“Oh shit,” a Blackburne student said behind me. A lone voice in the Manassas stands screamed in anguish.
A pair of trainers with a stretcher hustled onto the field, followed by two coaches. The Manassas players, heads bowed, stood around their fallen comrade. Alabama, Michigan, and North Carolina had been courting the Duke. Now he wouldn’t play anywhere next year, if ever. I could imagine football scouts in the audience shutting their notebooks and looking for the exits. We stared at the field, stunned at witnessing a dream cut down before our eyes. The Blackburne players milled around uncomfortably. I saw Bull pull off his helmet and stare at the Duke, who was now lying very still as the stretcher was put down next to him. Bull was crying. Then he was among his teammates, grabbing them by their shoulder pads and elbows and hustling them to the side where they knelt in a ragged circle, Bull leading them in prayer. In silence, the crowd watched as an ambulance, lights revolving, backed onto the field. When the paramedics lifted the stretcher and aimed for the open doors of the ambulance, the crowd stirred as if waking and began clapping solemnly. Someone blew a vuvuzela and was almost immediately silenced. The Manassas players all knelt now, heads bowed as the ambulance slowly drove off, taking the Duke with it. The clapping tapered off and then died, the crowd murmuring ominously in its wake. Rising to their feet, the Blackburne and Manassas players were awkwardly slapping one another’s shoulders in an attempt at encouragement, while Coach Gristina conferred with his Manassas counterpart before both nodded their heads and trotted back to their sidelines. The Game would continue.
Trip let out a low whistle. “Poor kid,” he said bleakly. “What a goddamn shame.”
I pictured Terence Jarrar lying on the river rock, blood running into the water from his shattered head. The image was like being plunged into ice water, and I almost gasped at the force of the memory. Something close to rage was building in my chest. “He’s alive,” I said brusquely.
I could feel Trip tense next to me, uncertain. “Yeah, but his scholarship chances—”
“Fuck his scholarship chances!” I shouted. Students jerked their heads around toward me. Trip blinked in shock, too startled to even step back. “He broke his leg—it’s not like his life’s over. He didn’t die or—”
Trip’s mouth dropped open. The student to my left shrank away from me as if I had sprouted bat wings and a pair of horns. I closed my eyes to shut them all out. Then I pushed past Trip and walked up the concrete steps of the aisle to an exit tunnel. Behind me, the referees blew their whistles to signal the start of play again, although to my ears it sounded as if the whistles were directed at me, calling foul.
I MADE MY WAY outside of the stadium and looked around for the red Blackburne alumni tent I knew would be somewhere nearby, thinking mean-spiritedly that Blackburne would never miss an opportunity to suck up to its alumni. I found the tent sitting off to the side on a grassy lawn between the parking lot and a brick Manassas classroom building. Few people were under the tent at that point—most were still in the stadium, commiserating over the Duke’s broken leg or impatiently waiting for the game to start again. Platters of cold cuts and bread and fruit-and-cheese trays lay waiting to be consumed, while a scattering of small circular tables and folding chairs gave the sense of an abandoned wedding reception.
I found the cash bar and paid for two whiskey sours, drinking the first in one long gulp and then wandering off with the second. My plan was to remain in the alumni tent for the rest of the game and get drunk, and then take a cab to some dump of a motel and sleep it off. Fuck this school, I thought, taking a sip of my drink. Fuck football, fuck the Game, fuck Ren Middleton. And fuck Fritz, too. I swallowed the rest of my drink to drown the protest my conscience made at that last thought.
This was what being with Michele had been like near the end, a long, deliberate war against my conscience, with my sobriety as occasional collateral damage. Early on I had stopped trying to keep up with Michele’s cocaine use and just drank when we went out. Regardless, at least once every couple of weeks I had woken up with my mouth tasting like the bottom drawer in my fridge and my head feeling as if it had been used as an anvil. Finally, after one all-night party, Michele collapsed on a fashion runway, her heart misfiring from arrhythmia, while I was throwing up in a nearby toilet. Her agency sent her to the hospital and then to rehab. Our relationship ended when she finished her thirty-day program and told me I had to move out of the apartment. Since then, I had avoided getting truly drunk. Right now, I wanted to do nothing else.
I had just bought my third whiskey sour, and the bartender was eyeing me dubiously, when someone called my name. I turned around to see Abby Davenport, standing in dark pants and a green sweater set and looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Hello,” I said, trying to cover my surprise. “What are you doing here?”
She brushed a strand of hair back over an ear. “I took the weekend off, came back home. My uncle’s visiting.” She glanced at the whiskey sour in my hand. “Celebrating early?”
“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” I said. “Can I get you a drink?”
She held up a Diet Coke can.
“Ah,” I said, as if she had satisfactorily answered a question, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I took a sip of my whiskey sour. The sour mix coated my tongue unpleasantly. “So Uncle Wat’s come to town?” I said.
She shrugged. “He lives in Georgetown now. But he’s coming over to dinner.” Her expression suggested that this required her attendance at the family manor.
Seeing her now in the sunshine instead of in the dim light of a school dance, I was surprised to realize that she had aged. Not any more than I had, and probably less, but there were worry lines around her mouth and the first faint indication of crow’s-feet by her blue eyes. For some reason, this softened me a bit.
Unbidden, Lester Briggs’s words rose to mind. If you want to find your friend, I suggest you start looking at his family. I took another drink as if swallowing the thought.
Abby said, “I also thought you might be here.” She said it almost as a challenge, as though defying me to take it personally.
I stared at her. “You wanted to find me?” I said.
She nodded. “I heard . . . about the boy last week. At Blackburne. I wanted to see if you were okay.”
We stood looking at each other. Abby was one of the only people who might appreciate how Terence’s death had upset me, how it had shaken the wall I’d constructed around the memories of Fritz’s disappearance. No, I wanted to say. I’m not okay.
“I’m fine,” I said. “But thanks. Thank you for asking.” I took another drink. “So, teaching,” I said, gesturing to include both of us. “Who knew?”
Abby smiled. A tired smile, granted, but a smile nonetheless. “Yeah,” she said. “All that studying in France finally paid off.”