I echoed what he’d said before. “You needed a friend. And that person could be me.” That was what I would tell my sister, too: Everett and I had neatly defined our relationship and it made things so much easier. Now I wouldn’t have to spend any extra time thinking about him and his visits and texts, and I could return to focusing entirely on actual problems. There was my sister’s actual, messy love life and where we were actually, permanently going to live. There were my lack of an actual, full-time job and the absence of my mother, who might have actually been missing.
“Good,” he told me, and I nodded at him as he took another bite of sandwich and then put it down. “I don’t know how hungry I am.”
“I’ll take half.” Now we were sharing food, and according to the first graders from last semester, that was what friends did. It made me think about school. “Did you already talk to your parents when you were with the trainer? If not, you might want to phrase things like the admin assistant does where I work. When she has to call home, she says, ‘This is Anita at Silver Leaf Elementary and so-and-so is absolutely fine.”
“Like I should impersonate her and pretend that I work at a school?”
“It’s just a good way to head off potential panic. The kids’ parents get worried when they see that she’s calling, and your parents might be worried if you call when they know you should be at a game.”
He nodded slightly and then put his hand to his head again.
“Have they been up here to see you play?” I asked.
“They’re not interested in sitting in the snow to watch an awful game,” he said. “I’ll tell them later. I don’t feel like talking.”
“Oh, I’ll—”
“I don’t mean you,” he told me. “Sit down.”
I found out that the armchairs in his house were really comfortable, too. “It’s so beautiful here,” I told him again. “Will you have to move?”
“It’s only a rental, but I’ll keep it for a while. It’s a pain in the ass to move and I see myself playing for the Woodsmen for at least a few seasons.”
If he made the team again. I was convinced that he was the best player who had ever gone out on that cruddy Junior Woodsmen field, but how would he do if he returned to real, professional football? I wondered if he had developed a strategy, like Sarah Pauker liked to prepare when there were behavioral issues in her first-grade class. She would sit with a student and they wrote down ideas for what to do if that kid got frustrated or angry, good words to use to explain emotions, and other smart stuff like that. I had tried her method in my search for better housing, but the only thing I had come up with for my plan was “get more money,” which wasn’t so helpful.
But maybe now wasn’t the time to start quizzing Everett about his own strategies, not since he was still so pale and sick-looking. As his friend, I would wait until he was feeling better.
He dozed off there on the couch and I removed the bowl of soup before something unfortunate could happen to the nice rug and he might have lost part of his security deposit. Although, he didn’t seem to be all that concerned about the rent, so maybe he’d earned a lot before, when he was with the real Woodsmen. I glanced back toward his bedroom and wondered what he had in there. A big wardrobe of beautiful clothes? I had never really noticed what he wore, except that he looked nice and wasn’t half-naked like the first time we’d met, but my sister had been pointing out how some of the pro-players liked to wear jewelry and super fancy outfits—head-to-toe designer clothes made bypeople that I had never heard of. Maybe he also had pictures of his family and of his wife, too. Ex-wife. But I prevented myself from going to look, and took my former seat again so that I could watch him. A few times, when I wasn’t seeing enough up-and-down movement in his chest, I went over and investigated more closely.
I was doing that when he opened his eyes.
“Damn!Jesus!”
“Sorry,” I apologized, and moved away. “I couldn’t see you breathing and I was checking.”
“You thought I had died?”
“I just couldn’t see you breathing,” I corrected. If he had really stopped doing that, then I would have done CPR and revived him, so it wouldn’t have counted as dead.
“How long have I been asleep?”
It hadn’t been that long, but enough time had passed for my sister to send me several more angry texts about leaving the game where I was supposed to be making friends with Boyd and resolving all the conflict between us. I had explained that someone needed to be with Everett and, since he and I were friends, it was me.
“You’re friends? That’s why you practically fainted when he got a little boo-boo?” she’d written back, and I had responded by sending a scientific article about concussions that she’d left on read.
Everett sat up slowly, swinging his long legs to the floor and then stretching gingerly. He huffed out an angry breath as he did. “I forgot how this feels.”
“Have you had many head injuries?”
“A bad one in high school. That was when my grandmother wanted me to quit playing.” He smiled slightly. “She made a big speech at Thanksgiving and said that football wasn’t worth losing my brain cells, but my brother reminded her that I didn’t have too many of those to begin with.”
“That wasn’t very nice. Did he get consequences for that behavior, like writing an apology letter to you or losing out on a privilege?”
“He was twenty-four when it happened, so no, he didn’t. But I also can’t remember him ever getting consequences, at any age.”
“At the least, someone should have reminded him not to hurt your feelings,” I said, and he huffed again.
“I didn’t care what he said. I never have,” he told me. “When I was a kid, we really used to get into it.”
