Pregame
“Mother f—”
Mrs. Pauker’s head snapped toward the sound of the voice, her eyes as large as car tires. He hadn’t stopped when he’d said “mother,” and we’d all clearly heard the word that came after it. It had echoed a little in the Woodsmen locker room.
“That’s a bad swear!” Harvey yelled, and several other students agreed. So did the parent chaperones, and so did I. “I know another one,” he told us. “It’s a word that means—”
“No, thank you!” Mrs. Pauker cut him off. She looked at me, forehead creased. “Zoey, can you…” She pointed at the door through which we’d all heard the man yelling.
She wanted me to figure out what was going on in there and I nodded, acknowledging that I would, so she directed her attention back to her first-grade class. “If you can hear my voice, clap once,” she told them crisply. She was really good at getting their attention. That, along with a million other classroommanagement skills, was something I was trying to absorb so that I could use it one day with my own students.
But at this moment in time, I had to investigate the origin of the cursing. It wasn’t really a mystery, since I was pretty sure that there were only two people behind that door. One was the football player that we were supposed to meet, and the other person was the man who’d introduced himself as “Everett’s agent.” He had been waiting in the locker room when we had filed in, most of us in a state of silent awe due to being in the famous Woodsmen Stadium. He’d only said, “I’m Everett’s agent. I’ll go talk to him.” He hadn’t responded when the representative from the football team had asked if everything was ok. Instead, he’d disappeared behind the door at the back of the room, and we had heard him speaking with someone.
The nice woman in orange, the team rep who’d guided us on our walk, had told us not to worry. “If Everett Ford is in the storage closet, I’m sure he’ll come out,” she’d assured everyone. But now, after what we’d just heard from there, she was looking at the door and she had lost her smile. “I’ll be right back,” she said. She left us, hurrying out of the locker room.
I’d already learned that field trips with twenty-three first graders weren’t easy, and today one of the parent chaperones had ended up acting worse than most of the kids. We’d had to wait for her to get out of the bathroom before we’d even left the school and then, when we were finally on our way, she’d complained that she was getting sick from the “bus fumes” and had demanded that the driver stop so she could “re-center the energy.” She’d wandered off once we’d arrived at the stadium and Mrs. Paukerhad to call her back, and then she’d whined that she was thirsty (which had set off a few of the kids).
Anyway, meeting the famous football player was supposed to have been the easy part—or maybe, I should have said “semi-famous.” Because when we’d first announced to the class that they were going to take a field trip to Woodsmen Stadium and see a real football player, they had just about exploded with shock and joy. But when Mrs. Pauker had told them his name, the reaction had been…less.
“Who is Everett Ford?” Ada had asked. “I never heard of him.” She was speaking for most of the other kids, too.
He was a backup quarterback for the team, their teacher had explained. And he was also, probably, the man who’d just yelled some ugly words in front of a crowd of six- and seven-year-olds. It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to discuss with him or his agent, but here I went—Sarah Pauker was the cooperating teacher, so it was her classroom and she was the boss. As the student teacher, I was here to learn and also to follow her instructions. That meant that I would confront cursing football players.
So I walked to the door at the back of the polished-wood and orange-carpeted locker room where we’d been waiting, and I knocked. “Hello? Everett Ford? Everett Ford’s agent?” I asked softly. Mrs. Pauker had the class singing together pretty happily, but I knew that there were eyes on me (both kid and parent). I tried again, knocking a little harder and clearing my throat. “Hello—oh!”
The door had opened inward and a hand came out. It grabbed my arm and pulled me, and I was suddenly face to face with the man who’d introduced himself to us before.
“Please stop pounding on the door,” the agent told me sternly. “You’re calling attention to him for no reason, because there’s zero cause for concern, none at all. Nil. Zip. Zilch. Everett is fine.”
Those words signaled to me that there was absolutely a cause for concern. I stared over his shoulder and spotted it, in the form of Woodsmen player Everett Ford. He was the person that we’d come here to meet because he represented the football team that was the Pride of the Peninsulas. He was the talented, well-paid, charitable athlete who had agreed to talk to a roomful of little kids and to answer their funny questions about professional sports and his life as a star. Kind of a star.
“Why is he on the floor of a storage room?” I asked the agent in confusion. Ford wasn’t just on the floor, though. He was spread-eagled on his stomach with his face turned into the rough carpet. And he wasn’t wearing a shirt, which was unusual. Was he planning to address Mrs. Pauker’s class in a state of partial nudity? She definitely wasn’t going to like that.
“Uggghhh,” the shirtless man said, an extended groan that ended in a whimper.
“Is that really Everett Ford?” I asked. I pointed at the prone person, in case the agent didn’t understand my meaning. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s under the weather.”
Everett Ford might have felt pretty bad right now but it wasn’t due to some kind of bug or bacteria, if that was what his agent was trying to imply. His statement was only true if “weather” meant booze—like that the Woodsmen guy was under an ocean of liquor, swimming in it and absorbing it through every pore (and swallowing a few gallons down his throat). That I would have believed, because I could smell it from where I was standing and I wasn’t very close.
“He’s drunk,” I stated.
The guy on the floor, the semi-famous but fully inebriated football player, picked up his head. He stared at the carpet in front of his face and moaned again. “Mother—”
He had repeated the bad swear, roaring it even louder this time. “Shh!” I said. “They can hear you!” I hoped that the kids were still singing their heads off, and that the sound of his words had been muffled.
“They can hear me?” he asked. Why was his voice still so loud? “Shit! They heard me say mother—”
“Everett, please!” his agent said. “Put on your shirt and get out there. You are contractually obligated to perform six distinct charitable acts and believe me, the Woodsmen team is counting the hours. Do you want to make things worse for yourself? You have to follow through.”
“Really?” I asked. “That’s why he’s meeting the first graders? Because his contract makes him?”
They didn’t bother to answer.
“Why?” Everett Ford asked the floor. “Why’d she do this to me?”
“Jesus H. Christ,” the agent muttered. “Again?”
