NOVEMBER 9, 2009
The practice field is a different place beneath a gray sky with a freezing wind knifing across it. I try to time it so that I’ll appear on the field right as practice finishes, but I am early. The players wear long-sleeved, stretchy shirts under their uniforms. Most wear gloves. Tyler’s hands are bare.
The metal bleacher under my butt feels like a plank of ice as I sit there waiting for some version of the moment when Ashton Kutcher jumps out and everyone cackles about me getting Punk’d. Madison, Paige, and the rest of them are all huddled beneath a blanket together at the other end of the bleachers, hoods of their North Face jackets pulled up like a row of little monks.
The players run up and down the field. They slam into one another. They grunt. Their hard plastic pads clack together. They weave around the field even more like ants than the band kids, all trying to pick up the scent of a trail. It is random chaos, a minor distraction from watching Tyler.
Coach Hines whistles, yells, “All right, y’all huddle up, now! Huddle up!”
They end their meeting with everyone piling hands together, do a tick-tock-the-game-is-locked, clap, and head for the locker room.
Madison yells to Tyler in a singsongy, babyish voice, “Ty-Mo, I already finished your assignment in English. Wanna come to Paige’s house and I can print it out?”
I think of Madison’s perfect 800 on the SAT math section. I guess math geniuses don’t always sound smart.
Tyler pulls his helmet off. His hair is flattened against his head with sweat. He shakes it out and shoots Madison the Dimple. He doesn’t even look my way.
Did I imagine the person he was at the quarry? Did I hallucinate him asking me to come here?
The team manager hands him a towel and takes his helmet. He wipes his face and walks toward the bleachers. By the time he reaches us, he still hasn’t looked at me once and I’ve concluded that he’s a psychopath who set this all up just for the fun of torturing me.
“Madison, thanks, you’re a sweetheart. But I’m good. I think my girl A.J.’s got me covered.” He tilts his chin my way. “Paige, Madison, you all know A.J., don’t you?”
There is a fraction of a second’s pause. Enough time for me to study Paige Winslow’s and Madison Chaffee’s faces to see if they are in on the joke. They aren’t. Instead they deal gracefully with whatever reversal of the laws of physics has allowed me to enter their gravitational field.
The team manager takes Tyler’s used towel.
“Madison, you want to give A.J. my homework?”
Madison nods her head, probably to help the process of me going from utterly invisible to being a fully formed object capable of stimulating the rods and cones in her retina. “Not a prob.”
When Tyler leaves for the locker room, the girls turn away from me. Not in a mean way. Just a sort of been-there way. No doubt they figure that I am some epic skeeze bag who is doing things to Tyler that require the limberness of a Ukranian gymnast and the morals of a bonobo monkey. That there have been others like me before and there will be others like me after.
Madison pulls some papers out of her zip-up notebook and brings them to me. I want to tell her that I am as baffled as she is and that, no doubt, Tyler will return to their planet very soon. But she seems so genuinely friendly when she says, “Don’t write too neat. That’s a giveaway,” that I just nod and take the papers.
Some might say that Tyler Moldenhauer is just using me to be his gay cover-up. But so what? I’m just using Tyler Moldenhauer too. To be happy.