile and roaring down the final straightaway, taller and faster than everyone around him. And somehow that morphed to Arthur Gentry finishing his own final lap and sinking down onto his knees. I wondered what he had thought about in his last seconds, besides the pain and the fear. Had he regretted just going for it? Had he died feeling like a damned fool?

  “Shin, Shin, she’s our girl, if she can’t do it, Logan can,” a brunette cheerleader chanted.

  The ref blew his whistle—halftime was over. I jogged back to join the Losers for the second half.

  “Hey, buddy, I was just having some fun with you,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, we didn’t mean anything,” Dylan seconded, but I didn’t say anything back.

  They needn’t have worried about us winning. In the second half Maysville started playing strong soccer, and the Losers lived up to their name. Our defense came apart and shot after shot whistled through Frank’s legs or rocketed between his arms. The goals mounted up against us, and the laughs from the bleachers came faster and louder.

  Pierre’s shorts fell to his knees but he somehow kept playing—to the delight of the roaring crowd—before his shorts fell to his ankles and tripped him up so that he fell flat on his face.

  “Losers, losers, losers forever,” our fans chanted. I saw Muhldinger and Mr. Bryce standing together, and they didn’t look very happy at how their football chant was being mangled.

  The strangest moment of the second half came when Chloe and Zirco smacked into each other in one of their defensive collisions near the top of our penalty box. Somehow when they fell to the ground her braces got snagged on the elastic of his shorts so that it looked like she was following him around. Zirco kept stepping away from her, flapping his arms like a bird trying to take off, while she followed closely behind him, pulled along by the elastic. The crowd roared and I saw hundreds of cell phones filming it. Even the ref couldn’t help smiling as he whistled play dead so that we could get Chloe “unhinged.”

  True to his promise, with five minutes to go Pierre sank to his knees and vomited on the sacred turf of Gentry Field.

  When the second half was finally over the score stood at eleven to one and the big crowd had gotten plenty of laughs. “Losers, losers, losers,” they chanted, and I saw some of them holding up signs for the TV cameras:

  I STILL HATE MY GYM TEACHER

  FOOTBALL KILLS BRAIN CELLS!

  We shook hands with the Maysville players, and then most of my teammates stayed together near midfield as fans came over and reporters tried to get interviews.

>   I walked off alone. I heard Becca calling my name, but I ignored her and started to jog away. Suddenly a well-dressed woman stood in my path.

  “Beautiful goal today, Jack,” she said. “I know you don’t like to talk to reporters, but my name is Dianne Foster and I wondered if you had any reaction to my article this morning.”

  My parents brought me up to never be rude to adults, but I looked her in the eye and heard myself say, “Yes. Go to hell.”

  28

  I dropped my muddy cleats on the front porch, slipped into our house, and heard my dad talking on the phone in the kitchen.

  “Hey, Jack,” he called, “get in here a minute.” He hadn’t said a word to me in four days, so I was a little surprised and headed right in. He was sitting at the counter, the phone in his hand. “How’d the game go?”

  “We got massacred,” I told him.

  “And you?”

  “I played okay.”

  “Sorry I wasn’t there to see it,” he said. “Work.”

  “I figured.”

  “There’s a man on the phone who wants to talk to you.” He held out the receiver.

  “It’s just a reporter,” I said, and suddenly there was plenty of anger in my voice. “I don’t talk to them, and just so you know, I never have. Tell him not to bother us anymore and hang up.”

  My father looked back at me, a little surprised. “It’s not a reporter. His name is Jan and I think you might want to talk to him.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Jan. What does he want?”

  Dad gave me a strange little smile and again offered me the phone. Given how cold things had been between us lately, I couldn’t figure out the reason for that smile, but it looked to me like my dad was proud of something. I took the receiver. “Hi, this is Jack Logan.”