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You gave up, my dad’s voice taunts me.
I grit my teeth, pick a road, then move my damned legs.
I shouldn’t have gone to Adam’s celebration party. It was a stupid, stupid decision of mine to go. I thought I’d be the better man, congratulate Adam for making it to the major leagues.
I can’t say what I gave him was exactly a congratulations.
My parting from the baseball team isn’t a pretty story.
I remember the party that night, sitting in a room at his big house with my teammates everywhere. It felt like everyone was there, from the others’ girlfriends and wives, to even random friends of friends I’d never seen before. There were so many chicks and dudes everywhere, the faces were all a blur.
Or maybe that’s the eight-going-on-nine beers I had. Another bad idea I had that night.
And the tequila shots.
“You’ve had enough, man,” Pete—the annoyingly thoughtful, peacemaking one on the team—told me. “You’ve out-drank Adam, and he’s half Irish.”
Adam. Just the name made me see red—the red of his hair. Redheaded Irish Adam. Strapping, perfect, curly-haired Adam. The one who stole my dream out from under my limping leg.
The one who, for all I knew, celebrated my injury.
That’s the level of fucked-up my head was at.
I found Adam in the kitchen across a sea of silent, attentive faces. They were all listening to some story he was telling them, his voice full of that boastful gusto he was known for.
I don’t know what came over me. The alcohol gifted me a whole new set of mental capacities I didn’t know I had, and puzzle pieces fell into place before my eyes I didn’t know were swimming around in my head. It didn’t matter if my random conclusions about Adam made no sense to anyone else; it made sense to me, and it was enough to fuel my following actions.
“We sharing knock-knock jokes over here?” I called out with due obnoxiousness.
Adam lifted two superior, bushy eyebrows. Only a flicker of annoyance crossed his eyes at his story being interrupted—his story, which I wasn’t even listening to. “Hey there, Stefan.”
“Knock, knock!” I spat back. “So what the hell do we have going on here?” I asked everyone else, my eyes skimming over their faces and yet seeing none of them. “Adam telling you all how he’s got the biggest dick on the field now?”
He glanced to the left, then to the right, then said, “Stefan, you’ve had one too many to drink. Maybe you should—”
“Hey, I got a great story!” I cut him off. “It’s about a guy who slid home, and instead of ending up at the after party—plot twist!—he ended up in a hos—a hos—hospital room!”
My words slurred together. I spluttered stupidly.
I was acting like a childish little bitch. I had no self-control. I was an embarrassment to myself, to my soon-to-be former team, and to everyone who cared about me at all.
Couldn’t at least one person try to shut me up before I went and ruined everything?
“Stefan …”
“And before he could even lick his wounds,” I went on, “there was already a vulture—a big, loud, redheaded vulture—picking the meat off my torn and twisted leg. How about that?”
The kitchen was eerily silent. Even the music from the other room seemed to dampen. My words rang and echoed around me like they were vultures of another kind circling my head.
“Stefan, bro, no one’s picking at anyone’s meat. C’mon.”
“Bro.” I scoffed at that, stumbled into the kitchen island, then came around it to bring myself face to face with Adam. “Bro … That’s a funny, funny, funny fuckin’ word, isn’t it? Are we ‘bros’?” I was in his face now. I watched as each of my words made his eyelashes bat from the push of my soured alcohol breath.
Every time I said that word—bro—I felt a pang of hurt within me. Was I thinking about someone else?
Was I thinking about him?
Adam pasted an endearing, patient, condescending little smile on his flushed, freckled face. “Stefan, Stefan, Stefan.” He slapped a hand on my shoulder and gave me a little shake—which felt like an earthquake in my drunken state of mind. “We will always be bros. No matter what.”
Always be bros.
We will always be bros.
Isn’t that something I had said to Ryan Caulfield once? Isn’t that what we promised each other, that we’d always be bros?
I remember thinking about Ryan, realizing what I had lost, realizing the “bro” I had let go.
A whole new storm surged into me, fueling my anger all the worse. “You must be so fuckin’ happy,” I spat at him, set off by his words, by my thoughts of Ryan, by everything. “You always wanted my ass gone. Now you got that wish.”
“No one’s happy about what happened, Stefan.”
He was even talking sense. Adam, the prick, was being the mature one. And yet there I kept going, lips flapping. “I know how it really was on that field between us. I know it. You know it. You, Adam, were nothing but a jealous little bitch.”
