She regarded the older girl, who wore an orange sports bra over her small breasts and had Go Jags! written across the tight muscles of her stomach. She wore her hair in cute pigtails and had fingermarks of paint, one black, one orange, under each green-grass eye. Kaylyn was almost a head taller than her, and maybe because she was a year older and seemed to already intimidate even the senior girls or maybe because she and 56 were such good friends, Tina found herself both flattered and unnerved. They stood in the front row, and Kaylyn pointed at Rick, standing with his back to them, Number 25.
“Look at him,” she said. “I’ve got a thing for butts in football pants. Even the fat kids, you know?”
Tina agreed but felt no more at ease. Fifty-six had a history with Kaylyn. Before they began dating, she’d seen 56 at Kaylyn’s locker after school, the halls empty. He’d stood too close to her, and Tina couldn’t help but strain to overhear him say, “Summer makes you dirty blond” and Kaylyn reply, “Not dirty enough for my taste.”
It wasn’t the questionable comment so much as when 56 reached for Kaylyn’s hair and rubbed a strand of it with his thumb and forefinger like he was testing the consistency of soil.
“Problem is,” she told Kaylyn, clearing her mind of that image. “I don’t know a thing about football. Like I barely understand what Todd even does.”
Kaylyn laughed. Her teeth were nice except for one Dracula fang that crowded out its neighbor.
“I gotcha here, Tina. So he’s the middle linebacker, which is sort of the leader of the defense. He’s like a jack-of-all-trades, so he roams around and can call a blitz and go after the quarterback, whatever he thinks is best. Your boyfriend,” she explained, “is a really freaking good middle linebacker. He already has the school record for sacks and tackles, which is why he’s getting recruited and part of the reason the team’s five and oh.”
Tina nodded, though much of the explanation flew over her head. Yet this became her identity. She was 56’s girl, and thereby staked her claim to the first two rows of the bleachers next to juniors and seniors. She felt mature there, adult, knowledgeable about the world in some new unquantifiable way.
She loved how everyone referred to the guys by their jersey numbers and quickly adopted the practice. She made a shirt with his number and last name across the back and threw dagger eyes at Jess Bealey, the cheerleader responsible for making his locker signs and baking him cookies and brownies before games. (They were just friends, 56 would say, and she’d worry about all the female friends he seemed to have.) It was her introduction to this exclusive club, this new world. His best friends, Ryan Ostrowski, Curtis Moretti, Matt Moore, and a few others, formed a kind of athletic elite. They got away with drinking, toilet papering houses, egging cars, always something. At the pep rally they introduced one another on stage, each to a rap song, each with a dance, jerseys tucked haphazardly into baggy jeans. She felt like an intricate part of the spectacle unfolding in the bonfire’s glow.
Once she understood more about what he did on the team, she found him even more appealing. She’d watch him on the sidelines. When the weather turned cold, steam would rise from his hot, sweaty head. In the game, he’d look to the one coach on the sidelines (the defensive coordinator, this was called), take a signal or wave it off, expressionless beneath the helmet, yet still expressive in the tics of his head and hands. Then the play would commence and it was like watching jujitsu, the way he tried to snatch apart the opposing player’s hands, feint, or slip his grip in some manner. She began to see that he was quicker and stronger than almost everyone he played against. Often he’d get right past the other team’s player, and then it was like watching a wolf in an open field bearing down on a rabbit. In the sixth game of the season, against Marysville (at that point the twenty-fourth ranked team in the state!), he had one truly amazing moment. The center hiked the ball, and instead of clashing into the other team’s player, 56 duped his matchup by sliding back, which caused the Marysville player to go tumbling forward. Fifty-six leapt over him, smashed aside another defender, and then there was nothing between him and the Marysville quarterback but grass. The QB tried to retreat (drop back, was the term), tried to throw, but 56 was so fast. He hit him with a spectacular plastic-crunch of pads, lifted him off the ground, and hurtled both of them through space. The whole stadium heard the hit, and a collective gasp and groan went up from both sides of the bleachers. The ball came out, and Stacey’s brother Matt (No. 44) scooped it up and ran it back for a touchdown. Fifty-six jumped up screaming, muscles flexed, beating the air with his fists as his teammates slapped his butt and helmet. The QB left the game with a concussion and New Canaan won 28–14. From the bleachers, Tina screamed and jumped and smacked her hands pink while she thought about how she was falling in love.
When driving into New Canaan from the west there’s no sign to greet you the way there is from the north. There’s only the farmland giving way to clusters of homes until you reach the first stoplight on SR 229. You followed that into town, past a massive grain silo, the empty steel factory now three decades abandoned, the old middle school shuttered since ’96 and entombed behind barbed wire fencing to keep inquisitive kids from running through the ruins. The Little Caesars and Donatos Pizza sitting side by side, Le Nails, House of Hair, A-Plus Insurance, Wendy Bakerfield Attorney at Law.
She’d brought Cole here to show him her hometown shortly after she agreed to temporarily move into his one bedroom. This living arrangement had not been an ideal situation from her parents’ perspective, but at that point the rent for the house on Jennings had become too much of a burden. Moving into a smaller place saved her parents so much money, and Cole had become family to them anyway. “I suppose your generation does things a little different anyhow,” was her mom’s final word about it. So she moved into Cole’s one bedroom in a little development five miles east of Van Wert.
She drove Cole out to the park in New Canaan, the town square, the baseball fields, the high school. She was incapable of articulating how alive this place had seemed when she was young, how much energy you could feel here. She could only see it through his eyes now: a dingy town getting dingier. Nostalgia shielding the rest.
“That’s the football field.” She pointed to the ring of fence and bleachers overseen by bleach-white stadium lights. As a child, the place had looked like it could hold the Super Bowl. The jaguar mascot burst through a wall, snarling, muscled arms with razor claws extending for prey, looking the way 56 had when he swallowed up that Marysville quarterback.
How to explain to him the town’s sadness, the tragedies. By the time she left, she’d held in her heart the notion of a curse, the one the town whispered about. At that point she and 56 had been broken up for well over a year. He was playing football for Mount Union, destined to flunk too many classes and get into the trouble that he did. She weighed around eighty-eight pounds, her eating problem having reached its apex. She kept seeing herself in the mirror; she’d always understood how pretty she was, blessed with strong cheekbones, a slim, delicate nose, long lashes, and smooth, smoky skin framed by raven hair. And yet her body never stopped looking grotesque to her; she pinched the flab around her belly, arms, and thighs; she skipped meals or ate a bag of chips for dinner. She’d also gone too far with the pricks.
Then that sensation of a curse began to be borne out. When Curtis Moretti died of a drug overdose, she found herself envying him. What a relief it would be to no longer be afraid and hurt all the time. The same fate later befell Ben Harrington. Rick Brinklan was killed in Iraq, and New Canaan had a parade when his body returned. Though her parents and Rick’s had known one another since they all went to New Canaan High School themselves, Tina missed the parade. How could she explain to Cole that it followed them all, that sadness somehow born in their high school days that could reach out and touch any of them at random. She had this image of Christ swimming through the chaos of life, trying to protect all these people who deserved mercy, and yet these oily tentacles kept slipping past Him, carrying away all the people He wanted to give sanctuary.