The Wave

Still sitting on the gym floor, Brian gazed up at the junior. "Man, you are the most conceited bag of no talent I've ever seen," he said.

"Oh yeah, look who's talking," Deutsch snarled back.

The next thing David knew, Brian had jumped to his feet and had his fists up. David lunged between the two quarterbacks.

"That's just what I was talking about!" he yelled as he pushed them apart. "We're supposed to be a team. We're supposed to support each other. The reason we've been so bad is because all we've been doing is fighting with each other."

More football players were in the gym now. "What's he talking about?" one of them asked.

David turned.Tm talking about unity. I'm talking about discipline. We have to start acting like a team. Like we have a common goal. Your job on this team isn't to steal another guy's position. Your job is to help this team win."

"I could help this team win," Deutsch said. "All Coach Schiller's got to do is make me the first-string quarterback."

"No, man!" David yelled at him. "A bunch of self-serving individuals don't make a team.You know why we've done so bad this year? Because we're twenty-five one-man teams all wearing the same Gordon High uniforms. You want to be first-string quarterback on a team that doesn't win? Or do you want to be second-string on a team that does win?"

Deutsch shrugged.

"I'm tired of losing," said another player.

"Yeah," said someone else. "It's a drag.This school doesn't even take us seriously any more."

"I'd give up my position and be a waterboy if it meant winning a game," said a third.

"Well, we could win," said David. "I'm not saying we'll be able to go out and destroy Clarkstown on Saturday, but if we start trying to be a team, I bet we could win a few games this year."

Most of the members of the football team were there by this time, and as David looked around at their faces he could see that they were interested.

"Okay," said one. "What do we do?"

David hesitated for a moment. What they could do was The Wave. But who was he to tell them? He'd only learned of it the day before himself. Suddenly he felt someone nudging him.

Tell them," Eric whispered. "Tell "em about The Wave."

What the hell, David thought. "Okay, all I know is you gotta start by learning the mottoes. And this is the salute..."

7

That evening Laurie Saunders told her parents about her last two days of history class. The Saunders family was sitting at the dining-room table finishing dinner. Through most of the meal, Laurie's father had given them a stroke- by-stroke description of the 78 he'd shot in golf that afternoon. Mr Saunders ran a division of a large semi­conductor company. Laurie's mother said that she didn't mind his passion for golf because on the course he managed to get out all the pressures and frustrations of his job. She said she couldn't explain how he did it, but as long as he came home in a good mood, she wasn't going to argue.

Neither was Laurie, although listening to her father talk about his golf game sometimes bored her to death. It was better that he was easy-going, rather than a worry- wart like her mother, who was probably the brightest and most perceptive woman Laurie had ever encountered. She practically ran the county's League of Women Voters by herself and was so politically astute that aspiring politicians seeking local offices were always asking her to advise them.

For Laurie, her mother was lots of fun when things were going well. She was full of ideas, and you could talk to her for hours. But other times, when Laurie was upset about something or was having a problem, her mother was murder — there was no way to hide anything from her. And once Laurie had admitted what the difficulty was, she wouldn't leave her alone.

When Laurie had started telling them about The Wave at dinner, it was mostly because she couldn't stand listening to her father talk about golf for another minute. She could tell her mother was bored too. For the last quarter of an hour Mrs Saunders had been scratching a wax stain out of the tablecloth with her fingernail.

"It was incredible," Laurie was saying about the class. "Everyone was saluting and repeating the motto. You couldn't help but get caught up in it. You know, really wanting to make it work. Feeling all that energy building around you."

Mrs Saunders stopped scratching the tablecloth and looked at her daughter. "I don't think I like it, Laurie. It sounds too militaristic to me."

"Oh, Mom," Laurie said, "you always take things the wrong way. It's nothing like that. Honest, you'd just have to be there feeling the positive energy in the class to really get what's going on."

Mr Saunders agreed. "To tell you the truth, I'm for whatever will make these kids pay attention to anything these days."

"And that's what it's really doing, Mom," Laurie said. "Even the bad kids are into it. You know Robert Billings, the class creep? Even he's part of a group. No one's picked on him for two whole days. Tell me that isn't positive."