Swing State (2 page)

3.

T
HIRTY-ONE SECONDS TO GO.
F
OURTH AND
one on the Schaferville twenty.

The bleachers tremored under Zachariah Tietz's feet. Not normal tremors—he'd been to enough games to know the feel of a game on the line—but tremors like something was wrong. Like the bleachers were going to collapse.

He looked to see if his father had noticed. But Paul Tietz, naked from the waist up, painted white with a sky blue “A” covering his long face, clapped cupped hands and chanted along with the crowd—ARM! BRIS! TER! ARM! BRIS! TER!—oblivious to the distress of both the bleachers beneath his feet and his son, painted in his mirror image.

Homecoming meant spectators who hadn't been to a game in twenty years or more, and thus hadn't seen painted Paul Tietz and son, or heard any of Paul's stories of his Armbrister High glory days. After brief introductions, two towering men with huge hands and boozy breath clapped Zachariah on his flabby back with enough force to bruise:
Attaboy. A fan for life. Lookit that paint!

Zachariah knew the story by heart: his dad had been on the field when Armbrister had won its lone state championship, in
the nineties. Paul, of course, neglected to mention the star back twisted his ankle in a celebratory pigpile following the game-clinching interception against Manchester West, leaving a gap that would have been filled by a replacement player had he, Paul Tietz, third-string kick holder, not heroically run onto the field to take a knee for the good of the team.

He'd heard the stories about the team dozens of times. One of his father's favorites worried him: the epic tale of Roger Conroy's ninety-one yard Hail Mary on Thanksgiving to beat Schaferville at the end of regulation—also known as “The Greatest Play in Armbrister Sports History.” Zachariah had been there in the stands with his father, but he had been three years old and had no memory of the day, the game, of Conroy hoisted onto shoulders in the middle of the field. One of his father's favorite photos was of that day: Paul and a chubby Zachariah, painted blue, cheering the victory.

His father's description of “The Play” always included the bleachers swaying fit to collapse. Thought they'd come down, he always said (and said earlier in the game to the men in the stands). But if we'd been killed right there we would have died with smiles on our faces.

On the field, Schaferville's defense bumbled around the line of scrimmage as the crowd howled. The coach, across the field from where they sat, held his hands in a “T.”

“See that? They had to stop because of us! Time out! Because of the fans!”

The men around them cheered Paul Tietz. The crowd's “ARM! BRIS! TER!” chant continued unabated all around. One of the men began stomping his feet on the last syllable for added emphasis. Zachariah felt his painted breasts—his tietz, as that girl Dixon called them—jiggle against his chest.

I'm going to die, Zachariah thought. None of my game shows will ever be on TV. I will never own a bakery. I'm going to die.

His father clapped and yelled.

During the week, Paul drank beer after beer and watched sports on TV when he got home from the mill. He only watched the news on game night, hoping one of the newscasters would cut to the stands, where he and Zachariah, painted, cheered on the team. They weren't shown often, for which Zachariah was grateful; one of the rotating cast of older kids in the voc wing, on Mondays after he and his father were shown, would inevitably have something to say about his television celebrity as they hipchecked him or wrenched his monogrammed L.L.Bean backpack from his shoulders and emptied it onto the floor or shook him down for money he never had. Zachariah wondered how they knew—what were they watching the news for, anyway?—and held his breath on the couch after the game every week, hoping for a reprieve.

He wanted to stay home and work on
Love Balloon
. Or make bread. But he couldn't. He had to go to games with his father. He couldn't imagine what would happen if he said he didn't want to go.

On the field, the ref blew his whistle.

His father leaned over. Spittle flew from his lips as he yelled over the din of the crowd: “WHAT ARE THEY GONNA DO?”

Zachariah said nothing.

His father: “FOURTH AND ONE. WHAT ARE THEY GONNA DO?”

“Sneak?”

“THEY EXPECT THAT!”

“Put that defensive lineman in there,” one of the men said. “The kid who's gonna be pro. Run a play behind him. What's that kid's name again?”

The teams formed at the line of scrimmage. Zachariah saw the Armbrister quarterback, Brandon Fahey, pointing at the line, waving his hands.

“WHAT ARE THEY GONNA DO?”

Zachariah first envisioned the wrong answer. His dad getting mad that he'd been shown up “in front of friends”—the kind of friends he made every week at games with his flask and boasts—and seeing him take the soccer sock of tennis balls from the closet afterward.

Then he imagined the bleachers groaning first to one side, then the other, before teetering and finally collapsing in a giant pile of sharp edges and flailing limbs, a pointed steel beam slowly pushing through his stomach as he screamed.

“THAT'S RIGHT. THEY'LL PASS!”

The men nodded.

Paul glowered at his son.

Fahey dropped back with the snap and lobbed a lazy arc to MacPhail, the tight end, who pulled the ball to his chest and stutter-stepped out of bounds to stop the clock.

First down.

The crowd roared.

How could they not notice the bleachers?

“PERFECT. STOP THE CLOCK. FOUR MORE.”

The bleachers lurched.

Zachariah hoped his death would be quick and painless.

A heavy hand slammed into his back.

“Some game, ain't it?”

“Yes, sir,” Zachariah said, thinking: we'll all be dead in a minute.

“Games like this make you proud to be a Spartans fan!”

Zachariah thought that if he lived, he'd make a challenge on
Love Balloon:
the Drunk Guy Relay. Run an obstacle course of mental challenges and then make it through a series of collapsing bleachers.

His father leaned over to them.

“WHAT'S IT GONNA BE?”

It doesn't matter, Zachariah thought. They'd all be dead. But he wanted the last few minutes of his life to be as painless as possible. So:

“First down,” he said. “They'll try for the end zone because they have three more after this. An incomplete stops the clock.”

The man who thumped Zachariah's back grinned and nodded. “You started him early,” the man yelled to Paul. “Fan for life.”

Paul nodded and passed the man his flask. He smiled briefly at Zachariah.

Both teams huddled up. Twenty-seven seconds.

Fahey feinted forward with the snap, then dropped back. He loosed a wobbling spiral.

The bleachers, fuse of expectation lit, fell silent.

This is it, Zachariah thought. If he catches the ball—who is that? Laramore—everyone will yell and clap and stomp. There's no way the bleachers will hold. We're right in the middle. I'll fall, then I'll be crushed by everyone landing on me. And there's going to be metal. Sharp pointy metal.

Maybe he'll drop it.

But then it'll happen all over again, second and goal. And everyone will be more excited.

An interception, though.

Yeah. An interception.

His father would spend the rest of the afternoon on the couch, drinking beer, flipping channels looking for sports. Maybe a
baseball game, maybe golf. It didn't matter. His disappointment would be so great that he'd watch whatever was on. Paul got sad when Armbrister lost. He got mad when Zachariah messed up stats or called plays incorrectly. Zachariah hadn't been saying anything when he wasn't sure, which worked.

Once his dad passed out, Zachariah would be free to work on
Love Balloon
. He knew the ending, but he had to figure out the rest.

So that's it,
he thought.
An interception, then
Love Balloon.

The ball wobbled through the air.

Laramore stopped his route and poised himself to make the catch.

The crowd waited to explode and kill Zachariah Tietz.

Behind Laramore, pistoning arms and legs in crimson and white.

Zachariah's eyes widened.

Fahey hadn't seen the safety.

Laramore, frozen, as the piston raced past him up the sideline.

The small throng across the field in the away bleachers erupted.

The men around Zachariah stood silent and motionless.

Schaferville's safety slowed as he approached the end zone. He held the ball aloft and high-stepped in.

Zachariah felt a grin widening across his face. He looked down quickly. The men around him, his father—none of them could see.

It was hard to make the grin go away. After all, it wasn't every day that he, Zachariah Tietz, decided a game, and the fate of everyone in the bleachers, with his mind.

* * *

“Shoulda known the goddamn shafety wash gonna be there,” Paul said on the ride home. “Sherioushly, he'sh the only good guy on the whole team.

“Yeah,” Zachariah said. He knew what happened didn't make sense, but it had happened. He had seen the imminent death of
everyone in the stands, and, through the power of his mind, prevented it.

Maybe his new talent had something to do with his weight gain, which had been stunning in its immediacy. In the course of a few months—summer vacation—he had ballooned. His father, between beers, told him to
go outside and get some exercise, goddammit
. Zachariah thought he got plenty. He rode his bike around, kicked a soccer ball against the cinderblock wall of the school toolshed (this despite what happened to him on the field). But still, his T-shirts began to hug him like he was a sausage, and his underwear cut off circulation to his legs.

The upside—if there was one—was his new wardrobe. He'd needed one. Until last year, he hadn't thought of his clothes at all. But after the soccer field incident his clothes drew attention. His sweaters and T-shirts and cords. He couldn't walk down the hall without someone picking on him. It didn't matter that he'd known some of his tormentors since preschool.

And that was all before his weight gain.

His dad begrudgingly gave him a hundred dollars. Zachariah took it to the thrift store, hoping no one would be there to witness him scouring the racks for clothing that fit. Maybe his powers (as he had already come to think of them) had been active even then: it felt inevitable that someone would be there to make fun of him during the Thrift Store Clothing Challenge. But no one appeared to harass him. Was it because he had used his powers? Because, as he shopped for XXL clothes bearing no logos, in an attempt to render himself invisible, he had thought
I don't want anyone to see me?

He hoped so. Even though it felt impossible.

When else had he used his powers? And how often was he allowed to use them? He thought back. At some point during
the school year he must've thought
I wish they'd leave me alone
when he was being picked on in the hallways. His new clothes didn't make him invisible, as he had hoped: he was the center of unwanted attention everywhere he went. If he didn't know better—and maybe he didn't—he'd say their plainness magnified his abuse. This girl named Dixon, who scared the crap out of him, whose weird burnt smell preceded her, had begun to notice and summarily harass him. Maybe his plain clothes hadn't drawn enough attention away from his new man boobs, which, he thought with a mixture of bemusement and satisfaction, were bigger than hers. Except she never said boobs. She found out his whole name somehow—even though he only knew her first name, Dixon—and called them his “tietz.” Once she began her serial torture, with kids chanting his name as they passed, he wondered how he never saw it coming, that one day he'd get fat (“it happens, though usually in girls,” the doctor had said) and his last name would define one of his most prominent physical features.

As Dixon leaned in and twisted his tietz to what felt like a breaking point, that unidentified but burnt smell overpowering his nostrils, her face hovered only inches from his, sneering. “You can't fight me because I'm a girl,” she had said one of the first times. “If you hit a girl you're a piece of shit and everyone will know it.” The thought of fighting back hadn't occurred to him until she mentioned it. He had no idea how. But he knew what she said was true. He was having a hard enough time already, navigating the new voc halls like a game show challenge with his new, clumsy body. The last thing he wanted was attention. And hitting a girl—even one who deserved it—would call just that sort of attention to him and make his life even worse.

Another time, as she twisted, she leaned in, burnt smell enveloping him, and said, “You're a perv, aren't you? You want to kiss me. I can tell.”

He hadn't—until she mentioned it. And he wasn't sure he really wanted to. But who else would he kiss? Girls didn't know he was alive. She showed him more attention than anyone in school, not counting teachers.

Kids passing chanting tietz, tietz.

“Well?”

“Uh,” he said. “I, uh . . .”

“Or maybe you're growing your own set of tietz so you can feel them.” She paused. “Do you want to feel mine?”

She jutted her chest toward him.

He felt his face flush. And he felt himself getting hard down there.

Oh no, he thought. Not now.

“Do you?”

“Uh. Um . . .”

“You're always looking at them.”

Usually when she finished twisting she heaved him backward. That time, though, she simply stopped. She was taller than him by a good six inches and looked silently down on him as she drew her hands back. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was hard. And he hoped she would.

She whispered “Tietz, you're a perv.”