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“Mmm. Chairs aren’t really made to fit me. Gets uncomfortable.”
I shook my head. “You really are a fucking giant. Shriver ever try to call you up?” Mr. Shriver was a better math teacher than a basketball coach, but you didn’t have to be a genius to want to give the tallest guy in school a jersey.
Caleb rolled his eyes. “That guy’s been following me down the hall since freshman year. Doesn’t know what no means.”
“You really don’t like sports?”
“I really don’t like much of anything.”
“Bleak, Beast.”
He laughed again. “Curated. I don’t like wasting time. I find out what I like and I like it and that’s it.”
That still sounded a little depressing, I thought, but I nodded, my stomach warm and full of breakfast and the fact that I’d made that shortlist of things he liked for some fucked up reason I still didn’t really understand.
“You ready for me to launch my spectacular comeback?” he asked, moving down to the other end of the table and the rest of last night’s game, adjusting his tiny pile of matches into an even line. I wasn’t sure how he could be so anal about note cards and still leave all the breakfast dishes just sitting there, but it was his table.
“I’m pretty sure you haven’t won a game yet,” I reminded him, sliding down into the chair across from him, squirming in a whole new seat and watching him grin about it. “I won’t hold my breath.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Prescott! Wake the fuck up!”
Riggs bent down and grabbed my hand, pulling me back up on my feet. I hadn’t spent so much time on the ground during practice since… well, ever, maybe. Even before I got bulk, I didn’t take a hit without a fight, and I usually won.
I groaned and bent over a second, giving myself a quick body check. I was sore as shit, my breath a little loose from Riggs’s helmet in my gut, but I still felt pretty decent. The ground was spongy from all the rain, but just enough to make the grass shiny and the dirt satisfying to tear into, my favorite kind of practice day. My head was just somewhere else. Funny the one day Coach was screaming at me to wake up was the one day I’d slept so much I wasn’t even tired.
“You alright?” Riggs asked, slapping me on the back. “Rough weekend? I’ve been there, I can go easy.”
“Nah, it’s just me, I’m good. Go hard, you don’t want Coach screaming at you too.”
Walker showing up ten minutes late for practice had put Coach T in a permanent rage that was probably gonna last all week. He wasn’t looking any better for that extra ten either. If he didn’t speed up his release, Coach was gonna choke on his whistle and drop dead on the field.
“Dude, Walker looks like shit, what the hell,” Riggs said, on the same page, and for a minute we both watched as he bounced around on the other end of the field for what felt like an hour before letting the ball go sailing so far past Ellis’s hands that he didn’t even bother diving for it, he just turned around and stalked back, yelling, and a couple of guys got in between them before things got bloody.
“They’re gonna kill each other,” I muttered.
Riggs nodded. “No doubt. He didn’t look this bad last week, did he?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” It was a stretch to think all the way back to Friday, and it hadn’t been the best day ever, so I wasn’t really trying to. It hadseemedlike an easy win, but… Walker folded a lot of towels last week. Maybe we should have won harder.
“Dude, if he still looks that rough this Friday, you havegotto be playing. Ollie will send him to the hospital. Like for real. That’ll be it. He gets hurt, that’s the season. And he’s… struggling.”
“Yeah. I know.” Not like I needed any extra stress, but Walker’s blindside was like the length of the field right now. If he needed ten minutes to get himself together in the pocket, I had to be there to get it for him. “He’ll get it together,” I said, and boy that wasn’t feeling true. I hated to think Ellis might be right. “You think—”
“You two here for practice, or you here for a gossip session?” Coach yelled, coming up behind us and blasting his whistle. “Huddle up. Come on, everybody huddle up,” he shouted downfield.
Coach Park in middle school used to always use a megaphone at practice, even when he was just standing a few feet away. Fucking hated that power trippy shit. Coach T didn’t need one. Didn’t even cup his hands. His voice carried so far, so loud it scared a bunch of birds off the roof of the school. Could have been a coincidence, I guess, but I didn’t think so. Loud enough everybody dead-sprinted to midfield, no jogging.
“Listen up,” he said, looking around, making sure everybody got a big helping of how unimpressed he was. “We beat Trinity on Friday. Who thinks that was a win?”
Nobody liked answering those trap questions where the right answer was always the wrong answer, but somebody had to, and the fact he couldn’t take two seconds of silence meant it was almost always Ellis.
“Hell yeah, it was a win, Coach. Weren’t you at the victory party? We got Walker’s mom in the pool.”
“Shut it!” Coach shouted, almost before the laughing started, and I looked over at Walker. I knew that sick, half-dead look on his face way too well. I felt like I’d had all the heart-to-hearts I could possibly handle with the guy, but part of me still wanted to pull him aside and go all Beast on him, sayEllis is an asshole. Ignore him, do your work.“Friday wasnota win,” Coach kept going. “Trinity gift wrapped that W and handed it to us. If we hadn’t won that game, I’d have burned all your goddamn jerseys and you’d all be standing here learning how to play basketball right now.”
This definitely wasn’t the same speech we’d gotten post game on Friday, but it never was. Friday wasgood job, Sunday waswho the fuck told you you did a good job. Whiplash if you weren’t prepared, but same old, same old once you got used to it.
