I opened Sense and Sensibility to the part where Marianne, our heroine Elinor’s younger sister, is sick. It couldn’t get any better than this. Mr. Willoughby, distraught at the news of Marianne’s sudden illness, shows up at their house intoxicated, begging to see her. It was tense and dramatic and somehow, although two hundred years previous, still totally relevant. It was the drunken text message to an ex two hundred years before such a thing existed.
I thought of Mr. Willoughby as one of the most interesting characters in Jane’s books. First, you think he’s great—he comes out of nowhere and has this whirlwind romance with Marianne—but then he turns around and drops Marianne completely, and you feel like he’s this truly terrible guy. But then somehow, in that scene where he shows up at the house, desperate to see if she’s okay, you almost feel sorry for him. Like maybe you could sympathize with him in some way, and you think perhaps he’s not such a bad, villainous person—just a regular person who made stupid decisions. He could’ve had everything that he wanted, but he threw it all away because of the choices that he made. You can’t truly hate someone like that. You can pity him, sure, but you can’t hate him.
The scene with Mr. Willoughby was as captivating as ever, but I couldn’t help but lose focus. I glanced up from the page every so often and watched Foster and Ezra work. Foster missed the ball the first few times Ezra threw it to him, but he seemed to get the hang of it as they went on. Ezra gave advice at a volume too low to be heard from where I sat, but Foster’s voice rang out clear and strong, asking what he was doing wrong and how he should fix it. It was strangely endearing. Foster really seemed to want to learn.
They came over for a break after a while. Ezra downed a bottle of water, and Foster relayed in his typical rambling style everything they had covered thus far.
“… And Ezra said this is just the way he learned, like this is just the same stuff they did! And next we’re doing … what are we doing next, Ezra?”
“Tackling.”
Foster’s face fell. “But … I thought I wouldn’t get tackled.”
“Anyone can get tackled.”
Foster didn’t reply.
Ezra put down his water and edged a little closer to where we were sitting. He wouldn’t look at me. It seemed to be a standard Ezra move—denying the existence of anyone who wasn’t of importance to him.
“What are you scared of?” he said.
“It’ll hurt.”
“Yeah, maybe it’ll hurt. So what?”
Foster just blinked at him.
“You ever play any board games?”
Foster practically worshipped the Parker Brothers. “Yeah.”
“What’s your favorite?”
He screwed up his face in thought. “Monopoly.”
“Okay. Say Monopoly was a contact game, and every time you passed GO, you got hit upside the head. Would you still play?”
“Why would I get hit upside the head? That wouldn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause it has nothing to do with the game. It doesn’t accomplish anything. At least in football…” Foster stopped himself. Ezra nodded.
“You’re getting hit for a reason. If taking a tackle means your team gets a first down, or a touchdown, it’s not for nothing, right?”
“Yeah.”
Ezra looked somewhat satisfied, but I knew Foster. He still had that troubled look on his face. This wouldn’t be easy.
“But … I mean, just knowing that it has a purpose doesn’t mean it’ll hurt you any less.”
“Yeah, but won’t it feel better to know that your getting tackled helped the team accomplish something? Look. You can kick, and that’s great, but they need to know that they can put you in there for a field play and not have to worry about where you’re at and what you’re doing and whether you’ll get steamrolled or not.”
This was the most I had ever heard Ezra say. I realized I was staring at him when his eyes met mine for a split second. I turned back to my book.
“Maybe if I kicked, like, really good, they wouldn’t care,” Foster said.
Ezra sighed. “Let’s just quit for today, okay? Go grab the ball.”
Foster jogged over to where the football lay in the grass a little ways away.
And all of a sudden, Ezra charged. Before I could yell or call out or warn Foster, Ezra had thrown himself at Foster, and flattened him to the ground.