from experience, and, if so, was he talking about Astrid or my mom? I considered asking him but decided I really didn’t want to know, as he continued. “Figure out what you want … whatever that is … and go for it.”
“I will,” I said. “But for now …”
My dad raised his eyebrows, waiting.
“For now, I just want to beat the hell out of the Longhorns.”
My dad laughed and said, “Yeah. You just might belong with Coach, after all.”
Thirty-one
On Saturday morning, the day of the final Walker game of the regular season, I woke up feeling sick to my stomach. My hatred for Texas always compounded my standard nervousness, and this year was even worse, with so much more at stake. If we won, we would be playing for the national championship. If we lost, Texas would forever relish their role as spoiler, and we’d finish the year ranked third or fourth, at best, in some ways more painful than a mediocre season.
I got out of bed, too rattled for coffee, too nauseated to eat, pacing and praying and fidgeting all over my apartment. I listened to music and even did some yoga poses and breathing exercises, but nothing worked. I told myself to get a grip. The game was big—as huge as they come—but there were more important things in life, fates worse than losing to the Longhorns. On this very day, people would get terrible diagnoses. Die in fluke tragic accidents. Others would get fired, lose their homes to the bank, their spouses to divorce, their best friends to petty differences. Beloved pets would be put to sleep. Suicide notes penned. Innocent men arrested. Natural disasters might even strike and topple whole villages in remote corners of the world.
This was only a game, I kept telling myself. Not life or death. But no matter how hard I tried to remain philosophical, I couldn’t talk myself into that perspective. Into any perspective.
And then, a few hours later, I actually puked in a trash can at the stadium.
J.J. busted me, coming up on my left shoulder, laughing.
“Did you just do what I think you did?” His voice echoed in the cavernous corridor that would later be squeezed with bodies and vendors.
I wiped my mouth with a napkin, took a swig of water from a bottle in my bag, and popped in a piece of gum before turning around to face him.
“Yep,” I said. “I sure did.”
“And something tells me it wasn’t bad fish.”
“Ha. No. It was the emasculated bovines,” I said, my favorite nickname for the Longhorns.
“So much for an impartial media.”
I laughed but quickly sobered up again, J.J.’s face mirroring the way I felt.
“Do you get the feeling that it’s now or never?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. Why do we feel that way?”
“Because,” he said. “We’re so close. I can’t imagine getting this close again. It could take years. And I’m sixty-one. I don’t have that kind of time.”
“I know,” I said. “You have to be so good … But so damn lucky, too.” I crossed my fingers, stared up at the ceiling of the atrium, and prayed for the hundredth time since that morning.
“You think we’ll pull it off?” he said.
I shrugged, thinking that when it really, truly mattered, I never had a good gut feeling. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t have faith in my team, but that I maintained the truest fans always reverted to a doomsday position in the same way that parents always worried about tragedy befalling their children. Love made things feel precarious, and, when you got right down to it, everything in life was tenuous and fleeting and ultimately tragic. Yes, someone would win this game, and two teams in the country would go on to play for a championship in January. And someone would win that game. And a few seniors at one program in the nation would end their careers on a jubilant high note. But for many, many more, the college football season would end in utter disappointment. Even heartbreak. Just like life.
J.J. slapped me on the back and said, “When’s the last time you tossed your cookies like that before a game?”
“The Cotton Bowl,” I said.
“Well, that’s a good sign, no?”
“Yep,” I said, having already thought of that superstitious angle. Because, no matter how pessimistic I was before a big game, I never stopped looking for signs, never stopped praying for the right alignment of stars over the Brazos River.
As it turned out, there was