The soccer ball rolls startlingly close to the goal that Mark is defending.  Adrenaline fills his blood. He charges forward, his face pale and purposeful. Part of his mind perceives individual blades of grass half-seconds before his spikes crush them.

Mark splits an imaginary line between momentarily off-balance opponents. The ball sits just behind that line, and it booms off Mark’s foot so hard and high that everybody stops for a second to watch.

Seeing the ball bounce near midfield, and out of danger, Mark feels a tinge of satisfaction, but the serious, concentrated look on his face remains. Anybody watching him can see that his lips are moving.

“Don’t take any crap from these bastards,” Mark says to nobody in particular.  “Repeat.  Do not take crap.”

He watches the action sixty yards away, one hand clenched in a fist. The sun pours on the field. Perspiration cascades over Mark’s face, and he nervously licks his lips between mutterings.

“Whad’re you talking about, Miller?” says Joe Brown.

Mark answers his teammate with an abrupt look of alarm, as if he’d never seen him before.

Brown stares back, curiously.

                                                                                                   ---

​

The other high school has the ball again, and they are coming. Mark tries a sliding tackle, gets kicked in the jaw. He barely feels it. He gets up, kicking and scrambling. In the confusion, he collides head-on with Brown, of all people, and is on the grass again, howling epithets.

Mark bounds up just in time. An opponent, with a smirk, tries to sneak a quick pass behind him. Mark veers around and intercepts.  There is an incredible glowing, crystal-like clarity now to the field and its contents. Mark stops, ball at his feet, and wonderingly absorbs the effect. Two opponents overrun him.

Mark breaks sharply to his right, then turns up field. Opponents fly past, blurs colored darkly like their uniforms. Finally, Mark is running out of room, nearing the sideline, and he pushes the ball off to a teammate, O’Reilly, leading him perfectly. Mark stops, blows out air. He realizes he could be floating. Nothing seems quite real; on balance, the overall impression is positive. Later, using this game as evidence, Mark thinks that this might turn out to be a pretty good year.

                                                                                                 ---

​

Since this is a practice game, the starters watch the second half from the bench.  Right in front of where Mark sits, Ricco and an opponent rush the ball. Ricco is farther away; he has to slide, and does, like a baseball player. His opponent winds up for a solid, hard kick. Ricco’s foot reaches the ball at the same moment his opponent connects. People hear something that sounds like a tree trunk snapping, but it’s a bone in Ricco’s leg. Incredible, Mark thinks, that that sound can come through skin.

Coach Tut is among the first to reach Ricco. He is looking down at the prostrate student, shouting and gesturing with both arms. Mark remains on the bench, thinking: damn, that Ricco sure knows how to go after the ball. He hears cries of, “Give him room, give him room!” There is a parting of bodies as men and women, dressed in white, arrive with a stretcher. Mark gets a look at Ricco’s blanched, bug-eyed face.

The orange-haired Tut is still yelling, while players from both teams, looking puzzled, observe him. Mark cannot quite make out what Tut is saying. He theorizes that Tut is scolding Ricco for taking his eye off the ball, one of the coach’s pet peeves. The members of the ambulance corps touch various parts of Ricco’s body. Then they scoop the injured player up and wheel him off the field with alacrity.  

Tut, looking subdued, approaches the bench.  “Broken leg,” he says. “At first, I thought it was worse. At first, I thought the poor bugger was dead.”

Joe Brown, among others, laughs. “Okay people!” somebody shouts. “Let’s get organized!”  

Tut looks at O’Reilly. “You’re in for Ricco.” An ambulance rolls away through traffic, siren wailing.  

                                                                                              ---

​

In the locker room afterwards, O’Reilly says, “Miller, I’m going to Hell.  Swear to God.”

Mark nods. “That’s fine.”

“Can you give me a ride to work?” O’Reilly has a part-time job at Orange Julius.

“You gotta work tonight?”

“I work thirty hours a week,” O’Reilly brags. “Wanna know how much I gross?”

Jon Kelly says, “I’m sure O’Reilly has plenty of time for his studies.”

Mark throws his jersey in his locker, removes a cake of flaking soap. “Where’s my goddamn towel?”

Coach Tut is making his rounds. He slaps Kelly on the back. “Great game,” he says.

Mark straightens up, awaits his own due praise.  “You’re gonna have a bruise on your chin,” Tut tells him.

“Two hundred dollars,” says O’Reilly.

Tut says to O’Reilly, “I’m warning you. Any more crap out there, you’re gone.”

Tut is referring to the yellow card O’Reilly earned after he had plowed his tubby body elbow-first into an opponent about ten seconds after the opponent had kicked away the ball.

Tut walks off, and O’Reilly says, “What this team needs is an enforcer.  And I’m just the guy to do it.”

“What this team needs is a goal-scorer,” says Kelly.

“I can score if nobody harasses me,” O’Reilly says. “I would have scored that one time on the throw-in if that lummox hadn’t kicked me in the balls.”

“He didn’t kick you in the balls,” Mark says.

“All right. So I exaggerate a little,” says O’Reilly.  “So he missed by that much.”  O’Reilly holds two fingers together.

“I got kicked in the jaw,” Mark says. “Whaddya say to that?”

“Small potatoes,” says O’Reilly.

“Ricco broke his leg,” says Kelly.

“I have to admit,” O’Reilly says. “That was impressive.”

Mark walks through a veritable minefield of towel snapping to get to the shower.  He chuckles as one particularly vicious snap cracks off the naked behind of Joe Brown.  Brown, tall and blond, stumbles groaning into the wall. His backside is raspberry-red.

Once, Brown was a little kid. But like others, he grew over the summer. Many people here are hairier and more muscular. To Mark, they are just vaguely familiar. Even worse, there are those who changed beyond reasonable expectation, who are shambling monsters. Their brains are playing catch-up with their long, thick legs. Mark himself is still skinny, still looks like he is twelve.

In the foggy, steaming shower, there is a conversation about drunkenness.

“So I say to ‘im, I says, ‘I sure as hell can drink the whole thing.’  And I did.  Puked all over my jacket.”

“Ha ho ha ha ha!”

“You ever see Lee Rambulski drink?  Four beers, and he’s stumbling around, throwing up ‘n shit.”

“Ho ho ha ha!”

“So I says to ‘im, I can too drive.  Plowed into a tree, passed out in the front seat.”

“Ho ho ha ha!”

“I don’t drink very often,” Mark says. “It’s a philosophical matter.  I like to be in control of myself at all times.”

“What the hell for?”

“Ho ho ha!”
                                                                                              ---

​

A few days later, in French class, the door opens and Ricco comes in, swinging on his crutches. His cast runs to the top of his thigh. A knapsack hangs from his shoulder.  He wears a flannel shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a Rolling Stones t-shirt. Mark gets a thought that Ricco looks stylish.

The French teacher is cross. She flings a piece of chalk to the floor. The chalk shatters, and tiny fragments spray around the room at knee-level. “Where have you been?” she demands.

“The zoo,” says Ricco.

Exuding the grinning confidence of a huckster, Ricco makes his way to the back of the room, where he lowers himself into a chair. He leans his crutches against the wall behind him. His white casts rests across the aisle.

Mark wonders about Ricco. Here’s a guy who for years contended for class goofball. Now, injured, he gains a presence. Won’t be long, Mark thinks with disgust, before that cast is covered with signatures.

After class, Mark runs off without talking to his old friend. The hallways seem more crowded this year, and dimmer. Where have all these people come from, he thinks, feeling a shudder deeper than the situation should warrant. All these damn books under his arm are clumsy. He hurries ahead. Slamming lockers sound like sudden explosions.  He thinks he may be getting sick. He conceives a concept: some parts of a day are worthless. Some moments are to be feared.  

Mark walks into a classroom and grins vaguely at some geeks already seated. His mind has frozen, he has nothing to say.

 

He sits for long worthless moments silently in his chair.

 

                                                                                                   THE END

 

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