Yours,
Nick
The following night, as I sat at my desk, signing my letter back to Jay, there was a loudbangon our door. “Open up!” screamed a voice.
I turned to look at Vinny who’d been practicing quiet notes on his tuba but was now frozen in confusion. Neither of us knew what this was about.
I got up from my desk and opened the door to find Charlie Buchanan in a West Egg athletic T-shirt and gray shorts.
“Get dressed, little girls,” he said, banging on the door frame with a sinister smile. “It’s time formidnight football.”
He walked off and I poked my head out into the hallway. The other boys of the White House were flooding our dorm, knocking on doors. Some were going into rooms and flipping over mattresses. This was unsettling for me, and all the barking was unnecessary for a football game. The Blue House boys groggily exited their rooms, rubbing sleep off their eyes.
“Ugh!” Vinny groaned. “Thisold tradition.”
I ran back inside and grabbed my letter. I couldn’t have Vinny reading it if he got back to the room before me. “What old tradition?” I asked.
Before Vinny could answer, another white boy in the hallway screamed, “Speed it up, princesses! Impromptu midnight games are tradition!”
I went outside and saw them butt-slapping my dorm mates all the way to the locker room, at the bottom of West Egg’s recreation building.
Once we were inside again, the white boys started taking off their shirts and admiring themselves in the room’s many mirrors. Oh, how buff they were. Vinny and I were so puny as to be invisible.
I glared at the macho chaos under the light of the room, still in disbelief I was on my two feet and not snug in bed as I slipped into my shorts.
My eyes scanned the room and landed on Jay.What was he doing here so late?
He turned and saw me looking. I pulled up my shorts and debated whether to wave or not.
Jay gave a quick nod and left his locker slightly ajar as he hurried off to the bathroom stall. I pulled my letter out of my pajama pants, which were resting in my locker, and folded it a second time in preparation to leave it in there while he was gone.
My heart thumped with a scandalous thrill as I approached the locker. I glanced left, then right, as if crossing the road. No one was looking, so I left the little note through the gap.
As Jay came back, I noted that his modest walk set him apart from his former friends. Charlie and Cannon walked chest-forward, like they’d bulldoze anything in their way.
Jay was beautiful like them, but he walked not like he meant to conquer the earth but like the earth had conquered him. Sadness radiated like sunbeams from his chest, ordering his limbs into a languid orbit.
Someone with so much money could not be as sad as he appeared to be!
When Jay reached his locker, he looked at the folded letter and glanced back to me. All I could do was stand there like a dog waiting to be fed.
Move, Nick.
I closed my locker as Jay slipped out of his pants, the muscles in his legs flexing as he stepped into his shorts.
I followed the boys filing out of the locker room until we reached the sports field, down some stairs off the main campus.
Charlie’s entourage did knee rises and stretched their arms out to prepare for the game.
It became very clear that it would be the Blue House versus the White House, by the way the white boys separated themselves from us for conditioning. I kept looking at the big guys from my dorm, like James—he was a future machine worker, and the strongest and most confident we had.
James began corralling us into a huddle, asking questions, and assigning roles. He’d be quarterback, and the rest of us would have roles that supported his throws, in the form of defense or running.
“Vinny, you running wide,” he said. “And Nick”—he pointed at me—“you gon’ catch. Keep your eyes on me, but run like hell.”
I swallowed with anxiety but nodded—he was right to assign me that role. If I tried to defend anything, I’d be crushed like a beetle, so I’d run to catch the pass and rely on my housemates for the rest.
We lined up in the middle of the field for the start of the game, each team facing the other. And then James said, “Signal! Hike!”
