“Where are the trainers?” someone yelled from a row above ours. A woman wearing Junior Woodsmen gear did run out from the bench area to kneel on the frozen ground. After a moment, we saw Everett slowly roll onto his back. She continued to kneel over him and the announcer said that the other player was being ejected for the illegal tackle. The coaches argued with the referees and I kept staring at the field.
“Sit down, Zo,” my sister urged. I hadn’t realized that I was standing but I did sink back to the cold metal. “He’s probably fine. They wear all that gear, right?”
“If he were fine, he’d get up,” I told her—and then he did. Slowly, he started to rise, but the trainer was too small to help much and some of the guys from the offensive line lifted him the rest of the way. They walked him over to the sidelines, too, and after a while, I watched a few of the players on the bench accompany him toward the big orange building where they had their locker room.
They returned as the backup QB came out and immediately threw an interception, but I didn’t care.
“Zoey, sit down!” my sister ordered. She yanked hard on my coat and I realized that I had risen, again. I had been staring at the orange building and wondering what was happening inside there.
“Should I go?” I asked her. “Everett doesn’t have anyone else here.”
“You would go into the Junior Woodsmen locker room?” Willow asked, her eyes widening. “Why?”
“To see…just to see,” I explained.
“I know that you two have been talking,” she said doubtfully.
We had been. We had been texting and it wasn’t anyone playing a prank or drunk-dialing. He’d called once, too, when he’d been driving near the bar and had wanted to see if I was there before he stopped in. I’d set him up with another glass of tonic water and he’d hung out with me for a while. He’d even tried to help Jannie with a problem with regarding her inventory tracking (the problem was that she wasn’t tracking it).
“We’ve been talking. So?” I asked my sister, but I was looking in another direction. The doors on the orange building had closed and I couldn’t see him anymore.
“You’ve been talking, but what’s happening? Do you even know?”
I glanced over at her and saw that she really did seem concerned. Boyd was staring intently into the sky, as if his total attention was focused there and maybe he didn’t hear us. But there was nothing wrong with the guy’s ears, just with his sense of compassion, his level of maturity, and the size of his fingers. They were abnormally short, reminding me of how some of the first graders had drawn circle hands with little dashes for the digits.
Everett’s fingers, on the other hand, were long and nimble, like he could have been a good bassoon player. I hoped he was ok in that orange building. Maybe there were windows that were low enough for a moderately tall woman to peek into.
“There’s nothing happening,” I told them both. Nothing at all, not a thing. No one was overly invested, not one single person. Nobody.
“Zoey! Sit down and stop looking over there. Sit!” she ordered, as if I was a dog. Obediently, I did and she put her arm over my lap like the bar on a roller coaster (where dogs were not allowed). “What is happening between you and that guy?”
“Nothing,” I repeated. Was this how she felt when I quizzed her about the idiot sitting to her right? Because I considered these questions to be very annoying! At the moment, I wanted to stickout my tongue and also to smack her. I had never done either of those things (except sometimes in my imagination) and I certainly wouldn’t be doing them now. Did she have those same urges when I was expressing my totally reasonable doubts about Boyd? And why hadn’t the announcer given us any updates from the locker room?
“I’ve never seen you behave this way,” my sister said, and I happened to glance over her shoulder at her stupid boyfriend. He was still looking fixedly at the sky, but now he was also wearing a little smirk as if something was pretty darn funny. Me? Was he laughing at me?
I didn’t need to deal with this, not his mockery and not her weird parental act. I dug my phone out of my pocket, but of course there was no information on Junior Woodsmen injury reports because nobody cared about this team. “I’m going to take a walk,” I announced. I removed my sister’s arm from my stomach and didn’t listen as she said my name again, sounding annoyed herself. I hurried down the steps and around to the back of the bleachers and then, as fast and furtive as I could be, I moved toward the orange building. The door seemed to be locked and yanking and angry words didn’t make it open.
So I did what any normal person would do, and I knocked—and surprisingly, that worked. A guy wearing a big parka, but not any kind of uniform, badge, or other indication that he was an employee here, opened it. “Yes?”
My heart pounded but I raised my chin. “I need to see Everett Ford, please,” I told him.
“Oh, sure, okey dokey,” he answered mildly, and he opened the door the rest of the way to let me enter. “Are you his girlfriend? His wife? I can walk you back there. They didn’t tell me to call for the ambulance so I guess he’s all right.”
That was good news. I nodded and followed the man back through the building, and I could immediately understand why he was wearing the parka with the hood pulled up. It wasn’t much warmer inside here than outside on the bleachers. We passed a large gym behind a glass wall with the Woodsmen (the real Woodsmen) logo embedded into the rubber floor, and then went by several other orange-painted rooms with nice furniture and a normal number of lights. “This isn’t bad,” I noted. It was cold but the facility was actually very clean and modern.
“This part of the building isn’t for the Juniors’ use. It’s all locked up and waiting for when the big guys come in the summer for their preseason training. You know, the real Woodsmen,” he explained, and we kept walking for what felt like another mile or so. Finally, he stopped in front of a door. “Okey dokey, here we are. Coming in,” he called as he opened it.
He held it for me and I entered what looked a little like a big medical office, except draftier and more run-down than the place where I saw my own doctor. The same woman who had been kneeling above Everett on the field was bending over him now, looking into his eyes as he lay on an elevated table. She turned her head and he shifted his gaze to where the parka guy and I stood.
“Zoey?” He started to sit up, but the woman told him to stay where he was.
“He’s ok,” she told me before I could speak. “He has a concussion.”
“That’s not ok, then. Should he have walked back here?” I asked her, and she explained again.
“The cart broke down two weeks ago. They’re supposed to fix it, but…”
“I’m ok,” he also said, and the parka guy, still standing behind me, announced that he was glad to hear it and that he had things to do. Maybe the trainer did too, because she left us alone for a minute and went into a little attached room that appeared to be an office.
