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I nodded. “Yeah. Can be. Pitchers get it. Kickers. QBs. Mostly it means you stop being able to do the thing you can do and you’re just dead in the fucking water, who knows how long or why or if you’ll get it back at all.”
“That sounds… bad.”
“Yeah. I mean, it could be he’s just sucking right now. Guys have off weeks. Off seasons, even. Took him a little while to get started last year too. Ellis isn’t fucking helping. But… it’s gonna be rough if he can’t shake it off. Doesn’t matter how long he can stay on his feet if he can’t throw, you know?”
“Can you do something else? Like a running play or something?”
He caught me off guard with that one. “What do you know about running plays?”
“Nothing really. But I’m trying to learn.”
“Since when?”
“Since… we started hanging out. I thought maybe it would help if I didn’t look like a total idiot in front of you. It’s not really that easy to learn football, though.”
“It’s kinda nice that you can be a total idiot about at least one thing. But I can teach you football. If you’re gonna come to my games you should know when to cheer.”
“You want me to come to your games?” He sounded more surprised by that than I expected.
“Well… yeah. I mean…” I didn’t realize I’d been absolutely imagining him roaring from the stands for me, being able to look up from the huddle and see him there the way other guys looked for their girlfriend or their dad or whoever’s eyes made them feel better when shit got tense on the field. “If you want. You don’t have to. I know you don’t like sports.”
“I like whenyouplay sports. I just didn’t know if that was part of the deal.”
“There’ll be hundreds of people there. It’s not like anyone will notice you,” I told him, brushing it off because… I didn’t know why. Like, how hard would it have been to say you’re my boyfriend, you should come to my games? Too hard, I guess.
I was still waiting for him to be offended by something I said or didn’t say, but if he was going to, it wasn’t now. He pushed our empty plates to the far side of the table and pulled up his backpack.
“Okay. Well, let’s make sure you’re playing on Friday, then, so I can come watch.”
I was thinking I was going to kick his ass at Chemistry Match for the hundredth time, but it wasn’t the stack of note cards he pulled out. Instead, he slid a paper across the table to me. Scratch that, multiple papers.
“What is this?” I asked him, not reaching for it just yet.
“It’s a practice test.”
I frowned. “You didn’t say anything about a test.” I wasn’t much a fan of surprises. Especially not this kind.
“It’s okay. There’s no pressure. It’s just time to start narrowing down what you need to work on the most. So we can focus our energy on what’s hardest for you to remember.”
I looked down and flipped through four long pages of practice test. I wasn’t sure what was so practice about it, it basically looked like the last test I’d taken in Mendleton’s, just twice as long. The one where I’d gotten a D and left most of the answers blank. My gut twisted up in a panic. I really didn’t like surprise tests. Or any tests. Or looking like an idiot.
“This isn’t for a grade,” he told me gently. “It’s just for us. Just information. But you can use all your tricks. Write things out if you want to. Picture the cards and the colors and the magnets on the fridge. Remember your pirate game. Whatever helps you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve used my brain before.”
Caleb snorted. “Okay, smartass. Go on, then. Take as long as you need. Fill in the blanks, that’s it.”
He stood up and left me there at the table, putting all the sandwich stuff away, loading up the dishwasher, and I sighed and looked down at the first page.
Yeah, this was the same shit I’d been doing in Mendleton’s— the element name and then a blank space for the symbol. Except, instead of splitting them into mini tests a week or two at a time, I was looking down the barrel at all of them in one go. Thebigtest. A third of my grade. No fucking pressure.
I made my way down the list, filling in the easy ones, skipping the ones I was pretty sure I’d never heard of in my life, and pausing when something seemed familiar, trying to remember if I’d matched it when we were playing, if I’d had to type it in to unlock a treasure chest full of bananas in Periodical Pirates, and a few times stopping to write things out, see if my handwriting jogged anything loose.
It was pretty obvious I knew more than I had when I’d fucked up that test in class. And more than I even realized I did, my hand just scribbling out answers when I’d barely looked at the question. Sucked to have a second ofHoly shit, I know thatfollowed up right away byYeah, not good enough, thoughwhen there were still so many blank spots. Too many.
When I was done and flipped it over, dropping my pen and raising my arms up in the air, I looked up at where he was leaning against the counter, watching me, and we were both surprised.
“Finished?” he asked me.
