corner, it was that Quinn didn’t even have the integrity to uphold her end of the deal. Daniel thought that maybe Wright tricked her, too, but I wasn’t inclined to believe it. She wanted to apply for semi-pro status, and if she wasn’t an arrogant daydreamer, she probably never would have risked that in a bet with me. Wright might have given her an out, but regardless of the reason, she went back on our deal, and that was unforgivable to me.
“Matheson!”
I jumped a little at the bark of my name, and the entire team and Coach were staring at me. “What?” I asked.
“Where are you?” Patrick asked. “It’s halftime. This is when you scream at us for sucking and tell us what you want us to do so that we can do it and still get yelled at after the game.”
“Right, sorry.” There was a round of murmurs and gasps around the room. “What now?”
Patrick shrugged. “You apologized.”
“I was apologizing to myself.”
I sat in silence for a minute and forced my brain to focus on the matter at hand. We were in the middle of a game, and after our loss to Minnesota, we needed a win. I stood up and moved to stand next to Tyler in front of the team. I let my mind rewind back over the first half of the game, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get my brain around anything other than Quinn and her team. It was infuriating. I went for some stock advice.
“We’re still not locking in,” I said. “We’re a good team, but we’re running like we’re shit. I don’t get that. If we don’t figure out a way to work together, this game is going to turn into another Minnesota.”
Tyler leaned toward me. “Zeke, we’re ahead by two touchdowns.”
That was news to me. It was shocking. No one had ever been able to distract me from football, but Quinn Dallen had managed to do the impossible. “I said what I said,” I growled. “This lead means nothing. If we keep fumbling around out there, we’re going to get eaten alive.”
My mind did what it had been doing for the past week and drifted back to my game against the Widows. We had the Widows demolished in numbers, and that was why we beat them so badly. Still, the Widows worked like a single unit with Quinn at the heart of it. It was how they managed to get close enough to kick a field goal. That’s what the Vipers were missing. Even if I was pulling the advice I was giving out of my ass, I knew it was solid because it was always the case. In the year that I’d been with them, we had never worked together once. Not like the Widows did, and they had half the practice time and way less tense games.
I threw my hand back, balled it into a fist, and hit one of the lockers, sending a loud screech echoing throughout the locker room. “We gotta get it together.” All of a sudden, I was angry again. What the hell was I doing, thinking about Quinn and the Widows in a positive manner? We were better than them, and I was going to prove it. “Now, get out there and act like you’re a goddamn team!”
The response I got was lukewarm, but everyone shuffled around and made their way back out toward the field.
The second half of the game was just as gone from my mind as the first one was. I was vaguely present as I made a couple of plays, and I distinctly remember the clap of hands on my back in celebration of points scored, but when the whistle blew to signify the end of the game, I was surprised so much time had passed. I glanced over at the scoreboard, and I honestly didn’t expect it to say that we’d won. For all my preaching about being disjointed, I could barely get one foot in front of the other. The situation with Quinn and the Black Widows was so heavy on my mind that I couldn’t wrap my mind around the task at hand. I didn’t like things distracting me from the most important thing in my life. Mission number one would be solving this stopgap. I refused to give Quinn Dallen any more of my time.
We were packing up after the game when I heard one of the guys call out, “Hey, isn’t that the