All The Glory (16 page)

I was glad he hadn’t suggested we go to his room, but at the same time I wondered if we’d always just hang out in the kitchen like two neighbors and not two friends.

“So what’s new at Banner?” he asked. “Everyone talking about the cold-blooded killer?”

“Yep. You’re still the biggest news the school has had since they discovered Mr. Williams was a closet transvestite.” If Jason could joke about his situation, so could I.
So there.

I reached down into my backpack that I’d dropped next to my chair and pulled out a book as I sat down.

“They giving you shit?” he asked me in a more serious voice. “My dad says you were on the news in front of our house, and that whole getting-punched-in-the-face-with-a-microphone shot was on every news channel all night.”

I dropped the book on the table with a bang. “Nothing I can’t handle.” I turned to a random page and looked up at him. “You ready to do some work?” My tongue licked at the spot on my lip that was still a little swollen from said microphone incident.

He shook his head. “No.” He was staring at me but then put all his attention on his cuticles.

“I heard you got tutors.”

“Yeah. It’s a joke.” He snorted in disgust. “You should see the homework.”

“Is it better or worse?”

“Way better. A single page. Four problems for math, nothing for anything else.”

“What?” I slapped my book shut. “That’s bullshit, man. You’re getting a free ride?” A sound distinctively like one a pig makes escaped my nostrils. Not attractive at all. I was thinking of the mountain of physics homework alone that I had waiting for me in my bag and I’d have to do later after I got home.

He shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “I guess killers don’t need to worry about having an education.”

I couldn’t decide how to react to that, but it didn’t matter. Jason wasn’t done.

He tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Everyone used to be on my case all the time about grades, giving me extra help, making sure I could qualify not just to play but to get into a good school.”

“But you had scholarships all lined up, right?”

His chair leaned back farther, making me think he was about to flip over.

“They’re better if you have good grades to back them up. It’s not easy to find an athlete who can play and do the classwork too.”

“Because they’re all dumbasses,” I said, agreeing with him, or so I thought.

“No, not really.” His chair rocked back and forth, back and forth on two legs. “It’s because most people choose to do the least amount of work possible, regardless of how smart they are. And if you’re good on the field or the court, you only need to do the minimum, and everything just falls into place.”

“You mean people get bogus good grades so they can make the school proud.”

Jason tipped his head and chair down to look at me. “Let me put it to you this way … strong sports programs bring in the best teachers and the most bucks.”

“For college maybe.”

“Not just college. Don’t fool yourself. You saw the car that Coach drove around, right?”

“Who didn’t. Mercedes SUV, right?”

“Yeah. You don’t think he paid for that out of his pocket, did you?”

I shrugged. “I guess I did. Maybe his family has money.”

“Bullshit. He was given a new car to
borrow
every year.” Jason put the word
borrow
in finger-quotes. “Same as the assistant coach. But you don’t see that happening to the woman’s softball coach, do you?”

“I have no idea what she drives.”

“She drives a nineteen eighty Toyota Corolla, covered in dents.”

“What about the track coach?” I asked, kind of joking. I imagined making a chart of all the coaches and their cars to prove some kind of point to the world.

“Track doesn’t get shit either. It’s football, basketball, sometimes baseball … the sports that pay big money on the outside professionally.”

“What about soccer?”

“Not there yet.”

I chewed on my bottom lip as I considered what he was saying. “So you guys, the future possible professional athlete golden boys … you help the coach get a slick ride … and you get what?” I glanced over to the door that I knew led to his garage. “You get cars too?”

“Hell no. No one would risk being that obvious. They can’t give us gifts, but they can take us out to dinner, buy us ‘equipment’…,” he used the finger quotes again, “… warm-ups, shoes for playing in, under armor, that kind of stuff. You should see my closet. It’s loaded with shit I probably shouldn’t have.”

“So what’s the point?” I asked, folding my arms over my book on top of the table.

“What do you mean what’s the point?”

“Why are we even talking about this?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. You wanted to dive into the homework and I was telling you there’s no point. I’m going to pass anyway. Or not.” He looked out the window into his backyard. “It doesn’t really matter at this point, anyway, does it?”

“Are we talking about the prison thing again?” His self-defeatist attitude was getting really annoying.

“Yeah. Sorry to be so boring about it.” He glared back at me.

“Okay, so let’s assume you’re found guilty.”

“I will be.” His nostrils flared.

“Whatever. So what does that mean? You have to be in prison for what … twenty years?”

“Minimum twenty-five.”

“So? You’ll only be a little old when you get out.”

“Forty-three.”

“See? You could get married and start having kids then. But you’ll need a job and you won’t get one as a football player. And since you’ll need to
work
in the future, you have to make sure your grades don’t suck.”

“You really are living in a fantasy world,” he said, sounding kind of bitter.

“Maybe.” I stared him down.

“Not maybe.
Definitely
. It’s hopeless.”

“I made you an email account,”
 
I blurted out, no longer able to take the stare-down contest and horrible words floating out there in the air between us.

Prison. Future. Hopeless.

“What?”

Leaning down, I grabbed my iPad from inside my backpack and put it out on the table. “I actually made you a playlist of songs, but I wasn’t sure how to get it to you off my cloud account.” I kept talking to fill the weird silence. “We aren’t friends on Facebook, and I didn’t have your email address, so I just opened you up a new account and put a link to the playlist in a message.”

I turned the iPad on and slide it over so he could see the screen.

He stared at the glass as different windows popped up at my command. I leaned in close enough that I could smell him again; not on purpose, but I didn’t lean back either.

“I haven’t been online since everything happened. My dad wouldn’t let me, and the cops took my phone and computer.”

I paused to look at him. “Am I breaking some kind of rule here, letting you see this?”

“No. He just told me he preferred I didn’t look, and he’s been so upset I didn’t want to make it worse by giving him a hard time about it.” Jason turned his head to face me, our noses just inches apart. “Is it bad? What they’re saying about me?”

I shrugged and leaned back a little, trying to play my rapid pulse-rate and his horrible question off like they were no big deal.

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t pay much attention to that stuff. People are assholes.” I pressed the link to get to the Google mail sign-in page. Things were getting too intense. I felt like the room was shrinking, having him that close.

“Your user name is here,” I pointed to the screen, “and your password is constantgardener99.” My face pinked up a bit at that small admission that I appreciated him noticing me. I prayed silently that he wouldn’t put two and two together and come up with four, i.e, desperate neighbor girl hungry for attention.

He signed in and clicked on the link in the message I sent without saying a word. It brought him to the playlist that automatically started playing. It shuffled the order so that the first one to come on wasn’t the first one I’d put there.

A slow smile spread across Jason’s face.

“You like?” I asked, smiling too, maybe a little embarrassed. Making a playlist suddenly seemed so … intimate.

He started bobbing his head. “What is it? Have I heard this before?”

“It’s
Return of the Mack
by Mack Morrison. From the nineties. Lots of gems from that decade.”

“It’s kind of hard not to dance to,” he said. “Brittney always said I was a terrible dancer.”

“Bitch.” The word popped out before I could stop it.

He laughed and a huge grin lit up his face, erasing all the those sad creases that had settled in before. “You said it.” He stood up and started moving around the kitchen. “Check this out. Can you believe she didn’t like it?”

I hooked my arm over the back of the chair as I watched his stiff body movements qwerk and jerk him over the floor.

“Oh my. Maybe instead of saying ‘bitch’ I should have said ‘starkly honest’.”

He pointed at me. “Get on your feet. No fair judging unless you’re ready to share your moves too.” He clapped his hands and raised his arms above his head and did some kind of weird attempt at a hip swivel.

I got up and rolled my eyes as I let the rhythm take me. “
This
is how you dance.” I moved my legs, feet, and hips in carefully-crafted, awesome synchronicity for a few seconds before waving a finger in his direction. “I don’t know what that is you’re doing over there.”

“This is cutting a rug, busting a move, getting on my gliiiide,” he said, dancing over in my direction.

“You look like you’re having a seizure.” I giggled as his head dropped back and his eyes rolled up into his head.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand and spinning me in a circle. “Dancing With the Stars, here we come.”

I was laughing and sweating within seconds, spinning this way and that, trying not to fall or get stepped on. Jason’s feet were everywhere, way too big for his own good.

“Ow!” I yelped, getting my big toe smashed for about the fifth time.

“Watch those giant toes of yours, lady. You’re throwing off my groove.” He attempted to do a spin and tripped, barely rescuing himself from a face plant by doing some sort of improvised push-up against the counter.

The song faded out and the next one in the shuffle order came on. I swallowed hard as the words started up.

We both stood there swaying and listening to the words, Hootie and the Blowfish talking about how old Hootie only wants to be with this girl who comes from a different world than he does.

Ack! What was I thinking when I made this thing!

“I love Hootie,” Jason said, making a lame attempt at dancing to the rhythm. He either didn’t notice the lyrics or was being a prince pretending like he didn’t.

“Yeah. Me too.” I was going to say something else to try and shift the subject away from the song, but the doorbell rang and did it for me,
thank all that is holy.

“You get it,” Jason said.

“Me?” I pointed at my chest.

“Yeah. If I get it they take a million pictures.” He walked over the front window and pushed the blinds down to peek in between them. “It’s Bobby.”

I rushed to the door and pulled it open, or tried to anyway. There were two locks Jason had to lean over my shoulder to un-do before it would work. My whole body went warm with the scent that filled my nose.

“Hello, kids,” Bobby said, a huge grin on his face. “Can Jason play?”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I GRABBED BOBBY BY THE front of his shirt and dragged him into the foyer before shutting the door behind him. “What are you doing here?”

“Hey, man,” Jason said holding up a hand for some sort of high five.

Bobby failed miserably, slapping his hand around with a loose wrist, never making a solid connection.

“Just came to hang out, see what’s what. Get the answers to our upcoming chemistry exam.” He winked at me. He was completely unashamed of his attempts at cheating his way through that class.

Jason laughed when Bobby’s ears perked up at the next song.

“Rico Suave? Seriously? Are we going old-school today?” He started doing some kind of flamenco move on his way into the middle of the living room.

“Please stop,” I said, “before you hurt yourself.” I leaned on the wood frame that surrounded the entrance to the room.

“You guys hungry?” Jason asked, moving down the hallway towards the kitchen.

“No, I’m on a diet,” Bobby said. “But I’ll watch you guys eat.” He danced his way down the hall behind Jason, and I took up the rear.

Bobby sat down at the table and I joined him. We both watched Jason go to the fridge and start pulling things out, putting them on the counter.

“Are you expecting guests?” Bobby asked as the items piled up.

“Nope. Just you guys.”

Six ham and cheese sandwiches and a giant bowl of potato chips joined us at the table before Jason sat down with three big glasses and two liters of soda.

“Uhhh, what part of diet did you not understand?” Bobby said, cracking off half of a chip and nibbling on it.

“These are for me,” Jason said, taking five of the sandwiches and putting them on a paper towel in front of him. He pushed the one remaining sandwich on a plate towards me.

I ate a chip and looked first at Bobby and then at Jason and back to Bobby again. Everything was too weird, all of us sitting at the table, acting like it was totally normal to eat after-school snacks together. If Jason hadn’t murdered the coach, none of us would be here. It was so, so wrong of me to have a glimmer of happiness over the tragedy, but I did. It was awful.

Bobby put his overly-understanding face on. “So. You killed the coach, eh?”

I kicked him under the table.

“Ow!” He glared at me.

Jason’s jaw clenched, and I wasn’t sure he was going to answer at all, but then he did and it was actually worse than the question, something I wouldn’t have guessed could be possible.

“Yep. I killed the coach. And I’m really sorry that he died, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.” He took a huge bite of his sandwich, pretty much leaving just the crust behind.