luck. He nodded. Forced a tight, polite smile, before turning back to Justin. “I’m looking forward to the day when I don’t have to do all this.” He waved his hand over the four plates of food. “I wouldn’t mind being fifty pounds lighter if it meant I didn’t have to eat my body weight in protein every day. I feel like a dinosaur some days. All I do is eat.”
“And you can’t ease up now?”
He shook his head as he finished the first sandwich. “Not at my position. I have to block and receive. I have to be strong enough to tackle and hold the line, and fast enough to run and catch passes, and powerful enough to break through the linebackers and safeties when they try to bring me down. I have to be not just a little bit of everything, but the best at three totally different skills: blocking, catching, and rushing.”
“Go Van de Hoek!” Another bro, on the other side of the half wall that divided the dining area, leaned over to hold out his hand for a fist bump. He nearly knocked over Justin’s textbook.
Wes bumped his fist and said nothing.
“That sounds intense,” Justin said, after the frat boy moved off.
“It can be. It can also anchor the team. If there’s great QB–tight end chemistry, the team is almost unstoppable. Colton and I have worked hard to get to that place.”
“Colton Hall? The quarterback?”
“Yeah. He’s my best friend, too. We met freshman year, when we were both wide-eyed and wet behind the ears. Both of us were real good at our high schools, but here, everyone was real good at their high schools. You had to be better than that. Work harder. Become more. We did, together.”
“It paid off.” He nudged Wes’s boot beneath the table with his shoe. “I meant it when I said you should be proud. Even when I was mad, I was proud of you. You earned this.”
“Oh my God, it’s Wes Van de Hoek!” This time, the girls didn’t approach Wes, but they pointed and stared and watched him eat like he was an animal at the zoo.
Wes dropped his second sandwich onto his plate. “Do you want to get out of here?”
“Yes. I’ll get to-go containers.” Justin was on the move before he finished speaking.
They ended up on the quad, hiding on the back side of a grove of trees, sitting in the dirt and facing a dried-up creek. Wes finished his sandwich and the spaghetti, then wolfed down the vegetables and eggs as Justin ate his apple.
“Tell me about your clinical rotations,” Wes asked. “Where are you working? What department will you be in?”
“University Hospital. I’m in the ER for my first rotation.”
Wes frowned.
“I picked trauma. I think I might want to specialize in emergency medicine. I’m looking forward to it.”
Wes went quiet as he drank his bottled water. He stared at the dust, at the leaves rustling on the wind, seeming to look inward. “My mom was a doctor,” he finally said. His voice was soft. Almost a whisper.
They’d never spoken about Wes’s mother, other than when Wes said she’d died, and that it was just his dad and him on the ranch. Justin kept his mouth shut. Waited to see if Wes would keep talking.
“She would drive out to the desert and find people who’d crossed the border. Families, mostly, who’d gotten lost coming over. Or who ran away from the coyotes and the human smugglers. Sometimes she’d find people who were left behind on purpose, if they got sick or hurt during the crossing. She saw a lot of trauma. She came home covered in blood a lot.”
“Just her?”
“She and my dad. There were a few others sometimes, but it was mostly her. She’d bring people back to the ranch and patch them up, then send them to her lawyer friend about two hours away. Try and get everyone settled in the right way.”
“She sounds amazing. Her and your father both. That’s incredible that they did that.”
He smiled, but it was sad and faded fast. “She was. She did a lot for people. Out there in West Texas, she was the only doctor in a hundred miles who would see people for free. We never had much, but she said it wasn’t up to anyone to put a price on someone’s life. She ran a little clinic in town and got some money from the government. I’d help her out after school when I was