Many of our coaches and trainers were pro players themselves and are big and fit, so they have no problem forcing themselves in the middle of us to break up the fight.
“Break it up, idiots. Is this pee-wee ball? Get your asses out of my locker room if you can’t act like professionals!” Coach angrily demands.
After things settle down, Carter approaches me to apologize. His right fist is tucked securely under his left armpit.
“I didn’t even see it was you when I swung, man. I’m so sorry.”
“Right.”
“Yo, man, your jaw must be made out of Valyrian fucking steel.” He grins sheepishly. “I think I may have just broken my hand.”
I shrug my shoulders because I don’t give a rat’s ass that Carter is hurt. He shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place. None of them should have. We put our bodies on the line for a living, not for a Twitter war.
“You cut my face,” I tell him, annoyed as hell as I look at myself in one of the locker mirrors.
A player named Dixon interrupts us.
“Hey, Rush, your cell keeps ringing. I think it may be important.”
“Who is it?”
Dixon is nosy. I already know he’s looked at the screen.
“Someone named Bird.”
I hurry to my phone and see that Mia has called me three times, back-to-back. At this time of day, my first assumption is that something must be wrong. She rarely calls me until well after practice hours and never repeatedly.
I press redial, hoping that it’s nothing I’ll have to kill someone over, because while I won’t exchange blows over childlike behavior like half of the team just did, Mia is somebody I will wage a bloody war for.
Five
RUSH
“Bird?”
“Rush.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask on pins and needles.
“I… I was fired from my job today.”
“You were what?”
“Fired. Canned. Kicked to the curb. What am I going to do, Rush?”
I hear soft cries and my heart breaks just a little.
I have heard my best friend fall apart only three times since we’ve met: once, when a clueless little shit dumped her our junior year of college; second, in the hospital the day she tore her ACL; and finally today.
Mia is not a crier. In fact, she’s usually the most vibrant person in the room and doesn’t let the heavy weight of this shitty world get to her. That’s probably one of the most impressive things about her. I wish I had even a smidgeon of her indomitable spirit. I was only blessed with a talent for football.
“I take it you didn’t see this coming?”
I grab a seat on one of the locker room benches as the rest of the team cleans up the mess from the scuffle and recounts who hit who first.
“No, I mean I knew the school was tightening their belts when I didn’t get a raise, and I heard some chatter about budget cuts and all of that, but I didn’t think they’d fire me. I’ve been there almost five years. I thought I was doing a good job. I thought my job was safe.”
“So it’s a budgetary thing?”
