All The Glory (3 page)

“Wow. This thing is like a tin can,” he said.

“The tin can that brought your sorry ass home,” I mumbled. Before I’d been nervous about having Jason in my car. Now I just was annoyed he was there and wanted him out.

I took off from the curb and barely got out onto the road when Jason reached his fingers up towards my stereo buttons.

I slapped his hand away and glared at him for a couple seconds. “No touching!” Then I went back to watching the road.
Only ten more blocks to go.

He jerked his hand back and laughed. “No touching? What does that even mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“That makes no sense.” He sounded like he was still laughing inside that stupid big head of his. I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or just feeling a little dizzy over the beer he drank. Whatever it was, it was making me mad.

I tried to explain so his tiny brain would understand. “It makes perfect sense. Do not touch my stereo and I won’t slap your hand. Simple math.”

“Put it on yourself, then,” he said.

“No. I like the silence.”

“You’re sure talking a lot for someone who likes silence.”

“You’re the one talking, not me.” The ridiculousness of the situation did attract my attention. I just couldn’t stop once we got started.

“How do you know where I live?” he asked.

I was grateful for the change of subject. “Because we’re neighbors? Because we’ve lived down the street from each other for over ten years?” Pretty much disgusted with him at this point, I couldn’t wait to get to his house and get rid of him.
 
I pressed on the accelerator to make the time stuck with him go by faster.

A full minute passed before he responded. “I knew that, you know. That we’re neighbors. I just didn’t know if you knew.”

“Oh, yeah?” My liar-liar-pants-on-fire alarm started going off in my brain. “Where do I live, then, if you know me so well?” I was probably being a bitch, but I couldn’t help it. I imagined he was lying to me like he probably lied to everyone.
 
I was busy cooking up this whole persona for him during this short car ride, and none of it was very pretty.

“Riiiight there,” he said, pointing to my house. “The house with all the flowers. You’re out there every single weekend planting those things. They look nice.”

And just like that, he made me feel very small and very stupid and very mean-girl.

“Yep, that’s me,” I say, trying to play it off. “The gardener girl.”

“The constant gardener. Loved that movie,” he said, kind of wistfully.

I was speechless. Nothing I’d imagined about him before was consistent with who he was right then. Was he being a different person for me as some kind of one-act play, or was I seeing the real guy? There was no way for me to know for sure then, but I know the truth now.

But we’re not to
now
yet. I still have things to tell you about
then
.

Chapter Five

TWO WEEKS WENT BY BEFORE I talked to Jason again. During those two weeks I fantasized that I’d be out constant gardening and he’d pull up in his Camaro and we’d shoot the breeze like old friends. But that never happened. We weren’t old friends and he had a life that didn’t include me.

Bobby came over, though, of course. I gardened while he did his cuticles and worried about sun exposure. We hung out and analyzed the living daylights out of that night with Jason.

Our final conclusion was that it was one of those moments in your life where the Universe reminds you in a fairly obvious way that things won’t always be the same and people aren’t always what you expect them to be. At the time we came to this brilliant conclusion, we had no idea how poignantly awful and true that insight would turn out to be for all of us.

It was game day again. Friday. The weather was perfect. The heated talk around school was that this was Jason’s big game.
The
Game. The one where the college scouts would all be attending and filming and making decisions over.

Not being a football player, I really had no idea what this would feel like for him, but I imagined it was a pretty big deal. He was probably nervous. A piece of me wanted to drive over to his house after school and tell him good luck. But he wouldn’t have been there, anyway. I found out later that he was at the stadium, in the locker rooms reserved for the home team.

I went to the game with Bobby, getting there early so we could have a good seat in the nosebleed area, the top row of the stands on the fifty yard line. We liked being able to see the entire game without anything blocking our view, and the players looking like tiny ants running around the field. We’d hold up our first fingers and thumbs and pretend to squish them as they ran around after that stupid ball. Silly little ants.
Squish!

The crowd was buzzing, even more so than usual. Bobby was twisted around so he could look out into the parking lot behind us. He banged me on the arm a bunch of times to tell me what he was looking at as I stared down at the groups of people huddled on the sidelines. The game should have started a while ago, but the players weren’t even out on the field yet.

“Check it out,” Bobby said. “Trouble.”

I turned around to see cop cars pouring into the parking lot.

“Whoa. What the hell is that all about?” I turned around more fully and stood up. “It better not be a bomb.”

Bobby and I held onto the back railing and watched as the squad cars parked with their lights flashing and several police officers got out. The wind ruffled my hair, and I had the strangest sensation that something evil had just blown into town. I tried to brush off the feeling, but it wouldn’t leave.

“I have no idea.” Bobby looked at me for a second before he took his phone out and started tapping away at the keyboard.

“Who are you texting?”

“Caroline. Maybe she knows something.”

Caroline was the one cheerleader who communicated with those of us on the lower echelon of the school’s hierarchy. Her little brother is gay so she has a special place in her heart for guys like Bobby.

A couple seconds later there was a response.

Bobby looked up at me, worry in his eyes.

“What?” I asked, suddenly concerned myself. I hadn’t seen this expression on Bobby’s face often, so I knew it must be a big deal, whatever it was.

“It’s Jason.”

Jason and I weren’t friends. I didn’t even really like him. But in that moment, my heart kind of seized up and I felt sick to my stomach. If nothing else, he was a neighbor. A neighbor who called me the Constant Gardener.

“What about Jason?” I asked, my voice kind of messed up.

Bobby was looking out into the parking lot. “Look,” he said, pointing down below us.

And that’s when I saw Jason being led out of the building in handcuffs and put into a police car.

Chapter Six

THE GAME NEVER STARTED. AN announcement was made over the loudspeaker that it had been cancelled due to an emergency. That was it; that was all they gave us, after calling in an entire battalion of cops.

The stands were full of grouchy adults who apparently lived for this baloney, but all the people my age were more interested in speculating about the reason for the cancellation. The most plausible they came up with was some sort of football player prank gone awry, but that didn’t really explain the level of police response we saw, or Jason being hauled off in handcuffs. I mean, that would have to’ve been a pretty serious prank, for it to end up like that. I thought maybe it was some sort of fight, but that really didn’t make sense either because Jason had never been the fighting type before and there would have been more than one person in cuffs, right? And all kinds of injuries?

I had to find out what had happened. Bobby’s texts had come up empty. Apparently, the cheerleaders were all on lock-down or something. They never came out on the field either that night. Good thing the powers-that-be cancelled the game, because I wasn’t sure how those players would have found the will to go on without all those pom-poms fluffing around and miniskirts flying up.

“Bobby, do you mind hitching a ride with someone else? I don’t feel very good right now.”

“Yeah, sure, you go ahead. Text me later.” He hugged me and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m here for you if you need me.” Somehow he knew that it was the Jason thing bothering me, but he also knew well enough not to say anything about it. There was a time to tease and a time to chill and he was good about recognizing the difference.

I left the stadium and drove home without the radio on, hoping that when I turned the corner, I’d see something up the street at Jason’s house shedding some light on the tragedy that had befallen him.

His house was dark. I drove past a couple times, but with all the lights off, it looked like neither Jason nor his dad were home. Jason’s mom died when he was a kid, so it was just the two of them. I felt really bad for him then. If I’d been the one arrested, I’d definitely want my mom there on the other side of the bars.

I went back home and up to my room after kissing my parents good night. Then I went online with my laptop and surfed the local news channels, hoping to find out what had happened at the stadium.

That’s when I saw the newsflash.

At first it was only on one site, but within an hour, it was picked up by every station.

LOCAL FOOTBALL STAR ARRESTED FOR ALLEGED MURDER OF HIS COACH
.

I kept reading the headlines over and over, different iterations of the same theme, getting sicker and sicker as the seconds ticked by. There was a roaring in my ears, and I could actually hear my pulse slamming away in my veins.

My door opened and my mother stuck her head in. “Babe. Did you see the news about Jason Bradley?”

I nodded, afraid that if I said anything out loud I might sound crazy. It was like I was falling apart, bits of me flying out into the air and dissipating like smoke from a blown-out candle. He was just in my car two weeks ago. He loved
The Constant Gardener
. He was funny, and he checked his zipper before he left the bathroom, which to me was a lot like checking for toilet paper on a shoe.

And he murdered someone? His coach, of all people? How was that even remotely possible?

“Can you believe it?” my mom said, opening the door more fully and crossing her arms over her chest. “It all sounds so improbable.”

“I know,” I said, my voice coming out scratchy.

“You okay?” she asked, frowning at me.

I nodded more vigorously so she wouldn’t question me. I wasn’t in the mood for a mom-interrogation. “Yeah. I’m fine. I hardly knew him.” My gaze slid over to the screen and another headline. “I guess I didn’t know him at all.”

“We never really know people, do we?” She sighed. “I guess that means the neighborhood is going to be a zoo with the press, for a while at least. Just try to stay clear of it, okay?”

For some reason this struck me as very disloyal and insensitive, but I nodded anyway. “Okay. I will.”

“G’night, sweetie,” she said. “Need anything before I hit the hay?”

“Nope. Sleep tight,” I said.

“Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” she said back.

That was our thing. I was pretty sure that if she ever didn’t say it to me, that I’d have nightmares, or bedbugs would actually start biting me. For some reason tonight it took on special meaning. I wondered if there were bedbugs and anyone to wish them away where Jason would be sleeping tonight.

She shut the door behind her and my room went silent. There was a video I could play on the news website if I wanted to. The thumbnail showed a woman news reporter with a microphone in her hand. The piece was about the football player who killed his coach.
 
They were saying
allegedly
, but their stories kept reading as if he’d already been found guilty. The headline over the video jumped out at me.

Coach Alan Fielding of Banner High School found slain in his stadium office. Alleged killer is Jason Bradley, recently taken into custody after he was found standing over the lifeless body of the beloved coach and mentor to thousands of our city’s young men.

I never knew the coach, since he pretty much stayed with football exclusively, but I’d heard he was a nice guy. Tough but fair. He was a big proponent of charity work, so all the guys on the team had to do this Big Brother thing where they mentored kids from bad neighborhoods and taught them about sports and stuff.

Even never having met him, I was mad at Jason for killing him. The news articles were turning my neighbor into someone I didn’t know. My mom was probably right. Maybe I never knew him at all.

It made me supremely depressed. I texted Bobby and told him that I was going to need copious amounts of chocolate tomorrow to get over this, and then I felt even worse when I realized that Jason wouldn’t be eating any chocolate tonight and for sure felt a hell of a lot worse than I did. This wasn’t about me; it was about him. I was so glad to be me that night, which was a first. Normally I was wishing I was someone else, some
where
else.

I thought about Jason and who he was, or who I thought he was. He’d never struck me as the violent type, not even on the field. He always helped people up off the ground and never joined in the shoving matches that sometimes erupted on the field.

Maybe he was provoked. But what could that coach have done to make Jason want to murder him? Did he tell Jason he was going to ride the bench, maybe? Did Jason see his NFL career going in the toilet because of something the coach was going to do, and that was what made him lose it?

Just the very idea made me dislike Jason even more, to imagine him doing something like that, having that attitude. And then I felt bad for jumping to those conclusions without even hearing his side of the story.

Nothing was making sense, so I stopped trying to make it sensical. Instead I put on my p.j.s and shut off my light, climbing into bed and hoping for a very quick transition into unconsciousness.

I fell asleep to tortured dreams about bad people I couldn’t see attacking me and calling me a loser.

Chapter Seven

I WOKE UP DETERMINED … DETERMINED to find out the truth, or some version of it, anyway. I texted Bobby and he showed up a half hour later, dressed for trouble-making. I can always count on Bobby.