Usually after a few minutes I would sink back into a nice doze, but this morning my eyes refused to stay shut. My head couldn’t find a comfortable spot on the pillow. The covers were too warm.
I flung them back and rolled over. A soft breeze blew through my window, pressing against the shade. Outside I could hear the scuff of sneakers on pavement and a faint intake of breath as a jogger passed by the house. A car door slammed somewhere not too far off. The blender buzzed.
Foster was making a smoothie.
I groaned. It was official: I was awake.
I never saw Foster in pajamas. He was always the last in bed and the first one up in the morning, looking just the same as he had the night before. I knew he must’ve had more clothes from home than it appeared, but the problem was that they all looked the same. All the crisp new tees, the button-down shirts, the perfectly whiskered jeans that my mom had bought him sat unworn in his dresser drawers upstairs. I felt bad that he refused to let go of his shit from home, but worse for my mom, who—although she wouldn’t admit it—scrutinized clothes that other kids were wearing on TV and in the magazines so that Foster would have exactly the right stuff. When he refused to wear it, she said she’d been silly—of course he’d want to pick his own look. But another shopping trip that ended empty-handed said it all: Foster had a look, and it was dingy.
“You want a smoothie?” Foster said when I stumbled into the kitchen.
“It’s really early to be using the blender, Foster.”
“You know, it’s only three thirty on the West Coast.”
“Did you wake up at three thirty when you lived on the West Coast?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Doesn’t waking up early make the day seem longer?”
To me, the day was twenty-four hours long, and no amount of getting up early would change that.
“You know what today is?” Foster asked when I didn’t speak.
“Friday?”
“Uh-huh. And guess what happens on Fridays?”
The Future Science Revolutionaries of America focused their combined mental energies on moving the principal’s car one inch to the left? Wait, no—that was yesterday.
“I don’t know.”
Foster’s eyes widened. “You don’t know?”
“What happens on Fridays, Foster?” I was getting impatient. Then it dawned on me. But there was no way on earth something so normal could leave Foster’s lips. He couldn’t mean—
“Football!”
I stared. It had only been three months. There was still so much I didn’t know about him. “You like football?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been to a game in real life.”
That was more like it.
“Aunt Kathy said you’d take me.”
My mother had a way of volunteering me for Foster-related activities without my knowing. The look on Foster’s face said mine gave that away.
“Will you take me?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, because what else was there to say? Things were different now.
Football wasn’t as grand in Temple Sterling as in some of those places you hear about in Texas and even in other parts of Florida—twenty thousand–seat stadiums and a full-scale town shutdown on game nights. But still, it was undeniably important. The football followers were devoted: parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins of boys on the team. Kids like me, unrelated but still wanting to be a part of something. Men, from the guys down at the bank to seventy-year-old Fred of Fred’s Service Station, who played on past TS teams, who understood the feel of the stadium on a Friday night, and who migrated there Friday nights since to try to claim a little piece of it back. Football was something everyone had in common—like a mutual religion. We all believed in touchdowns and field goals. We were all baptized in the floodlights.
I wove through the crowd that night, Foster in tow. He grabbed the back of my shirt as we worked our way up to an emptier stretch in the far bank of bleachers, in front of the end zone.