Out of Position (21 page)

A moment later, I feel the blankets over my bare rear and tail being swept back. I make the worst possible move: flipping onto my side to see who it is, which has the dual effect of sending lancing pains through my head and giving the doe holding the blankets a full view of my equipment. I’m proud to say that it’s fully recovered from the night’s activities and has assumed its usual morning position at full mast. I stare at the maid for maybe half a second before the pain hits and I wince, shutting my eyes and clapping my paws over my muzzle—had I thought of it, I would’ve clapped them somewhere else, but this was reflex.

The blankets drop back onto me. I hear scurrying feet, and then the door closing. I think she said something. I hope it was “sorry.” I couldn’t really catch it.

After a shower, I feel a lot better. I find my pants and a note from Dev that says he had a league breakfast and he couldn’t wake me up. Which probably means he didn’t try hard, remembering I’d been drinking, and just forgot to leave the “Do not disturb” sign out on the door. I decide to go find my own breakfast on my way back to my hotel. Checking out is the first thing I’ve looked forward to doing there.

It’s over my McMuffin that I start to think about what Dev said. What will I do about school? Because the truth is, I haven’t been really focused this term, and I’m going to need to step it up. The movie and creative writing I could do in my sleep, but I’m barely through a quarter of the book my TA asked me to read for the lit review class, and I haven’t done more than outline my senior thesis. I kind of need that to graduate, so I can’t just slough it off altogether. I tap the steaming coffee cup with a claw and wonder if I can fake the writeup I promised for lit review, and whether the library will be open when I get back to Forester so I can finally look up some sources to decide what to write my thesis on. But both of those thoughts are really just circumventing the main question.

If I take this job with the Dragons, then I’m going to have to drop the lit review. I think I can still graduate if I keep the other two and finish my senior thesis. That’ll mean a lot of sleepless nights. But I can do it.

The real question, of course, is which means more to me, the job or the degree. I have a sense of pride with the degree, and I certainly intend to finish it if I can. But the job could be my career. And hey, I can always go get the degree later. I know a few fifth-year seniors. If I have to take another year to finish up, I can do that. No matter what my father thinks.

I check out of my hotel, with some choice words for the quality of the room that fall on uncaring ears. On my way to the bus stop, my phone rings.

“Hi, sexy,” I say, expecting Dev’s voice on the other end.

“Wiley?”

Oh, uh, shit. Teach me to look at the number before answering. “Hi, Mother.”

“Is this a… are you busy?”

“No, no, this is fine.” I try to put out of my mind what I just said to my mother. “What’s going on?”

“Where are you?”

I look around. “Outside some Peet’s in Boliat.” Shit. I forgot to lie.

“Boliat? Why are you in Boliat?”

“There was a football thing here.” I check a nearby clock; I’ve got plenty of time to make my bus.

“You didn’t answer your phone all weekend.”

“I’ve had it with me.”

“I mean, your other phone.”

I roll my eyes. “Why did you give me this phone if you’re just going to call my room?”

“That’s the number we have programmed into our phone. I had to call the company to find out this number. What are you doing in Boliat?”

“I told you, there’s a football thing here.”

“But what are you doing? Just watching it?”

Close enough. “Yes, Mother. Just watching. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Just going to the nursery today to get some tomatoes and maybe some geraniums for the new border we just put in. Have you been down there all week?”

“Just since Wednesday night. How’s the weather up there?”

“Wednesday night? Wiley, what about your classes?”

“My classes are fine.” Great. This, I lie about.

She gets that tone in her voice. “But if you’ve been gone all week?” and now I can hear my father in the background. I can’t hear his words, but the ‘he’d better not be doing that’ tone is unmistakable. “He says they’re fine,” she says to him.

“Let me talk to him,” I hear my father say.

“I’m at the bus station. I need to go. Say hi to Father for me.”

He’s already on the phone. “Wiley, you’re not failing your classes, are you?”

“It’s fine. I’m fine. I need to hang up.”

“I’m not paying thirty thousand dollars…”

I hate this speech. “You took out a loan.”

“It’s still costing me money. And you’re treating it like it’s some kind of party.”

I sigh. “I’m taking the bus back to Forester now. It leaves in ten minutes.”

My mother comes back on the line. “Call us when you get back.”

“I will, Mother, I promise.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too.” I hang up the phone and walk into Peet’s to get a coffee for the ride back. The bus won’t leave for half an hour, and the station’s only two blocks away.

 
When I get home, there are two messages on my machine: the first from Father, telling me to call him with a report on my classes. The second is from Jason, my lit review TA, telling me that he and my advisor want to see me tomorrow morning at eleven. If it’s convenient. It’s not, but I have nothing scheduled against it, and so I have to go show up. Jason’s a nice guy, an arctic fox who occasionally pings my gaydar. I say occasionally because that’s about how often I’ve been seeing him lately.

He greets me with a smile, dressed sharply as usual. My advisor, Dr. Schruft, smells like he’s been wearing the same light blue shirt and tan sweater vest for the last two weeks. For a bobcat, he’s not very fastidious. He barely acknowledges my entry while Jason says, “Have a seat.”

We wait for him to finish whatever he’s doing with the papers on his desk, which looks to me like intently making me wait. Finally, he looks up and says to Jason, “Go ahead.”

“Wiley,” Jason says, “We wanted to talk to you about 18
^th
Century Lit Review.” He pauses to wait for me to say something, but the first thing that comes to mind is
yeah, I know I’m not doing well,
which doesn’t seem to me to be helpful. So I keep quiet, and he goes on. “You turned in some good work the first couple weeks of the semester, and I really enjoyed your participation in the discussions. But lately your presence has been missed.”

“You’re failing,” Schruft says bluntly.

“I’d be happy to give you a passing grade if you turn in more work of the caliber of the first two assignments,” Jason says. His body language is apologetic, so I’m guessing Schruft wasn’t in on our little arrangement about me missing the entire past week for the combine.

Schruft glances at him. “If you think that simply because you have completed ninety-eight percent of the required work for this degree that you can, what is the term, coast through this last class, you are mistaken. I thought that we had made that abundantly clear your sophomore year, when we had our first meeting and I told you that I would not tolerate any slacking throughout our association. Simply because that association is nearly at an end, do not feel that my standards are loosening.”

“I remember,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think of that won’t get me thrown out of his office immediately.

“I told Dr. Schruft that I don’t think you’re trying to coast,” Jason says, then turns to the bobcat. “I’ve talked to Wiley a couple times and he has assured me that his distractions are legitimate.”

“And what distractions are those?”

Now they’re both looking at me, while I try to remember what I’ve been telling Jason. It’s no use lying about a family problem, because if I already mentioned the football, then lying will just make it worse. I hate lying because I hate being lied to, but even if that weren’t the case, I wouldn’t be able to handle the work of remembering what I’ve said to whom. “I’ve been exploring an internship,” I say carefully.

“At a literary journal, perhaps?” Dr. Schruft does sarcasm well. “I don’t recall seeing a request for a recommendation cross my desk.”

“It’s… with a football team.”

To judge solely from their reactions, I might have just told them that I was expecting to be appointed the next CEO of General Motors. The uncomfortable silence stretches on and on until my advisor says, with exaggerated disbelief, “A football team? Doing what?
Marketing?’

“
Scouting,” I tell them. “It turns out I’m good at it.”

“That’s great,” Jason says, with a smile that feels genuine.

Dr. Schruft turns a withering glance on him. “What you choose to do with the degree you earn is, of course, your own choice and your own responsibility, Wiley. However, what you do in order to earn it is, at least in part, mine. And it would be a dereliction of my duty to my students to fail to warn you that if you persist in pursuing this… football internship… that you will be seriously jeopardizing your chances at attaining that degree.”

“I was hoping we could work something out,” I say.

“We decided that if you can just attend most of the rest of the sessions,” Jason begins.

Schruft cuts him off. “All of the rest of the sessions, Wiley, and take part actively in the discussion. And turn in all the assignments for the rest of the term.”

Jason’s ears go back slightly and his whiskers twitch, eyes widening just a touch. A moment later, I catch a shift in his scent: surprise. “I thought,” he says, and Schruft cuts him off again.

“All of the rest of the sessions,” he repeats.

They both look at me. “If I could just turn in the reports,” I say, “and maybe come to one session a week…”

Before Jason can get one word out, Schruft starts talking again. “Wiley, let me put this in terms you will be able to understand. You are a yard away from the goal line, and this class is your fourth down. Anything short of the full yard will leave you shy of your goal.”

I refrain from telling him that in football, one doesn’t drive towards one’s own goal, and say instead, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

They both look at me, Schruft angry, Jason sympathetic but guarded. “Well, then,” Schruft says, “it looks like you have to decide where your priorities lie.”

 
I try Morty that evening, but he’s in the middle of something. He says he’ll call back. So I call my father to get him off my back with some verbal stalling, at least temporarily. Morty calls back an hour later.

“You ever been to West Hampburg?” he asks me.

“Sadly, no.”

“Don’t go,” he says. “It’s a pit. There’s one decent bar in the place and it closes at one.”

“On a college campus?”

“Yeah, I know. The kids must be drinking somewhere else. I can’t really ask ’em, though. Like asking your boss where to find a hooker.”

I pretend not to have heard that. “Senior day there, I guess?”

He rattles off the names of a few prospects he’s seen. “But you’re calling about the job. McCallum’s okay with us bringing you on, but he says we can’t pay you during the internship. And we wouldn’t bring you on full time ’til July, right before the college camps open.”

“Okay.” I try to make sure it sounds more upbeat than I feel.

“Figure you wouldn’t be making money in school anyway, right?”

“So I can keep going to school?” Maybe there’s an upside to not being paid after all.

“Sure.” He coughs, a good, hacking, cigarette cough. “We don’t get in usually ’til the afternoons anyway. If you can get in by three and work through dinner, that’s all we need.”

The lit review class, of course, is at 1:30 Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’d have to leave a half hour into it to get down to the Dragons’ facility by three. “Let me call you back tomorrow,” I say.

I’ve bought myself time, but I already know what my answer is. Scouting, being useful around the game, made me feel better than anything else I’ve done—as a career, anyway. Even acting. So I decide I’ll try to work out the scheduling. I call Morty back and accept the internship.

For a week, I try to do both, leaving the lit review halfway through and arriving a bit late to the Dragons. It’s clear by the end of Thursday that neither group is happy with this arrangement. But dropping the lit review class is serious, and it’s something that, like it or not, I’m going to have to discuss with my parents.

Mother, predictably, is delighted to hear my voice. She wants to know how things are going, I say great, and I weigh my options. Father’s going to be the big stumbling block, of course. Is it worth it to get Mother on my side only to have Father put the kibosh on both of us? I’m not sure. As it happens, I don’t end up making that decision anyway. She asks about classes and before I know it, I say, “Well, I do have this problem.”

I can almost see her ears shoot up. “What’s the problem, honey?”

“Well,” I say, “it’s about the one class I’m taking. It conflicts with something I really want to do, but I do sort of need it to graduate.”

“If you need it to graduate,” she says, “then you need to keep taking the class.”

I take a breath. “Thing is,” I say, “if this other thing works out, then I might not need to graduate.”

“I don’t understand,” she says. “Not need to graduate? But what would you do?”

It takes me a good long time to force myself to say the words. “It’s this football thing.”

“Oh, Wiley.”

“Mother, I met this guy, and he offered me a job—”

“It’s just a game, it’s not something you ever even played—”

“—with the Dragons, the Hilltown Dragons—”

“—I know you watched it, but so do thousands of other boys—”

“—and it might lead to a real job if I’m good at it, and I am—”

“Wait, it’s not even a real job?”

Just possibly, I may not have presented the facts in the optimal order. “It’s an internship, Mother, that’s how they all start.”

But already I hear her calling my father, and a second later he’s picked up an extension. Great, I don’t even get them one at a time. “What’s this about football?”