Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,41

places but I think they are not: here we’re quiet and slow-moving. We breathe more evenly. We speak lowly. If somebody looks worried we leave him alone or we clap him on the back one time.

I’m the quarterback. I’m very good but I’m not the best in the state or even in our conference. Funny enough, that title belongs to Dee Marshall who I was friends with growing up in Yonkers. Whose mother Rhonda was friends with my mother, once upon a time, before my mother stopped having friends. They grew up together. Dee was my bad best friend in middle school, the one who I got into trouble with. In some ways he is the reason I am here. My mother was very glad when we stopped talking much after I went to Pells. She used to say things like Rhonda’s a good person but not a good mother. As if she should talk about good mothers. Or Rhonda was nuts growing up. It’s no wonder about that poor kid. Dee is half black and half Rhonda and is the best athlete I’ve ever seen. He was my best friend for fourteen years. When I think of my old friends from Yonkers I hope they aren’t mad at me but I think they are. I see them sometimes—on weekends I see them or at the store. Mostly I keep my head down. When I do see them we say some words to each other. At first they called me all the time and I called them back half the time. Now they don’t call me anymore. They live in another world from mine.

Yonkers is part of our conference. In football and basketball they are better than us and mostly they win. For some reason this makes me happy. But in baseball we are better than they are, and we win every time. When I play any game against Yonkers I avoid eye contact. I say hello to my old friends and then I avoid eye contact with them thereafter. Dee Marshall is the most frightening and the angriest. I play him in basketball too and that is the worst. Even when we were kids it was the only place he ever showed any emotion. It’s scary. It’s the sight of him barreling toward you, all six feet and four inches of him, all of his muscles and veins working hard and together to plow past you or, if you are especially brave, to bowl you over. When his team wins, which is usually, he cries out once in victory, slaps the backs of his useless teammates, jumps occasionally into the air, bringing his heels up to meet his thighs. When we were sophomores I was assigned to guard him. After they beat us he pointed right at me and it was the most hateful look I ever got in my life. Dee I’m sorry, I wanted to tell him. I miss you every one of you. My teammates who leave from games in cars that are nicer than anything your parents can afford don’t matter to me as much as you do.

I am all padded and suited up early, for once, and I walk out to the lobby of the gym, where PTA mothers sell concessions to their children, not to me. I always bring my snack from home. Trevor and Kurt and Chuck and Peters and Kramer and Cossy and Brian Heller and Jonesy and Matt Barnaby are all out there already, sitting on some benches. As soon as I walk toward them Trevor goes, You! And! Lindsay! Harper! which is apparently the only thing he can say these days. I don’t know what you’re talking about, I say, but I am smiling very much.

What the fuck, says Kurt.

Matt Barnaby is silent because he used to go out with Lindsay. She dumped him at the start of the year. I am sure he still likes her, who wouldn’t. This does not make her off-limits to me. Matt and I are not friends. He is a junior. I don’t particularly like him.

When did this happen? says Kurt. Is that where you’ve been every weekend?

I shrug. Maybe, I say.

I don’t know exactly why I haven’t told any of my friends. Why I waited for them to find out. I knew they would eventually. I guess it was that I didn’t want to fuck anything up. I didn’t want to disturb what was good and important to me. It was the