There’s something in her voice that tells me I got lost in the screen for a minute. That I was watching this old game, these players I don’t know, and seeing someone else altogether.
I look back at her, and she’s set her palm on the bed beside her, an invitation.
I’ve spent the last few years of my life making a study of all the ways you might get someone to talk to you about something that matters.
But I’ve never seen a single thing as convincing as the sight of Jess Greene’s slender hand on the white expanse of unremarkable hotel sheets.
I cross to her, and it’s a transformation not unlike the one in the foyer—we slip so easily from one thing to the next. Standing apart, then sitting beside her, then lying back and pulling her close. She’s warm and soft and still beside me, the same hand from the sheets now on my stomach.
This mattress is two hundred times more comfortable than it was a half hour ago.
“I’m sure you read a lot about Cope,” I say. “When you looked me up, or whatever.”
“Only a little.” Her breath is a soft puff against my skin, and the funny thing is, I completely believe her. I believe that whatever Jess looked up, she would’ve quickly walked away from: closing her browser, desperately trying to clear her mind of whatever she thought she didn’t have a right to.
“You saw the stories about him having bipolar?”
She nods—quick, almost apologetic.
“He wouldn’t mind you knowing that,” I assure her. “He wasn’t ever ashamed of it, once he got the diagnosis. He was open about it.”
Too open, according to a lot of the people around him. Some of our coaches and a lot of our teammates, almost everyone when he went pro. His agent, too, this dirtbag guy who got a lion’s share of my public rage after he posted a soft-focus black-and-white shot of him and Cope celebrating on draft day.
With a broken heart emoji.
“Our sophomore year, after the season was over, Cope had—he had a real tough couple of months.”
I’m understating it, to be honest. He had a terrifying two months, and as his roommate, I witnessed most of it. Sleepless nights, lost time. Behavior that at first made me mad, then freaked me the fuck out.
“It was the first time he’d ever had anything that severe, that long-lasting.”
I don’t add everything from the whiteboard that lives in my brain all the time: everything I’ve learned about Bipolar I, about traumatic brain injuries, about the three concussions Cope had before his twenty-first birthday, and the ones he had after, too. I’ve read study after study showing links between mental health and brain injury, study after study about mood disorders and concussions.
The worst shit I’ve ever memorized.
“That must’ve been scary.” She strokes her thumb back and forth against my skin slowly. It’s as calming as the deep breaths I’m incapable of taking right now.
“His parents took him home for a couple weeks to see a doctor they trusted, someone who had nothing to do with the team doctors. They were—they are—really great, his parents. And that doctor. That’s who diagnosed him, and who first prescribed something. It helped him a lot. You wouldn’t believe it, how the meds helped him.”
I realize, of course, that this is a meaningless thing to say to someone who never met Cope, who never had the chance to know him. But I guess I’m saying it because I wish she did.
“Except also, they didn’t help him. With football. He said he didn’t feel as fast or as strong. His hands would shake.”
I clear my throat, stalling through the flash of anger that accompanies my thinking about this next part.
“And we had this one coach who—I won’t say he told Cope to stop taking it. I won’t go that far.”
He said other things, though, and to Jess I repeat them all. I tell her how he’d relentlessly point out the changes to Cope’s stats, how he’d go on and on about “mental toughness.” His lectures on doctors overprescribing “happy pills,” his complaints that “everyone today wants a quick fix.” He’d go on and on about “training clean,” as if over half the guys on our team weren’t sucking down deranged ingredients in their “protein shakes” three times a day. He’d say the media had gotten “hysterical” over concussions. That “snowflake reporters” were trying to ruin the game.
I still hate him for saying those things.
I still hate myself for not realizing, until so much later, how truly damaging it all was. Cope was haunted by that shit for years, even though he only rarely admitted it. But he’d go on and off his meds, on and off, year after year. Even though the back-and-forth surely made things worse for him.
“Uff,” Jess says, flinching slightly, and I realize with a start that’s not a reaction to what I’ve told her—instead, she’s winced because my fingers have hit a small tangle in her hair, which I’ve apparently been stroking over and over. It’s fanned out on the bed behind her, a record of my mindless, mostly careful self-soothing.
“Shit, sorry.”
I unwind my fingers from her hair, and she moves carefully, sitting up and turning toward me, taking the offending hand and holding it, pressing our palms together.
