Stupid Fast - By Geoff Herbach Page 0,46
hot is that Katie Koehler. She’s going to be a freshman. You know her? Her ass is small, but I’m okay with that if…” and on and on and on and on. I chewed and nodded. Cody just chewed and looked across the yard.
And the freaking football movie? Even though I couldn’t really hear it because Karpinski was talking (“That’s a helluva hit—remember when I hit Bennett in the Dodgeville game? That was that kind of hit), I could see it fine. Pretty much horrible. There was some running and catching, which I like—high-arching passes in slow motion across the big blue sky—but it was mostly close-ups of total brutality times like five hundred, and there was a lot of blood and broken legs and noses and snot and stuff. Even though the movie was supposed to show how cool football is, I think, it more showed how terrible it is and how mean and mad everybody who plays football is. I totally loved running and catching a football but actually playing football? I didn’t like the idea of broken noses and snot and blood pouring out everywhere.
Thankfully, on the way home, while he drove, Cody shouted over the sound of night air blowing in through the windows, “Football’s not really like that at all, Reinstein.”
“What?” I shouted.
“Football isn’t that crazy. Your legs aren’t going to get broken,” he called.
“Yeah, but, isn’t that Jay Landry dude from St. Mary’s Springs going to try to break my legs?”
“Sort of, but legs just don’t break that easy, man. I’ve been playing tackle since Pee Wee, since I was seven, and I’ve never gotten hurt even a little other than getting the wind knocked out of me.”
“Oh. That’s good to hear, man.” The hot wind blew in. What did he mean wind knocked out?
Then Cody smiled big and looked at me.
“Karpinski never shuts up, does he?”
“No.”
“Did you notice?” Cody asked.
“What?”
He started laughing.
“My experiment?”
“What?” I started laughing too, even though I didn’t know why.
“I wondered if I could go to Karpinski’s house, have supper, watch a movie, and leave without saying a single word.”
“Did you?”
“Not one word in like four hours!”
“I didn’t notice!”
“Not even hi or bye!”
“I didn’t notice!”
“How could you? Karpinski never shuts up.” Cody smiled huge.
And he completely cracked me up. Totally hilarious. I really liked Cody. Seriously. He sort of made me like Karpinski too.
When he dropped me off, he said, “See you tomorrow, brother.”
Speaking of brothers: Andrew was digging in the storage area under the stairs when I got home. That wasn’t a surprise. But something did catch me off guard: my TV wasn’t on the stand in the basement.
“What did you do to the TV, Andrew?” I hissed.
“Jerri took it,” Andrew responded, still digging through crap.
“She took my TV?”
“I’m working here, assface,” Andrew said, continuing to dig.
I went to bed and looked at the football team’s playbook Coach Johnson gave me a couple of days earlier. I tried to figure out all these crazy arrows and Xs and Os that were supposed to show where me and the other players were supposed to run. It looked like algebra and geometry combined, and it made me tired, which was good because I was so mad about the TV that I didn’t think I could sleep. What gives you the right to just take my TV? It’s always been mine. It’s mine, Jerri. Mine! Cody told me I wouldn’t really figure it all out until we were on the field in pads and helmets when there’d be a defense there trying to break my legs, like Jay Landry is going to break my legs, except legs don’t break that easy. But he might knock my wind out, which doesn’t sound very pleasant at all because I need my wind—wind is breath, wind is air, wind in the clouds. I fell asleep.
***
Outside of spending a ton of time with Cody and Karpinski doing football stuff (and listening to Karpinski rant and rant), I spent a lot of time with Aleah the last week of June. Both weekends at the end of June, because she didn’t practice on weekends, we hung out a lot, taking walks all over town (yes, townies shouted at us, which Aleah loved), eating stuff she made, watching movies (all of it at her house because I didn’t want her to see what was going on at mine).
She still didn’t get out of bed until about dinnertime on weekends, so we did everything at night.
In a way, the fact