Ezra rolled his eyes and tugged on the brim of his hat. “Seriously?”
“What?” I shrugged. “Can’t help it if the walks clear my head, and there’s the bonus of fans getting to wave to me when I walk by.” Who was I to deny them that pleasure?
“They only care about us when we’re winning,” Cole said, shaking his head.
“Which is why I need to make sure I’ve got my parade route locked down for all the cheering this season.”
“Way to jinx it,” Ezra grumbled.
“Just telling the truth as I see it.”
“If you want to walk, that’s fine with me. I’ve got better shit to do.” Ezra left the locker room, marching like the floor had pissed him off.
“Come on, Cole.” Hollis, our quarterback and another of my roommates, marched out of the physiotherapy room and snapped a towel in his direction. “Get your ass in the shower. We don’t want to jinx the season, so we’ve all got to be at Welcome Wagon.” He wrapped a fresh towel around his waist.
Cole massaged his knee. “Doesn’t participating after losing to Fulton U for the past two seasons make it seem more likely that we’re actually jinxing ourselves?”
I stopped midstride with my foot dangling in the air. We’d been at Welcome Wagon every year, and every year we had made it further in the play-offs only to lose. All eyes were on us during the campus tradition. The attention was magnetic. Maybe this time would be the time it worked.
“Better to get everyone cheering for us while we can.” The mood on campus after last season made it hard to go to class. It had been hard to hold my head up and brought back all those old memories from high school before I bulked up and found my football family. After last season, there had been long, uncomfortable weeks where it felt like everyone was staring and not in a good way.
But the summer break seemed to have made a lot of people forget or at least have hope for what the new season would bring. I turned and spread my arms wide. “You know what this season will be like. I’m not giving up a single party opportunity. Who knows how many we’ll get. Let’s have some fun. Remember what that feels like?”
Cole glared and gritted his teeth, setting off a squeaking and grinding noise that made me want to explode my own ear drums. “I can’t even feel my legs from the knee down. How am I supposed to have any fun?” His hip injury from the summer was slow to recover.
I held out my hand.
He grabbed onto it, locking his fingers around mine.
I pulled him up.
“With Mikelson”—he glanced over his shoulder—“on my ass, I don’t remember what fun is anymore.”
“Come on, you’re at the center of it all. Other than all eyes on Hollis, they’re all waiting for you to toss that snap.” I raised my hands in the air like I was painting a picture of the adoring fans all cheering and screaming our names.
“For now.” His eyes clouded, and his jaw clenched, setting off the vein in his neck. “The target on my back just got a hell of a lot bigger.”
“That’s why this year, it’s all about no distractions. You’ve got this. We’ve got this.”
I finished up first and grabbed my stuff. The locker room had emptied out in record time. Cleaning crew wandered through picking up discarded athletic tape, bandages and everything else used to hold us together. Most of the guys would crash for a while before Welcome Wagon began. It was an off-the-books St. Francis University aka STFU tradition that the administration hated.
With a towel around his waist, Cole walked out of the showers. He looked dead on his feet.
“Hauser, the coach wants to see you,” an assistant coach called out from the doorway leading to the coaches’ offices.
“Fuck.” He didn’t even try to muffle it. “Can I at least get dressed first?”
The coach shot him an apologetic look. “He said now.”
Gripping his towel tighter, Cole turned toward the offices.
“Do you want me to wait for you?” Cole might need to decompress after a talk with Mikelson or maybe just throw a few things. We’d all been there. Sitting alone after a meeting with Coach was an invitation for shitty things trying to pull you under. I don’t know where he got his motivational advice from, but it might’ve been the 7th circle of hell.
“No use in both of us being miserable,” he said and marched off.
I shoved through the doors to the outside and inhaled the first breath of the new school year and the official start of the season.
Stiff soreness worked its way through my muscles, but the football high was still there, humming through my veins. With a bottle in hand, I gulped water on the walk back to The Zoo. The moniker followed us wherever we lived, mainly due to the parties post-season. If there was one group of guys who knew how to blow off steam, it was football players who’d been avoiding booze for months and didn’t have to wake up at 5 a.m. for practice the next day.
Cars lined up curbside in both directions—trunks brimmed with boxes and SUVs had couches strapped to the roofs and back windows you couldn’t see out of. Horns honked as people were rushed to unload their crap and haul ass off campus.
Dad hung out for a few hours before the trip back home two weeks ago before the long trip back to Harvard, Mass. One perk of moving in for training camp was not having to deal with the gridlock madness that took over the campus for the weekend before classes started.
I ducked through one of the lawns with residence halls on four sides and got to our street. It wasn’t as packed, since most of the people on the off-campus side had arrived early when their leases started to avoid the campus chaos. But the other half of the street teemed with brand new upperclassman moving all their things into the four-person apartment clusters.
I turned the corner down the street that ran the length of campus where I’d call home for the next two years. Our place was right on the dividing line between on- and off-campus. It was the best of both worlds and meant we didn’t have to worry about leaving for the winter breaks or the summers.
My phone buzzed.
I grabbed it out of my pocket. “Hey, Dad.”
“Hey, son. How’d practice go?”
“I’ll let you know once the adrenaline fully wears off. I left the field a little while ago and I’m on my way home.”
“Didn’t practice start at eight this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s nearly 1pm.”
I stared up at the sky, squinting at the sun. Losing track of time during practice happened a lot. I could tell he was shaking his head even from the other end of the line.
“That coach,” he grumbled.
“I wanted to play for the best.” Not that Mikelson deserved me jumping to his defense, but for my own dad to think I couldn’t handle the work it took to be a winner stung.
“You always wanted to be the best.” His chiding tone shifted and rippled with amusement.
“At least I’m not that scrawny kid forcing you to play with me in the back yard anymore.” My dad went to every game once I started playing for my high school team. His car was always the first one driving behind the team bus for away games, and he even came to practices when things were slow at the warehouse. Making him proud was half the reason I’d started playing to begin with.