“I play JV football. They gave it to all of us. But if we screw it up, we’re dead meat. Worse than you guys.”
Classes passed in a blur, all of us sitting at our desks like men awaiting the long march to the gallows, praying for a reprieve. At soccer practice, we played with a frantic energy that impressed our coaches, who didn’t realize we were scared half out of our wits. We trudged reluctantly up the Hill after practice, not wanting to turn our backs on the fading day. Dinner was miserable, and even though Trip still swore they couldn’t really hurt us because the teachers wouldn’t allow it, his was a lone voice. A trio of sixth formers walked past our table and slowed, grinning at us like cats surveying a rack of mice.
For the first six weeks of school, all third formers had to go to the large lecture hall in Stadler for the evening study period. We shuffled in, all of us carrying our rosters to hopefully memorize over the next two hours. Mr. Downing, an old bulldog of a Latin teacher who had taught at Blackburne for thirty years, sat behind a desk on a dais at the back of the room where he could oversee us. He barked at us to get seated, and we obeyed. When the bell rang for the start of study hall, I got out my English grammar book to complete an exercise on fragments and run-on sentences. I couldn’t look at the football roster. I was too nervous, and so I reasoned that homework would calm me down. After about half an hour, I did feel a bit calmer, and spent the rest of the first study period looking over the roster of fifty-odd names.
When the bell rang for break, everybody got up to stretch and go to the bathroom. I put my head down on my desk to take a brief nap, but startled cries brought me and everyone else out of the room and into the hallway. Posted on every door to every classroom was a photocopy of a stylized, roaring lion’s head drawn in black, red, and gold. They had not been on the doors when we had gone into Stadler. Even Trip Alexander was quiet now.
The second study period was essentially useless. No matter how hard I looked at the roster, names and jersey numbers slipped out of my mind like water through a clenched fist. I looked at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand slowly sweep its way around. How many times had I willed that clock to go faster! Now I wanted it to stop, or start winding backward, maybe all the way back to the day my parents had first uttered the word Blackburne so I could say no and end this nightmare.
With five minutes left in study hall, I heard Trip gasp. I looked over and saw, with a start, a face looking at us through the square window in the door. It was a monstrous face, red and yellow and black, the eyes leering, the mouth open in a fierce grin. The face vanished. From the low, astonished cries around me, I knew I hadn’t been alone in seeing it.
Behind us, in a low, gravelly voice, Mr. Downing said, “They’re gonna getcha.”
A whoop from the hall was answered by half a dozen other whoops, as if a troop of crazed Indian braves were waiting outside. I shot a look at Diamond, sitting two aisles over. He turned to look at me, the first acknowledgment he’d made all evening that I existed, and my bowels turned to ice water. Diamond looked scared.
Slowly, from outside the room, came a vibrating sound that grew in intensity. Whoever was in the hallway was stomping their feet, slowly at first and then faster and faster. A rebel yell broke out, followed by whoops and cries. Eyes widened and sought desperately, frantically, for escape. We all cowered in the lecture hall, waiting for the stroke of doom.
The bell rang. Immediately, the door to the room burst open, and three enormous sixth formers, their shirts off, their faces and chests slathered with red and gold war paint, bounded in. “Run, boys!” one of them hollered at us. He waved us on like a paratrooper waving new recruits through the open door of an airplane. “Go! Go!” We bleated like sheep and ran through the doorway, leaving our books and backpacks behind. Older boys lined the hallway, shouting at us and waving us to the exit doors at the far end. We burst out into the night between another double cordon of football players, some with flashlights, all of them waving us down the walkway to the fine arts building. They shouted and screamed at us, and we yelled back incoherently as we stumbled down the path and then up the stairs and into the lobby of the building. I barely registered seeing two teachers in the lobby, standing to the side as if viewing an art gallery. Then we thundered into the auditorium, where upperclassmen in white football jerseys guided us into rows of seats and yelled at us to remain standing. I recognized John Cole as one of them, gleefully haranguing a new boy.
Onstage, the varsity football team was stomping and clapping and hooting at us, the noise threatening to crescendo to an almost painful level. Spotlights from the ceiling washed over them, bathing them in white-hot light. Suddenly one of them shouted, “L!”
“L!” the team shouted back.
“I!”
“I!” they shouted.
“O!”
Enough of us had gathered our wits to shout “O!” along with the team.
“N!”
“N!” we screamed, shaking the rafters.
“S!”
“S!” I screamed, so loud I thought my vocal cords would bleed.
“Go-o-o Lions! Fight team fight!” the team finished in unison. Pandemonium—hollers, fists thrust to the ceiling, veins taut in foreheads and necks. Everywhere I looked, I saw a screaming, exultant football player. We tried to match them, but we were like Girl Scouts trying to drown out the audience at a metal concert. Never in my life had I been subject to such raw, impassioned noise, and it both terrified and thrilled me.
We were led through a few more cheers, which we dutifully screamed as loud as we could. It proved cathartic—I was able to shed some of my earlier fear by yelling my head off. But then I realized that the football players were ushering someone onto the stage, where a lone, empty chair awaited under a spotlight. They brought the boy to the chair and made him sit down. To my dismay, it was Diamond.
“All right!” one of the varsity players onstage said, this one with a shaved head and no neck to speak of. “We’re gonna see how well you boys know your varsity football players. Diamond! Who am I?”
Diamond, surrounded by a semicircle of varsity players, looked up at the boy addressing him and tried to smile, though it looked like a grimace. He licked his lips and cast a glance around. “Uh,” he seemed to say.
“What?” No Neck said, incredulous. “You don’t know?” He plucked his jersey front and shook it. “Number forty-eight! Come on, Diamond! Who am I?”
Someone next to me said, “Don’t worry, they won’t hurt him.”
I turned to see a boy about my height, with brown hair grown a little long in front. He gave me a slight, lopsided smile.
“What?” I asked.