“It is.” We’ve both stopped walking and she’s dropped my arm to square off with me in this dark and dreary corridor.
“Football’s your dream, and I get that. And I know your coach mentioning going pro the other week has you excited, but you also have to be realistic. It’s just not smart.”
Her words stir up long-buried memories, and in an instant all the things in her that remind me of Lina come to the surface, similarities that I haven’t thought about in a long time. But I’ve had this fight before. Maybe not about a concussion, but that dig about being realistic is always the same. People think it’s the nice way to help you manage your hopes . . . that they’re doing you a favor by being honest. But that’s fucking ridiculous. It assumes that you’re stupid or naive, that you don’t have reality beating down the door to your thoughts day in and day out. It takes fucking work to dream, and I don’t need anyone else shoving the unlikelihood of success in my face, because I do that to myself enough already.
I need someone to believe with me. To believe for me when I can’t believe myself.
“You have to take care of yourself, Mateo, if you want to—”
“You know what?” I say. “Turns out that I am pretty fucking tired.” I gesture to the tunnel walls. “I don’t know why I gave a shit about this anyway.”
I turn back toward the entrance, and I don’t pause to take hold of her hand or let her grab my arm. I need the space.
“Mateo. You can’t just keep deflecting like this. It’s not enough just to rest. You need to tell someone. You need to take precautions against—”
And then I just snap. I whirl around and pin her with the beam of the flashlight. “You know fuck all about what I need, Nell. Jesus, you’ve never even been to a game. You don’t know anything about football, and you don’t know anything about me.”
For a moment she looks small. Too damn small. The black of the tunnel looms around her, threatening to swallow her despite my measly light. Her arms are wrapped around her middle, and in that big sweatshirt she looks like she needs protecting.
From me.
And just when I’m about to go to her, to say something, to take back my harsh words . . . anything . . . she lifts her chin in that familiar proud way of hers.
“I’ve known you from the moment we met, Mateo Torres.”
How could I have forgotten? “A puppet? That’s what you called me, right? Letting other people pull my strings. Sorry, sweetheart, but I pull my own strings.”
“Maybe you do. But you’re still performing for other people. You play class clown for others, thinking it makes them like you or makes you fun. But history has a word for that . . . you’re playing the fool.”
That hits me harder than any tackle, and for all her words about it just taking one hit to knock me out, it’s ironic that she would be the one to deliver the worst blow.
“Fuck this. I don’t need any of this.”
I take off down the tunnel, heading back for the small hole of light I can see in the distance. My feet splash through puddles, and the noise from my movements amplifies in the small space, becomes harsher and distorted as it echoes. Then I hear Nell hurrying along behind me. She calls out, “I’m not saying you are a fool. Mateo, would you stop? Listen to me for a second. You’re smart and kind and wonderful, and I—I . . .” She sucks in a breath, probably from trying to keep pace with me, but I don’t stop. “I’m just saying you don’t need to play that part for other people. Your friends care about you. I care about you. You don’t need to pretend for us.”
I jerk around, and she barely skids to a stop before slamming into me. And my voice is too loud, and she’s too close, everything is too close as I yell, “It’s for me, damn it. It’s not for you. It’s not for my friends. Did you ever think of that while you were dissecting me? My life? The way I am . . . I do that for me.”
My heart thuds in my ears so loud I’m surprised it doesn’t echo in the tunnel, too. Nell swallows, and I can see those big eyes working, studying me, moving around the pieces of me in her head to fit this new development.
“Why?”
One damn word. Just one damn word, and it’s the absolute last thing I want her to say because I know how my answer will sound. Pathetic boy with a broken heart pretending so it doesn’t hurt. It’s so goddamn ridiculous.
“Because it helps. Helped.”
She lifts a hand like she wants to touch me, but then seems to second-guess herself, and it stays hanging in the air between us as she asks, “With what?”
Then I tell her everything about Lina. With my eyes on the ceiling and the walls so that I don’t have to look at her, I tell her how in love I was.
“She was this brilliant, confident girl. The kind of girl that when you look at her, you know she can do anything, be anything. She had the whole fucking world in the palm of her hand, and she had me there, too. From the moment I met her. But you can’t . . . you can’t love someone like that without feeling like you have something to prove. To her. To the world. I needed everyone to know that we belonged together. That even if I wasn’t some genius, even if I had zero hope of going to the Ivy League schools that were practically begging for her attention, I was important. I was going places. So when it looked like football could do that for me, I threw everything into it. I had to play college ball. I had to go pro. There was no other option. She and football were linked in my head, the two great loves of my life, and I would have done anything, given whatever it took, to keep them both.”
I break off, and I realize that my breathing is ragged, that my heart is pounding hard enough to put a dent in my ribs.
“What happened?” she asks.
And finally, I look at her. Only she’s not looking at me; she has her arms wrapped around herself and her gaze on the circle of light my flashlight makes on the ground.
“I got too caught up in it all. I was so focused on proving myself that I didn’t realize I was losing everything in my attempt to gain it. Lina and I started fighting. Every time I brought up football, she would tell me to be realistic, that I needed to have a backup plan in case it didn’t work out. But all I could hear was that she didn’t trust me to be good enough.”
“For football? Or her?” Nell’s voice is small as she asks.
I sigh and drag my hand over my face. “Both. It was always both.”
“Senior year, I narrowed it down to two schools. Rusk, which had the bigger program and was closer to home, and a smaller Division Two school that was not too far from the university that Lina had chosen. I was torn. Rusk was the better place to prove myself, but it was too far away from her. The Division Two school had a good football program, but the chance of getting noticed in Division Two was a lot smaller. I could have possibly swung a transfer to a bigger university eventually, but it was a risk. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. She broke up with me the night before I was going to commit to the Division Two school. She said that we wanted different things out of life. Her exact words were something about her moving on from high school to bigger things. But I was so stuck on football that I didn’t know when it was time to let go. She didn’t want to hang around while I relived my glory days for as long as I could.”
“That’s awful.”
It was awful. Most of the time our fears come from within us, but she planted the seed that day. And every time I’m feeling low, I water it with thoughts about whether or not the best parts of my life are behind me.
“To be fair,” I say, “I wasn’t exactly the best boyfriend there at the end. I let the recruiting game go to my head. I was so wrapped up in being the best athlete that I could be for her that I didn’t realize I was ignoring her in the process. I tried to fix it. God knows, I tried. I would have done anything, maybe even given up football, if she had shown even the slightest interest in giving me a second chance. But she didn’t. So I committed to Rusk, and tried to put it all behind me. And when I got here, I thought I was starting over. I hid my broken heart behind parties an
d jokes in the beginning because I wanted to make a good impression. No one likes that mopey guy who misses high school during freshman orientation. After a while it became second nature. And some days, it was almost like I’d never known Lina at all. In fact, I’d almost forgotten her completely.”
“Until you met me.”
“I—”
I don’t know what to say. Is it better to be honest? To lie? Either way makes me an asshole.
“The day we met, after I got hit with the Frisbee . . . you said I reminded you of someone. It was her? Wasn’t it?”
I don’t answer because words will only make this worse. And I wish my earlier joke about that disaster movie would come true, that some pipe would burst or there would be some freak flood, and a wall of water would come and just drown this all out.
“I think I’d like to leave now.”
She takes the flashlight out of my hand and walks past me, and for a few long moments I stay where I am. I let the light fade away. Her footsteps, too. And as silence moves in around me, I realize that what just happened was nothing like the fights I had with Lina. Our fights had been loud and aggressive, and they’d left me burning up. And when things with Lina had ended, I felt like I’d been at the center of some explosion, and all the pieces of me were scattered everywhere, and that everyone had to see it, see how broken I was. I was alive, but in pieces.
Fighting with Nell is like . . . it’s like drowning. And each word that pushed us further apart, each step she took, was another gulp of water into my lungs. And just like someone stuck underwater . . . I knew I should stop. I knew that each gulp was killing me, but I just couldn’t.
And now that she’s gone, I’m not in pieces. There was no explosion. No battered and bleeding pieces of me to hold together. No, I would almost prefer that there were.
Because she’s taken the last of the air with her, and inside now I’m as still as the dark tunnel around me, and just as lifeless and empty.
Chapter 25
Nell’s To-Do List
• Stop making to-do lists. They suck. A lot.
Between the time that Torres left my bed the morning after his concussion and his return later that evening . . . before everything fell apart, I’d added something to my list.
And I know I can cross it off because even though I hate him, even though the thought of him brings every doubt and insecurity roaring to life in my head . . . that damn fist around my heart still squeezes.
So I guess I can finally admit it. Late, though it is.
23. Fall in love.
Been there, done that, wish I had never written a single word of this stupid list. But I’m committed to it now, so I add yet another item.
24. Get my heart broken.
Then I cross them both off at the same time. Whoo-hoo life experience. Sure glad I have that now.
I knew this whole experiment would all go bad. There’s no way it couldn’t, not with me at the helm. God, I should have realized this sooner. I should have known that he and I wouldn’t fit together under normal circumstances. The only reason he ever looked twice at me was because of her.
There are still items on my list that I haven’t completed, but I feel like I’ve done my part. I’ve stepped outside of my comfort zone. I’ve taken risks. And I’ve paid for it.
And I was right all along.
I’m better off committed to my work. And now I’m going to graduate early. I’ve narrowed down my grad school choices to two programs, and I’ll be filling out those applications . . . soon. Anytime now. I’m going to do the things I always planned to do, and I’m never going to look back.
That’s the first lie I tell myself.
I’m no longer worried about my future. I know everything is going to work out.
That’s the second.
The next day, I lie when I tell Dylan (and myself) that I changed my mind. That Torres and I, while attracted to each other, just aren’t compatible.
I lie when she asks if I want to eat ice cream and watch chick flicks, and say instead that I need to work on grad school applications. Then, when she’s gone, I break out my sweatpants and the ice cream and settle down on the couch to watch a special on the Discovery Channel about lions hunting their prey. (Okay . . . so I wasn’t lying about the chick flicks, but all the rest of it . . . )
It’s a lie each time I go to bed and promise I won’t think of him.
It’s a lie each time I wake up and convince myself that he was absolutely not the first thing on my mind.
It’s a lie that I’m not disintegrating with worry the night before the football game thinking about all the things that could go wrong, the ways he could be hit, how it could affect him.
I don’t care.
I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.
(More lies.)
So, even though I hate my list . . . even though I said I was through . . . when Saturday comes, I make plans to check another item off my list.
10. Go to a football game.
After this . . . I’ll be done.
TAILGATING.
Dallas tells me that it gets its name from everyone camping out at their trucks, setting up food and drinks on their tailgates to party before a football game. Personally, I think it’s absurd to make the name of an inanimate object into a verb, but no one asked me. I also think it’s absurd that in a sport called football, the majority of the game has very little interaction between balls and feet. But again . . . not my choice.
Dylan, Matt, Dallas, Stella, and I carpooled together, and I follow them to a section of the parking lot where the student union is throwing a huge tailgate party. From the few things I’ve picked up over the years, I had expected the game not to be very female-friendly. I mean, it’s sports, for one thing. But so many commercials and photos I’d seen played up the cheerleaders in skimpy clothing, and I figured that kind of stuff would run rampant. Ironically, there are a lot more half-naked guys than there are girls.
There’s one large group of shirtless guys whose chests are painted a dark red to match the school’s colors. Each guy has a single letter on his chest in white, and while I’m sure this was not their intention, the four closest to me spell out the word “suck.”
I get a hot dog, but decline alcohol, and the five of us sit down on those concrete slabs that are placed in front of parking spots. As I eat, I survey the group of shirtless guys again, taking in all the letters, and working anagrams in my head trying to figure out what they might say. They’ve shifted again and instead of “suck,” there’s now a group sporting the word “scat.” Again, I’m doubting (and also weirdly hoping) this was their intention. There are somewhere between fifteen and twenty guys, and they keep moving around, which is putting a serious damper on my anagramming.
“What are you staring so hard at?” Stella asks beside me.
Everyone else has kept up a steady stream of chatter, but the two of us have been quiet. I heard Dallas mention something about this being the first game Stella has attended in a while. According to Stella, it’s only been like a month and a half, which doesn’t sound like that big of a deal to me, but everyone else seems to think it’s significant.
“I’m brainstorming possible combinations of the letters on those shirtless guys that are really extraordinarily drunk considering how early in the day it is.”
She smiles. “What do you have so far?”
“Well, this group here and that one over there could combine to spell ‘scrotum.’ But I feel confident that’s not their intended message.”
Stella chokes on her soda. “Oh God, I hope it is.”
I think about how much of a kick Torres would get out of this, and my heart rattles.
“More realistically, though, they’re spelling something to do with the school. Rusk. Those letters match up. There’s not a Y that I can see, so I don’t think it says ‘university.’ There’s an F and two Os, so I’m betting ‘football’ is part of it. But that still leaves some letters unaccounted
for.”
“Wildcat,” Stella provides. “The team mascot, I think the rest spells ‘wildcat.’ ”
I scan the letters again, and she’s right. I nod. “Mystery solved.”
Then I go back to chewing my hot dog. And chewing and chewing because I don’t know what to say. I should be working on that whole friendship thing. That’s the one thing that might be salvageable from this whole list disaster. Everything else might have backfired, but I know now that I can’t let myself go back to being lonely. I can’t work that way, and it was foolish to think that I could.
“I’m nervous,” I tell Stella. “About seeing this game.”
“Don’t be. Football isn’t as complicated as it seems. You’ll get it in no time.”
I shake my head. “It’s not that. I was sort of, briefly, dating Torres.”
She coughs and thumps her hand against her chest a few times as if she’s choking. “You were? Seriously? How did I miss that?”
I shrug.
“Damn,” she continues. “I’m off my game. Usually, I’m the first person to know that kind of stuff.”
“Well, there’s not much to know anymore. We got in a big fight, and it’s over. Really, it was doomed before it ever started because . . . well, it just was.”
Because me and emotions don’t mix.
Because I was just a stand-in.
Because we’re too different. Way, way, too different.
She says, “I know a thing or two about being doomed before it starts.”
“It’s awful, isn’t it?”
She glances over her shoulder, almost like she’s checking to make sure her friends are still busy in conversation. Satisfied, she turns back to me and says, “It’s like . . . you have plans, ideas for how something is going to unfold. And you’re patient, you don’t try to rush things because you know they’ll happen when they’re supposed to happen. But then what happens is something altogether different. And it doesn’t just affect your old plans, it obliterates them. It makes the choice for you. And you’re left feeling stupid that you ever even considered those old options, that you ever got your hopes up.”