“Well, you did all that preparation. Aren’t you ready?” I asked, and I expected him to immediately respond with a resounding “yes.”
Instead, he looked at me for a moment and then changed the subject. “What did you do today? How’d you get so sandy?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “You keep saying that you should be the starter, that you’re better and you deserve it. Are you doubting that now?”
He still looked at me, quiet for much too long. “No,” he finally answered. “No, I’m not doubting anything. Nothing. Zero doubts.”
Which obviously meant that he was. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Are you upset because that coach was mean to you?”
And suddenly, Everett smiled. “Was Rami mean to me? Would you make him apologize if he was?”
I would have liked to, but I had a feeling that a Woodsmen football coach would pay even less attention to my attempt at discipline than the fourth graders had.
“He wasn’t trying to be a jerk. That’s how coaches talk,” he told me. “They give you shit, but he wasn’t even doing that. He was being honest because he’s the kind of person who’s thoughtful and means what he says. If he doesn’t trust me, then he has good reasons.”
“Not to bring it up again…” But I did. “You were drunk at work. And you told me that when you started with the Woodsmen as a rookie, maybe you didn’t try as hard as you should have because you expected the starting job to be handed to you. You said you didn’t do the film study—”
“Ok, yeah.” He held up his hand like a crossing guard.
“People can only judge you by what you’ve done in the past,” I said. “They look at that and think, oh, that guy won’t try hard, he won’t set a good example, he’ll lead the guys into ruin—”
“Zoey!” he exclaimed again. “Who the hell said anything about ruin?” His eyes seemed to glitter like they had before, when I’d thought that he was excited. Now I wasn’t sure about the emotions he was experiencing.
“You’ll just have to show them that you won’t do those things,” I continued. “You won’t be ruinous at all.”
“Damn,” he repeated. He finished the glass of water, guzzling it down. “Time to go.”
Oh, I understood. He wanted me to leave, which made sense. Fun Girl? No, I hadn’t been her at all. I’d been trying to keep up with that persona as we had texted during the Woodsmen training camp, because seeing him face-to-face had been nearly impossible. He was almost constantly busy with football and inthe moments when he wasn’t, I understood that I wasn’t at the top of the list of people he wanted to hang out with.
“Ok. Good luck,” I said, and started for the door.
“You’re leaving without me?” Everett was also walking out, so apparently I’d interpreted things wrong again. But this time, unlike the prom invitation that hadn’t been real, I was very happy to have been mistaken. “Do you golf?” he asked. “We could go to the driving range.”
“No, I never have.”
“I have two bikes. You know how to ride, right?”
“Um, pretty well,” I said cautiously. Without thinking, I bent and touched the scar on my knee, the one I’d gotten after the last time I’d tried biking. “I would do it again.”
His eyes also went to my knee. The scar wasn’t very visible anymore, though. “We could walk on the beach,” he suggested. “There are stairs down to the water.”
“Yes,” I immediately responded. Walking was something I believed that I could handle. I left my bag and we went to the wooden steps at the corner of this property. “You’re so lucky to live here,” I said as we started to descend.
“I’m glad I kept it. It felt like I was coming home when I showed up again.” He stopped on a landing. “There’s a loose board here. Watch out.”
I carefully avoided it. “It’s funny how quickly you can get used to something, though. After about a week, I felt like my apartment was home.”
“Is it nice? Do you like it?”
“It’s ok,” I said. There was no reason to mention that parking was an issue, because there was a bar downstairs, and that the man next door had escalated from thumps on the wall to screaming at us from the hallway whenever he thought we were being too loud. It wasn’t the most fun environment, since now we were whispering and tiptoeing to try to avoid an argument with him. “I’m glad that I was able to find something that I can afford.”
“Did your sister get a job?”
“Not yet, but she’s saying that she wants to get a driver’s license. That would make it easier to work,” I explained. I tried not to think about insurance payments. “Were you sad to leave your house in Arizona?”
“A little. It’s my grandmother’s house,” he said. “She left it to me and it’s still full of all her stuff. She knew that the end was coming and she tried to get things ready, but she told me that she was tired. She apologized for leaving the mess. Watch here, too.” He signaled another board. “I still sleep in my old room there. When I got to college, she replaced the race car bed with one that fit me a little better.”
“You had your own room at her house?”
