151 Days (57 page)

It wasn’t okay, but I let it go because it was obviously just making him miserable, and I needed to focus on the last games of the year.

It was a four-day series of games at Round Rock that went from playoff to championship—if you got that far. We had been here before as a team, but this was my first time as a captain. I had seen a little game tape on the other teams, and we were in for a pretty serious fight. There’s no such thing as lucky teams when you get this far. It all came down to blood, sweat, and determination. The entire game could simply come down to the team who wanted it more since they were evenly matched in skills.

And I wanted it very bad.

We checked into our hotel and got our stuff stowed away for practice. Games started the next afternoon, which meant we had a couple of hours in the morning and then nothing but playing for our lives the next few days. I knew we could win this. I had no doubt that as a team we were the best there this year. The key was keeping the team from turning confidence into cockiness.

That meant spending that night going over what we were still coming up short on and making the guys aware the only way we were in this was if we all worked together. I’m pretty sure they just wanted to order room service and watch pay-per-view, but I kept them focused for most of the night, which made me feel a little better.

I was sharing a room with Josh, which meant I spent most of the night listening to him talk to Jennifer in a baby voice that made me want to claw my ears out. Luckily I had Kyle and FaceTime, which meant I could ignore that train wreck altogether.

“Is he talking like a baby?” Kyle asked me as I lay in the hotel bed with my headphones on.

I nodded and rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Lovely, isn’t it?”

“We don’t do that, do we?” he asked.

I had to pause and think about it. “Well, if we do, it’s not in front of other people.”

He nodded and smiled. “That works for me.”

“When do you get here?” I asked him, knowing he was driving up with Tyler and his mom to watch the games.

“Tomorrow morning. We went and got food for tailgating before the first game. Are we really going to cook stuff and eat it in a parking lot?”

The look on his face was priceless. “Dude, tailgate food is the best,” I tried to convince him. “Nothing else like it.”

“Yes there is. A ton of food is like it, except it’s made inside, with washed hands and stuff.”

That made me laugh. “Trust me, when you take a bite of a tailgate hot dog, your life will change.”

“Food poisoning?” he asked.

I burst out laughing.

“Hey, man,” Josh said from the next bed. “Can you keep it down? People are trying to talk.”

I glanced at Kyle, and he gave me that small grin of his back. Looking over at Josh, I said, “Oh, is wittle Joshy upset he can’t hear his wuvey-dovey?”

I could hear Jennifer’s voice scream from his phone. “
You didn’t say he was in the room with you!
”

Josh immediately forgot me and tried to calm Jennifer down.

“You’re bad,” Kyle commented.

“So… lots of things we can do with a video phone,” I said, arching an eyebrow at him.

He got red and looked around like there was someone in his room. “Brad, we can’t… not over the phone.”

“Wanna bet?” I said suggestively.

Which was when someone knocked on our door.

“Damn,” I said, sitting up. “I’ll call you back?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow. I need to get some sleep so I can be awake when Tyler gets here.”

“But what about the video phone?”

He winked at me. “Use your imagination.” And hung up.

Son of a bitch.

I adjusted myself as I opened the door.

Shayne Fuller was standing there.

There is no easy way to explain Shayne Fuller to you without sounding like I’m a stuck-up asshole, so let’s just pretend you know me better and know I don’t believe everything I’m about to tell you but am using it as reference so you can understand, okay?

Shayne Fuller was Granada’s version of me.

We were the same age, grew up playing baseball against each other just about everywhere we went, and we were both playing our hearts out for our senior year. He was taller than me with darker hair, but we had that same build most baseball players had—part muscle, part lean runner, all of it necessary for what we need to do. Where my arms were big from batting, his looked like carved cables from continuous pitching. The only difference was that he wasn’t gay, least as far as I knew. I mean, he had a girlfriend, but so did I for a few years, so what does that mean in the long run? Either way, he was what Kyle would call the Bizarro version of me, and he was knocking on my door.

“Hey, Shayne,” I said as if we always talked instead of the three times we’d ever actually exchanged words.

“Hey, dude, have a second?”

He had that tone of voice that made you want to do what he said no matter what. It was the voice of a leader, of an alpha dog, and it was damn annoying because I didn’t have it. People usually went along with what I said because they either liked me or liked what they thought I was, but it was rarely because of a commanding presence or anything. Shayne was the opposite. He was Foster’s Captain America and would grow up to be a cop or a firefighter, and people would just automatically do what he said even if he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

“Let me grab my coat,” I said, realizing I had done exactly what he wanted without even asking why.

Josh looked at him in the door and then back to me. “You want some backup?” he asked quietly.

“Do you think he knocked at the door to invite me to get jumped?”

Josh had no answer for that. Instead he called out, “Take your phone just in case.”

I shook my head and closed the door behind me. “Where we going?” I asked Shayne.

He looked both ways down the hall and said. “DQ is across the street?”

“Sure,” I said, slipping my jacket on. I was expecting some version of trash-talking since Granada was in the playoffs as well. After all, the rivalry between our schools was pretty intense. There was no basis for it; it was just the way it had always been and most likely will always be in Foster.

We got in the elevator and headed down to the lobby. “Congratulations for getting here, by the way,” he said absently.

“Um, thanks, you too, man.” This didn’t feel like trash-talking.

“You know it’s going to come down to us, right? I’ve seen the same game tapes as you have. You’re the only competition we have this year.”

I hadn’t looked that far ahead, to be honest. I knew who we played tomorrow and didn’t have a thought past that game. I couldn’t think about what was next, because what was here needed every single bit of my concentration. But thinking about who else was here, I had to agree with him. “It’ll be a good game, though.”

He smiled as we got off in the lobby. “You can count on that.”

We walked out of the hotel and crossed the street to Dairy Queen. We both ordered a sundae and sat on the benches out front. Neither one of us talked for a while as we consumed the ice cream. Finally he said, “I heard what happened.”

I looked up at him, having no idea what he meant.

“About the prom thing. I heard what they did. That sucks, man.”

“Yeah,” I said bitterly, trying to have some form of a poker face. “Just more shit on top of a shitty year.”

“Did you turn down A&M?” he asked, paying acute attention to my answer. “I heard rumors, but I want to hear you say it.”

I finished my sundae and nodded. “Yeah, they wanted me to lie about being gay and all that. Was a whole set of things I could and couldn’t do. So I told them to fuck off.”

“Wow” was all he could say as he took another bite. “I don’t know if I could have done that.”

“Yeah, but you’re not gay,” I reminded him.

“No, but still, I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t give up to be an Aggie. Had to be hard.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything, ’cause what was there to say?

“Anyways, I asked about our prom, and they said you had to actually go to the school to be able to get in and all that, which sounds like bullshit since no one ever cared who went to what prom before. So I’d say you guys can come to ours, but I have a feeling they’re going to do the same thing.”

I just stared at him for a long time, not even sure how to compute what he’d just said.

“But what they’re doing, it’s crap. I just thought you should hear that from someone else, and I’m not the only one who thinks that.”

“I don’t get it,” I said slowly. “We’re not friends. Why do you care?”

“I can only care about friends when they’re being fucked over?” he asked rhetorically. “I knew Kelly too. He went to football camp with my brother, and he was cool enough. I just think after everything is said and done, what you do in your bedroom doesn’t matter to me. And it shouldn’t change if you can go to your fucking prom or not.”

He grabbed the empty sundae container and tossed it into the trash. “I just wanted to let you know, no one who counts cares if you’re gay, man.”

I was kind of blown away. “Thanks, man.”

He gave me a grin and said, “You want to thank me? Kick the shit out of those losers so I can play you in the championship. I’ve been dying to take you down since I was twelve.”

I laughed. “You can try, Fuller, but I got your number.”

He held his fist out for me to bump. “Then we’re cool?”

I bumped it back. “More than cool, dude. Consider yourself a friend.”

He nodded as we got up and walked back to the hotel. It was going to be an interesting few days.

T
HE
BASEBALL
nut in me wants to explain every single moment of the next two games, but I have a feeling you’d doze off somewhere around the third inning. So let me tell you, we won both games and ended up in the finals against Granada, just like Shayne had predicted. We were tired, but there was no way any of us were sleeping the night before the game. Tyler, Matt, Kyle, and his mom went to dinner with me and my parents that night. It was the first time all my families sat at one table, and I was more than a little nervous about how they would get along.

“So, UC Berkeley?” my dad asked Kyle after we had ordered. “That’s not an easy school to get into.”

I saw Kyle’s mom beam with pride as Kyle blushed slightly from the praise. “So is A&M,” Kyle remarked after taking a drink of water. “A lot harder to get in on a baseball scholarship than an academic one.”

My dad paused for a moment. This was his first exposure to Kyle’s underhanded snark, and as always it took a moment for a first-timer to recognize it. “I agree, and I was very proud of Brad for both achieving it and for turning it down.”

“It’s hard to read emotion on some people sometimes,” Kyle replied, sounding apologetic even though I knew he wasn’t. “Was just making sure.”

My dad studied Kyle for a long few seconds and then said, “I think maybe you were just busting my balls because you’re not my biggest fan.”

Kyle nodded, putting his glass down. “That too.”

It took everyone half a second to realize what Kyle had said.

And then my dad started laughing boisterously. Everyone else followed hesitantly. “You really are my son’s defender, aren’t you?”

Kyle gave him a small smile, which indicated he was publicly acknowledging the mirth of the situation but wasn’t sharing in it. “Your son can defend himself just fine. What I refuse to do is let someone belittle him ever again. That isn’t going to happen on my watch.”

Kyle’s mom nudged him and whispered something to him, but he refused to acknowledge it. Instead he just locked eyes with my dad and waited.

Slowly my dad nodded. “Agreed.” He looked over at me and added, “I am as proud as I can be with the way you’ve been playing the last two games, and it doesn’t matter what the score is for the next game. In my book you already won everything that counts.” He looked back at Kyle. “Better?”

Kyle smiled for real. “Completely.”

My mom looked over to Kyle’s mom. “You mind if I borrow him sometime? I need to know how he does that.”

Linda looked at Kyle, and the expression on her face looked like she was seeing him for the first time. “I’d like to know that too.”

After that, the tension at the table went away, and we began to talk randomly about the game, graduation, and everything else. Under the table, I grabbed Kyle’s hand and squeezed it in thanks. He squeezed it back, and I knew it meant “I love you too.”

You couldn’t have pried that smile off my face with explosives.

“So what are we going to do about prom?” Tyler asked after dinner but before dessert.

“I put a complaint in to the school,” my mom said. “But they said the rule came from the prom committee, which is voted on by the students, so there was nothing the school could do.”

“That’s bull,” I said, stopping myself from finishing that word. “Raymond put them up to it. He’s had it out for us from the start.”

“We’re just not going to go,” Kyle said out of nowhere, ignoring the way everyone looked at him in shock. “What? Why would anyone think we would want to spend our prom at a dance that the people don’t want us attending? What is there to get out of it besides pissing people off? I’d rather stay at home and be with people who actually like us than sit in a dance in some form of protest.” He shook his head and refused to look anyone in the eyes. “I’ve charged at all the windmills I can in this town. I really just want to spend the rest of my time here drama-free.”

No one said a word. The sound of the restaurant was deafening in the silence. Finally my dad cleared his throat and said, “Well, that just sounds like you’re chickenshit.” Of course, everyone looked at him, but he was staring at Kyle. “It’s hard to read emotion on some people, so just wanted to make sure we were clear. That is a chickenshit reason.”

Kyle gave him a half smile. “I think maybe you were just busting my balls because you’re not my biggest fan.”

My dad gave him the same smile back. “Then you’d be wrong because right up to you saying that, I was becoming a huge fan. Now, not so much.”