151 Days (32 page)

Perkins shook his head and laughed. “Okay. Nathan, I owe you a drink. You were right about your son.”

I paused, not sure my dad knew anything about me that wasn’t bad.

“I told him you were practically an Aggie already,” my dad explained. “I bet him a drink that he had never met a kid who wanted to get into his school more than you.”

I had no idea what to say to that. It almost sounded like my dad was proud of me.

“Okay then, so this weekend good?” Perkins said to my dad.

“Sounds great. We’ll drive down Friday and get a room in College Station.” They both got up and shook hands.

Perkins handed my dad a card. “Call this number when you’re in town, and one of the recruiters will be by to show you around.” He looked at me. “Next time we meet, Brad, I might just be your coach.” He held his hand out, and I felt my control slip.

“Can you wait one second while I go get my baseball cards? I would love for you to sign your rookie card.”

My dad sighed as I ran upstairs in my socks, trying not to holler in joy as I went.

T
HAT
NIGHT
at dinner, my dad brought the cruel reality crashing in on my dream.

“They say this is to show you around the school, but what they are really doing is checking to see if you’re the type of person they want to waste a couple hundred thousand dollars on. So you need to be on your best behavior. No, scratch that, I’ve seen your best. You need to be better than that.”

He accented every word by waving around a chicken leg, which made him look even more pompous as he declared what was going to happen. My mother, as always, tried to lessen his effect. “Now, Nate, if they didn’t want him they wouldn’t have offered to show him around.”

“It’s not true,” my dad went on, as if I wasn’t sitting at the table. “Plenty of kids out there with a good arm and a fast hustle. Trust me, they have a dozen guys lined up for this one spot. He needs to knock them out.”

“I’m sure he will,” my mom said, giving me a smile.

“That makes one of us,” my dad mumbled under his breath.

B
EFORE
I
was just anxious; now I was anxious and panicking as the week slipped by. The team was crazy for the news, especially Josh, who had taken up the role as my de facto best friend since Kyle dumped me. It was nice because no one else brought up the fact that I was suddenly single. At least Josh talked with me about it.

“So, nothing?” he asked as we ate lunch in the student union. Since Kelly, no one really wanted to eat at The Table anymore. It was like, without him there, it wasn’t the same. So most of the group just gathered into smaller groups that ate in other places. A lot of the team had decided on the student union as their home base.

No joke intended.

I shook my head as I looked out the window toward the music building. I could see Kyle, Jennifer, and Sammy eating there, talking—everything we used to do. My sandwich tasted like ashes in my mouth. “I called three times last night. His mom finally said he went to bed at eight. Kyle hasn’t gone to bed at eight since he was in diapers.”

“That’s cold,” Josh agreed as I looked away from the window. “But still, A&M, dude. That has to be exciting.”

I shrugged. “Between my dad and no Kyle, I have a bad feeling about going.”

“I would hit my grandmother over the head with a snow shovel for a chance at what you got, man.” I looked up at him, and he added hastily, “I meant the scholarship, not the Kyle part.”

That made me laugh. “You’re good, man,” I said to him. “You have to have offers so far.”

He nodded as he took a sip of his Coke. “Yeah, but none of them are A&M.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

The rest of the week plodded on as my nervousness about the weekend grew worse. My mom kept trying to convince me it wouldn’t be that bad. My dad did nothing to make me believe her. Thursday before practice, Jennifer was waiting for me by the locker room.

“Hey, stranger,” she said, smiling warmly. At least, it would look like that to anyone else. I had known her too long not to know when something was wrong, I suppose I had always had that ability; the difference being, before I would just find reasons to be elsewhere until it passed. As I walked up to her, I marveled again on how much of an asshole I used to be.

“Hey,” I said, putting my practice bag down. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she said way too quickly. “I just hadn’t talked with you in a while, and so I thought—”

Yeah, she was really bad at this.

“What’s wrong?” I said, interrupting her. “It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s that if I’m late to practice, Gunn will make me run extra laps, and at this point I have run enough to get to Africa and back.”

She sighed and looked away, which meant she wasn’t sure how to start.

“Is this about Kyle?” I felt my heart begin to pace faster as I asked.

“Okay, look. He has been in a mood lately. A bad one. A seriously bad one. At first he was just short with people, and then there was the meeting….”

“How did it go?” I asked her. I had purposefully stayed away from it because I knew Kyle didn’t want me there.

She rolled her eyes. “Think about the worst-case scenario and then multiply it by a thousand.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad?” I asked, disbelieving since I hadn’t heard about anything happening. In fact, I hadn’t heard of one person outside of Kyle, Jennifer, and Sammy showing up. If one of the guys had dropped in to cause some shit, I would have heard about it by now.

“Trust me, there was yelling and screaming, and Kyle losing his shit….”

“About what?” I asked, shocked.

As she opened her mouth, the locker room door opened, and Coach Gunn glared at me. “You really like running, don’t you, son?”

Fuck
.

I grabbed my bag and gave her an apologetic look. “I have to bounce. Call you after practice?”

She nodded and gave a half smile to the coach.

“Miss Rogers, nice to see you again,” he said.

Jennifer gave me a half salute. “Sir, yes sir,” she said and took off toward her car.

As I walked in, Coach Gunn said in a low voice, “You know how I know you’re really gay?” I looked up at him in confusion. “Because you didn’t ask that girl to marry you. It was the only possible excuse.” He smiled, and it made me chuckle.

“Yeah, she is great,” I said, watching her get in her car as the locker room door closed.

What was wrong with Kyle?

I
FOCUSED
on practice and let Kyle slip from my mind for the time being.

I love how that makes it sound like I actually stopped worrying for a while. Truth was, my body was on autopilot while I thumbed through all the things that could be wrong with him. I wanted to think it was me, or the lack of me, since it was the lack of him that was fucking me up. But if he was that upset because of our breakup, why wouldn’t he just take my call? When I heard the coach’s whistle blow twice, signaling the end of practice, I was ready to skip a shower and just race over to Kyle’s house and make him talk to me.

I got a couple of steps before I saw my dad standing next to Gunn, the two of them laughing about something. My dad looked up at me when I got closer. “Hey, get changed. Your mom packed you a bag of clothes so we can leave tonight.”

My mind stumbled over itself. “Like, right now?”

My dad’s smile dimmed a bit as he answered. “Yes, like right now.”

I tried to calculate the chances of him taking me by Kyle’s before we left. I had a better chance of finding pirate’s gold on the bottom of my locker. Instead I just walked past him into the locker room, pissed that life kept getting in my way. I practically tore my uniform off and threw each piece, balled up, into my locker with force. I was practically nude when Josh walked up to me slowly. “Whoa,” he said carefully. “What did those cleats ever do to you?”

I realized I had one of my cleats in my hand and was about to hurl it into my locker with the rest of my uniform. Instead I just dropped it and sat on the bench. “I really think I am never getting back together with Kyle.”

Josh sat down next to me. “Hey, don’t talk like that. You can’t give up on it now.”

“Something is wrong with him, and he won’t talk to me, and now my dad is here, and I won’t be back until Monday, and this sucks,” I raged.

Paul, one of the younger players, walked by and saw Josh and me sitting together on the bench practically naked and gave us a look. Josh looked up at him and growled. “Hey, noob, you keep staring, I’m suddenly going to remember you didn’t get initiated to the team last year.” Paul took off like his hair was on fire.

“Did we initiate anyone last year?” I asked him.

“Yeah, dude, we made them strip down and do something humiliating because we’re trapped in a bad ’80s teenage movie.” He shook his head at me. “Of course we didn’t initiate anyone, but he doesn’t know that.”

That made me laugh despite how upset I was.

The doors from the field slammed shut, and I saw Gunn and my dad walk toward his office. “Fuck, I need to change.”

“How about I go talk to him?” Josh asked.

“My dad?” I asked, grabbing my towel and shower bag.

“No, Kyle, you idiot,” he said, following me into the shower area. “While you’re gone, I can go by and make sure he’s okay. Maybe talk you up some? You never know, might do some good.”

I turned on my shower. “Or you could make things ten times worse by just showing up.”

I lathered up my hair and heard him say, “I’ll stay out of it, but no offense, dude. How much worse can it get?”

W
E
WERE
about an hour out of town when my dad asked me if I was hungry.

I shrugged my shoulders as I watched the nothing outside my window.

“What’s up?” he asked. “I’d think you would be bouncing off the walls, you’ve wanted this so long.”

I looked back and him and gave a weak smile. “I am, Dad, really. I just have a lot going on right now.”

He looked back to the road and glanced back at me a few seconds later. I couldn’t read the look on his face, but it wasn’t good because he pulled the car over. He turned it off and shifted to face me fully. I felt my stomach begin to sour as he began to lecture me. “No, in fact you do not have a lot going on right now,” he informed me sternly. “In fact, you have nothing else in your life besides this interview, period. Your entire life, everything is wrapped up in this weekend, and I don’t want your mind somewhere else.” He let a few seconds go by before adding, “Or with someone else.”

I looked up, and I knew he knew about Kyle and me.

“Breakups suck, Brad. That is a fact of life. The thing is, you get angry, cry, and move on with your life. You don’t let your future tumble out of your grasp because of it. So you have tonight and some of tomorrow morning to get over it, but when you walk onto that campus, you had better have gotten over it or better at hiding it. Either way, it’s done. Got it?”

I nodded, knowing there was no way I could argue with him about this.

“There’s a Whataburger up ahead. You hungry or not?” he asked as he started the car.

I nodded.

“Fine,” he said, pulling back onto the highway.

After another few minutes of silence, I asked him, “You ever have a breakup screw up your entire life?”

He didn’t look over at me as he drove. “Sure,” he said, thinking about it. “It was when your mom broke up with me when I told her I was going to school out of state.” In a much more subdued tone, he said, “Heck, that was the reason I got drunk and kicked out of college.” I was shocked, since I was pretty sure my parents barely tolerated each other. “Anyway, I do know how a bad breakup can fuck up your future. So I am speaking from experience when I say, don’t let your heart ruin your life.”

He took the next exit, and we got Whataburger, but neither of us talked much.

T
HE
NEXT
morning, I had put Kyle out of my mind the best I could.

My dad was right; this had been my dream forever, and I needed to be fully
here
. Not half here and half wishing he would take me back. So I got dressed as I mentally told myself that I couldn’t mess this up. It was bottom of the ninth, and the winning run was on second. It all came down to me hitting this ball as hard as I could.

My dad called the school, and less than twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door.

I answered it and found myself face to face with the tallest guy I had ever seen in my life. I mean, he was six foot six if he was an inch. He stood there wearing an A&M sweatshirt and a pair of khakis. I just blinked as I tried to comprehend that they made guys this big.

“You must be Brad,” he said in a deep voice that made him seem even more imposing than he was. “I’m Danny.” He held his hand out. I took it and tried not to notice the way his palm completely engulfed my own like I was a child. “Howdy,” he said with a huge smile.

I smiled back, because I had been waiting my whole life to be howdied at A&M.

“Howdy back,” I said, moving a step into the room. “This is my dad.”

Danny ducked slightly as he walked in. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Greymark.” He shook my dad’s hand, and I could see the same awe in my dad’s face as he just shook it back mutely. “Welcome to A&M,” he said when he was done. “You guys have breakfast yet or you wanna jump into the tour?”

“You go to school here?” I asked incredulously. It was stupid question, but I was still trying to wrap my mind around that guys came in that size. “I mean, you play baseball here?”

He shook his head. “Basketball, but the baseball team is pretty busy with playoffs, so they asked me to show you around. That okay?” he asked casually. I realized if I could get used to standing next to a guy who was taller than a building, I would have found him attractive. He had black hair and blue eyes that made it look like he found everything funny. It was like someone took a normal, cute guy and then stretched him to supersize.