Game changer, p.8
Game Changer, page 8
“But for a second you looked like you weren’t sure . . .”
Katie met my gaze, maybe a little bit bothered that I could read her so easily. “It was nothing,” she said. “Just déjà vu or something.”
“Or something,” I repeated. “‘Déjà vu’ translates to mean ‘already seen,’ right? It’s Latin.”
“French,” she corrected. “But yeah.”
“And you have already seen this. Because this is—”
“A mascot!” she blurted. “It’s the mascot of one of the other schools we play, right? And it’s not a wizard, it’s a . . . it’s a . . .”
I waited for it. And she said—
“It’s a . . . tree?”
“It’s a wave,” I finally told her. “It’s blue! It’s a wave.”
And she grinned. “Are you sure it’s not red?”
I had to give her a point for that. “Well, then it would be the Crimson Tide, and not the Tibbetsville Tsunamis.” Although the Crimson Tide’s mascot is an elephant. In what universe does that make sense?
“Tibbetsville?” she said.
I nodded and let her piece it together, hoping that this time she’d do better than “tree.”
“Our mascot?”
I nodded again. “Last week.”
She looked at the image, then to me, then to the image again. “Normally I would tell you that you’ve taken one too many hits, but every time I look back at it, for like a tenth of a second, I remember something about it.”
She grabbed it away from me. “Like this—” And she pointed to the hands I drew on the wave. Don’t ask me why a tsunami has hands, but it does. “You drew four fingers, but it only has three. Isn’t that right?”
And yes, she was right.
“Can I keep this?”
“Sure.”
She folded it and stuck it in her locker, and that’s when Layton appeared like a stealth bomber, putting his five-fingered hand around her waist. “What’s going on here?” he asked jovially. “Something I should be worried about?”
Katie didn’t miss a beat. “Ash was just asking if I knew where you were.”
He pulled her closer in a bone-crush of affection. “I’m right here.”
“So . . . I was wondering if I could borrow your notes for science,” I told him, pulling the fiction out of thin air just as deftly as Katie had. “My notebook fell in our Jacuzzi.”
“I thought your Toughbook was waterproof,” he said. “You’re always bragging about it.”
“Oh, right. No, I meant the paper kind.”
He scoffed at the idea of me using a paper notebook. In my old life I didn’t have any waterproof electronics. Just an old iPhone with a perpetually cracked screen, and a “fair condition” eBay Mac with memory issues.
“Why don’t you ask that brainy kid, Peter, that you hang out with?”
“It’s Paul,” I told him.
“Yeah, ask him—his notes’ll be way better than mine.”
Then he sauntered off to class with Katie in his proprietary grip. Katie didn’t turn back to look at me or say goodbye. Maybe because she knew Layton would notice or maybe because the near headlock he had her in restricted her motion.
Mission two of that morning: identify the twin skaters. I started by charming the school secretary before class with small talk and mild flattery, noticing how cool it was that her earrings matched her nail polish. Then, before it got weird, I asked her the big question.
“Do you think maybe you could help me? I’m doing a genetics report and I need to interview all the identical twins at our school.”
There were only two sets of twins that I knew: the Tomassini sisters, who had diverged to opposite poles. Bronwyn had buzz-cut hair, tattoos, and so many piercings it looked like she’d been attacked by a BeDazzler. Her sister, Beth, had a perpetual perm, liked unicorns, and wore a charm bracelet that looked like the custodian’s keychain. Then there were the Hudson brothers, who looked exactly alike, except that Ethan was a nice guy and Mark was a dickwad. You could only tell them apart when they opened their mouths: if every third word was an f-bomb, then you knew it was Mark.
The secretary knew without even looking at her computer that those were the only identical twins at our school.
“How about graduates?” I asked. “Or ones who dropped out?”
“Honey,” she said, “they don’t pay me enough to dig that deep, and even if they did, I don’t have access to the archives.”
Fail. I expected as much.
I hadn’t seen much of Leo or Angela since Sunday night. I didn’t avoid them intentionally, but it wasn’t entirely unintentional either. I saw Leo at practice, and I had a few classes with him, but neither of us engaged. There was a distance that hadn’t been there before. Like we were in the same classroom, but at completely different schools.
On Thursday, Angela came over to sit with me during lunch. Until then, I had chosen to sit alone—something I never did, but things change.
“My brother wants me to tell you that your penance is served, and you’re out of the doghouse,” Angela said.
“How about you?” I asked.
“You were never in the doghouse with me,” she said, then thought about it and said, “Can I rephrase that?”
I gave her an obligatory laugh that felt more awkward than helpful.
“Anyway,” said Angela, “that’s not what I really came over to talk about. I hear you’ve been talking to Katie.”
I sighed. Why is it that everyone always knows everyone else’s business in this town? “Yeah, I’m worried about her,” I told Angela.
“So am I. She says everything’s fine, but I have a hard time believing it. Layton is . . . controlling.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it.”
“What has Katie told you?”
I shook my head. “Nothing but to mind my own business.”
Angela dropped her shoulders, disappointed. “She’s in love with him, and she’s scared of him. That’s a bad combination.”
“I don’t think he’s hurting her. Physically, I mean.”
“Not yet, anyway. But there are other ways to bruise a person, you know?”
And that made me think about the way Layton looked at Katie. It was the way he might look at a treasured painting that he felt was just a little crooked on the wall, so he was constantly, endlessly adjusting it.
“If you ask me, she’d be better off with anyone else,” I told Angela. “Hell, she’d even be better off with Norris.”
Angela laughed at that. Katie with Norris would be a local production of Beauty and the Beast. Except at the end, the beast just transforms into a turd.
Angela tapped her fingertips against her lips—as if what she was thinking had just come to mind—which clearly it hadn’t. “If anybody would be better . . . how about you?” she suggested.
The last thing I needed at the moment was Angela playing matchmaker. “That,” I said, “would not help the situation.”
“Well at the very least, you should have a talk with Layton.”
“And say what?” I glanced over to the table where Katie sat with Layton and a few of their friends, who were couples. They seemed happy enough. “Seemed” was the operative word here. Layton himself was never actually happy. In his world, there was always something to find fault with.
“We’ll watch,” I suggested. “We’ll keep an eye on the situation.”
But Angela wasn’t too happy with that approach. “Why is it that guys just want to sit around and watch until something awful happens?”
She stormed off before I could have any sort of comeback. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t like that. That sometimes you have to see where things are going in order to plan an effective strategy. That making vague accusations against our star quarterback could backfire—because there were way too many people who believed he could do no wrong. It would be different if Katie broke up with him. I would totally stand behind her—even in front of her—to protect her. But that wasn’t the train she was currently on. She, like the rest of our school, was on the Layton Vandenboom Express, and it wasn’t slowing down enough for her to get off.
Leo and I spoke after practice that night, for the first time since the revelation about me and his sister. Technically, it was only a revelation for me, because Leo already knew. But now I knew he knew, which was awkward. I longed for the time when nobody knew anything.
We talked sports first to break the ice. Leo reminded me that tomorrow’s game was an away game, and how the other team’s field had lousy turf. Slippery and hard on the bones.
“You know we’re okay, right?” he finally said.
“You’re sure?”
That annoyed him. “What is it with you, that you need constant reassurance now?”
“Because if it was the other way around, I might not be okay with it.”
“See, Ash, that’s the difference between you and me,” he said. “Me, I’m all magnanimous and shit, because I see the big picture. But you can’t see much of anything because you got your head up your ass.”
That actually made me smile. “Sometimes it’s the safest place to be.”
“Safe is overrated,” he said. “Can’t we just go back to the way things were before?”
That was just what I needed to hear. Things going back to normal. I just wished more things could. “So we’re still friends, right?”
“For better or for worse, that’s a given,” he said.
But things that are given can also be taken away.
This week’s game was on hostile territory. We had a crowd on the visitors’ side, but nowhere near as big as the home crowd. The other team’s mascot was the Phoenix, which probably seemed a good idea at the time, until someone realized the plural of “Phoenix” was Phoenices. And when the loudspeaker proudly announced, “The Phoenices are on the field!” none of us could keep a straight face. Maybe that was part of their psychological tactics. Weaken us through laughter.
All joking aside, they were a tough team. We’re hard to beat, but I guess you could say the Phoenices rose to the occasion.
By the beginning of the fourth quarter, we were down twenty to fourteen. Layton was furious at himself for allowing such a thing to happen, while at the same time blaming everyone else. I knew I was holding back, not playing as hard as I usually do, because my fear of going sideways again muted all my responses. Which meant if we lost, I would be a part of the reason.
The truth is, I shouldn’t have been there at all. I should have retired my jersey while it was still blue and lived a tackle-free life. Because this world, as twisted as it was, was fixable. It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done. I could be the old me in the new digs. If I knew what was coming, that’s what I would have done. But I was foolish. I was arrogant. Like Leo said, my head was lodged in a place where the sun, moon, and stars don’t shine.
With eight minutes left to play, the ball changed hands, and I took the field with the rest of the defensive team, determined to make these next few plays count.
I got into position, the ball was snapped, and I lunged forward like a freight train. The opposing lineman misjudged, engaging me off balance. I pushed past him, making him spin like a turnstile. The QB was fading back, looking for a receiver to pass to. His eyes kept darting. I could tell he couldn’t throw a clear pass, and he was going to make a run for it. I could see, almost feel, his center of gravity shifting, and I knew which direction he was going to run an instant before he made the move. I surged toward him, knowing if I took him down it would be a major loss of yardage for the Phoenices. I hit him hard.
And the moment I made contact, it happened again.
This time it was different. The instant of cold wasn’t just an instant. It was like being submerged in ice water. Like the people leaping from the Titanic must have felt the second they hit the frigid Atlantic. And I was moving. I wasn’t falling, I was sliding. Not backward or forward, not up or down, or even sideways. I was sliding in a direction that doesn’t exist. I instinctively knew that this was much worse than before. The air was sucked out of my lungs, and I thought, This is it. This is what I feared. The zip line cable snapping. The plunge to oblivion.
And then I gasped. Not just gasped but sucked two whole lungfuls of air. In spite of feeling like I had just returned from a trip to deep space, I got to my feet, trying to catch my breath, not sure how long I had been lying there. It must not have been long, because no one seemed to notice. Everyone was just getting ready for the next play.
Everything seemed normal. Almost. Everything seemed fine. But not really. Because my head was still feeling the resonance of that place between. The phantom headache had an entire new dimension. There had been a colossal shift, but here, in the middle of a football field, I couldn’t see it yet.
So I did what I was supposed to do. I did my job. I took to the line. I didn’t take down the quarterback again, but my previous power tackle made him timidly toss away the next two passes, and then the Phoenices punted. I was off the field as our offensive team took their places.
Once I was on the sidelines, I started to become aware of things. First were the names on the jerseys of the kids around me. Out on the field, I didn’t notice—I mean, we’re all suited up, with helmets and mouth guards that distort our features behind the face masks. Only now, when helmets were off, did I realize that I didn’t know some of these kids. And yet I did. To the real me, at least half the faces and half the names were completely unfamiliar. But once I connected a name to a face, the memories from this new reality kicked in with a painful mental resonance that made me wince.
“You okay, man?” asked a teammate whose jersey said “Jenkins,” a kid who wasn’t on the team ten minutes ago. “That was one helluva sack out there.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I told him, trying not to wince at the vibrations twanking in my head.
Out on the field, Layton took the snap, and the play came to life. Leo went long. Layton passed. Leo caught the ball, to the roar of our fans and teammates. No one was near him. He took it all the way down for a touchdown!
It was only when he came back from the end zone that I realized something was very wrong with this triumphant picture.
“Damn,” said Jenkins, “he’s fast as a s’equal on payday!”
“Fast as a what?” But Jenkins didn’t even hear me—he was whooping and whistling and giving Leo the adulation he deserved.
Only here’s the thing . . .
It wasn’t Leo.
The name on his jersey said “Easley” and when he took off his helmet, it was this ginger dude, with skin about a million shades lighter than Leo’s. In fact, as I looked around me, there was an uneasy sameness to the team.
White. They were all white. This, on a team that is about as ethnically diverse as a team can get. But all the brown kids were nowhere to be seen. I looked up to the stands and saw this crazy sea of pale on both sides of the field. And I knew the sickness I now felt in my gut was only going to get worse.
7
My Sunscreen Ignorance
Here’s what I know:
Back in the 1950s there was this Supreme Court case called Brown v. Board of Education. It wasn’t just one case, but five cases combined into one. I know this because it was a question on a social studies test. I’m embarrassed to say that something so important—so monumental—had, until now, been reduced to an index card in my head.
The case was all about segregation, which was legal back then. In a big part of the country, white kids went to white schools, and Black kids went to Black schools that were supposed to be “separate but equal,” but of course there was nothing equal about them.
The Supreme Court unanimously decided that segregation was unconstitutional, and therefore illegal. It took a while for them to get to that decision unanimously, but they did, and the law changed.
There was pushback, of course, from people who liked things the way they were, and who resisted. The governor of Alabama stood in a school doorway to prevent two Black students from going in. A county in Virginia actually closed all of its public schools for five years rather than integrate them. Really. I’m not making this up—this crap went down in my reality. My original reality. But in spite of resistance, the Supreme Court decision that struck down segregation was an important victory in a never-ending battle.
So what happened here to screw that up?
I didn’t know it at the time, but in this new world, that Supreme Court decision wasn’t unanimous. In fact, it went the other way. Three to five. Five Supreme Court justices upheld segregation.
That decision changed everything.
History forked in a different direction. Segregation remained the law of the land. And that expression, “s’equal”? Turns out it’s a derogatory term for anyone from “those” schools in “those” neighborhoods. It’s short for “separate-but-equal.”
I’m a strong guy, but just thinking about it made me crumble. The America I knew was already battling a dark age where Miss Liberty’s light flickered like a bulb ready to be changed. But in this America, her torch had already been completely and utterly doused.
After the game, I went out to the Towne Centre like I always do, on autopilot. I was too stunned to be anything but habitual. I knew there’d be memories of who I was in this world. They were waiting for me if I dug too deep, and I wasn’t ready to know. So I did my best to skate on the surface until I had the courage to take the deep dive.
But even the Towne Centre had changed. Different restaurants, alternate-universe movies. And the seating area of the food court was divided. Here’s where I really started to get a sense of what this world was all about. Because the food court had a white side, and a nonwhite side.
“Over here, Ash!” called that redheaded receiver who had taken Leo’s place on the team. Josh Easley. A hint of a memory told me he was my best friend in this world. He was sitting with Norris and a few others, some of whom were there before, others who were specific to this world. Maybe they had existed before, but they certainly weren’t on the team.
