Page 78 of The Quarterback
Maybe someday he wouldn’t feel like something irreplaceable had been ripped out of him.
Not today, though.
He took the key and his debit card and found room 223. He threw his duffel in the corner and lay facedown on the bed.
A minute later, he pulled one of the motel’s lumpy pillows to his chest and curled around it. “Nick…” He buried his face in the pillow as the sob he’d bullied away since he’d walked out of Nick’s condo—not home anymore—broke loose. He screamed into the dusty cotton pillowcase. Punched the mattress, once, twice. Grabbed the pillow again, as if he could grab on to Nick, hold him tight and never let go. “I love you,” he moaned. “I love you.”
Why did no one ever love him back?
Why was it so easy for people to leave him? What was wrong with him that made everyone walk away, go back to their own lives, and leave him behind?
It was just summer.
You’re my whole world, Justin.
Why wasn’theanyone’s whole world?
He buried his face deeper in the pillow.
* * *
“Yo, Colton, my man!”Orlando was all smiles as he jogged across the field to Colton. He held out his hand for a fist bump.
Colton sent another football sailing toward the crossbar of the uprights in the end zone. Like the twenty-six he’d already thrown, it fell short. Well short. He’d littered the field from the end zone to the thirty-yard line with footballs, passes that didn’t have the power to go the distance of a warm-up throw.
Before his injury, he could launch footballs from just about anywhere on the field and slam them right into the crossbar. He could drop back from the line, haul off like he was trying to strip the laces from the leather, and still bounce it three inches to the right of the upright on the bar like he was calling the pocket in a game of pool.
He hadn’t hit the uprights once today.
He grunted as he released the next ball, trying to give it more power, more force. His spiral suffered, and the ball wobbled before tipping end over end and burying itself in the grass just shy of the five-yard line.
He sniffed and reached for another ball.
Orlando’s fist dropped. He watched Colton’s twenty-eighth failed throw. “Your shoulder still bothering you, huh?”
Colton grabbed another football from the pile at his feet. He said nothing.
Orlando hung around to watch another football wobble through the air before he said, “You’ll get there, man,” and jogged to the rest of the team coming out of the locker room.
If he was going toget there,he would have gotten to that point over the summer. Or heshouldhave, if he’d been diligent about practice. If he’d spent the six hours a day he should have, he’d be where he needed to be. He’d be making these easy throws.
He’d arrived before dawn, so he could avoid the rest of the team. He’d changed in an empty locker room and then grabbed three bags of footballs and headed for the field. He was early enough that he saw the light in Coach’s office turn on while he was on the thirty-yard line. An hour later, the offensive coordinator and the quarterback coach came out to watch him fling balls as hard as he could.
They didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to.
The rest of the team warmed up on the other half of the field as he jogged out to collect his littered balls. Everyone else ran warm-up sprints between the yard lines, catching up and reconnecting as they shook out the summer kinks. Colton stayed in the shadowed corner of the end zone, gathering his footballs for another round of failure.
His teammates, his friends, tried to talk to him as practice got going. Everyone except Wes, who conspicuously remained far away from him.
He hadn’t seen Wes since he’d left him in Nick’s condo. He hadn’t seen anyone else, either. He’d been curled in bed for two days, watching the shadow of the sun arc against the wall through the gap in the motel’s nicotine-stained curtains.
Before, they would have been inseparable. Would have tossed the football between them as they talked. Would have jogged the field together, playing bullshit chase games and testing each other’s sprinting to try to catch each other off guard. He would have sat on Wes’s back as Wes did push-ups, and then Wes would have stood in front of him like a damn giant, trying to bat down his throws as he warmed up against the net. They would have been happy, together, the way best friends were.
Now, Wes kept his back to Colton. He never looked his way.
The team noticed. How could they not? He felt their stares. Started to hear the whispers, too, as the hours dragged on. The muttered curses as his throws got worse, not better. Shorter yardage. Less height. He couldn’t even make the end zone now.
By lunch, his shoulder was killing him. Stabs of pain shot down his arm and his spine, and his muscles were alternating between seizing up and going numb. He tried to shake it off between each throw. Tried to roll his shoulder loose when it got so bad his tears blurred out the crossbeam and he couldn’t see a thing when he let go of the ball.
