Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Before every practice we're supposed to come up with what Big Coach calls a Fact from History or Science. His father was a superintendent of schools and he's big on people knowing something. Mine on Thursday practice the week before Childress week is that according to surveys, ten percent more young people in America this year have felt like they were going to go nuts than ten years ago.

“Where'd you get this?” Big Coach wants to know, fingering my scrap of paper.

I show him: Dr. Joseph Mercola, author of Total Health Program.

Port Neches-Groves's Web site's mailbag link is going all spastic all week because the entire starting backfield — Corey and Cody Clark, the quarterback, and Michael Thibodeaux, the fullback— are all hurt and Clark and Thibodeaux out at least a week and smart money says that that's the end of the line with powerhouse Port Arthur coming up.

“What's the matter with you?” my brother asks when he finds me in his room, squatting on the floor. I'm naked. It's three in the morning.

I couldn't sleep, I tell him.

“What, you think you're gonna be more fucked-up than me, too?” he goes. He says it like if he could kill me, he would.

I just squat there, shocked by his voice.

“You wanta feel sorry for somebody? Feel sorry for me,” he says. When I look at him his eyes are all teared up.

“What's wrong?” my mom wants to know when she comes downstairs to make coffee. We're both in the kitchen. I put on some sweatpants and a shirt when I got too cold. The sun's up and the dog's out.

She sees me shivering and turns up the heat. “Nobody answers anymore?” she wants to know. “Maybe I should shout all the time?” she asks, when nobody says anything.

She leaves the room and comes back with a desk drawer she upends over my plate. Pencil stubs, old photographs, rubber bands, tacks. “Your father's stuff,” she tells me, exasperated. “Knock yourself out.”

Nobody in the photos is him. There's a bill from 1987 for some dry cleaning.

I even go to the school nurse. “I feel like—” I tell her when it's my turn. That's as far as I get. It's not like if I found him anything would be any better.

“Tryin' to get outta practice?” Wainwright asks me later in the hall. He has eyes in the back of his head. He dips a shoulder towards me and I flinch.

I come free on a blitz in practice that afternoon and I'm about to decapitate our starting QB when our fullback puts his helmet into my sternum. “Who blacks out on a chest hit?” Wainwright asks when I come to. I'm somewhere where everything's white. He says I'm black and blue from my throat to my stomach. He pulls back the sheet and hospital gown and shows me with a hand mirror.

“Thank God,” my mom says to herself when she sees me. She had to come from work. My brother's not with her. It's killing her, I can tell.

Can I play with a bruised sternum? The doctor's on the fence about it. He says we can wait and see. Big Coach says it's my call. I rest all weekend and I'm held out of practice Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday I can go and watch, anyway. Already it's like I'm not even on the team. For an hour nobody's on the same page and Coach stands there doing a slow burn until finally he tells the defense that since they're not thinking maybe it's because they're not getting enough blood to their heads. He makes them all do handstands until he tells them to stop. Wainwright's is like a statue. He points his toes.

This goes on for five minutes, kids' feet and legs teetering. People pull over on River Road to watch. Various kids, trying to hold their handstands, laugh. When they do, Coach crosses to where they are and pushes them over with his foot.

When practice breaks up I'm still over by the fence. Wain-wright heads in with two of the other linebackers. I hang there on the chain link like the crowd on Media Day.

On Thursday somebody tapes photos in the urinals of Chil-dress's stars on offense and defense.

Friday morning I wake up crying. This is it, I tell myself, but that's not why I'm crying. My mother makes coffee and nobody says anything before I go to school. My brother looks like if the whole house blew up, that'd be okay too. My hand is jerking so much that I try only once to drink my coffee and then dump the mug in the sink.

The school hallways are all hung with blue and white banners. The tape's come off the cinderblock on one and the first letter's drooped over on itself, so instead of BEAT CHILDRESS the thing reads EAT CHILDRESS. A custodian passes me with a ladder.

There's a pep rally we're all supposed to go to but I skip it and hide out in the library. I can hear the marching band's percussion section whaling away.

“Good luck tonight,” one of the librarians says. She doesn't seem surprised I'm not at the rally.

I stick myself off in the stacks, looking back and forth through the same book. Who cries on the morning of a big game? I hold my hands in my lap as best I can.