Page 6 of The Game Plan

“I don’t know you. You don’t even know my name.”

“Miles Cavanaugh,” she says, shooting me a victorious grin. “You’re number 14. You’re a linebacker.”

Okay, she’s got me there. Maybe if my dad wasn’t wearing a jersey with my name on it…

“I don’t have a tutor or study guides. I’m doing fine on my own.”

She’s undeterred. “Come on. I can make it worth your while.”

This makes me laugh. “You have nothing to offer me.”

“You don’t know that.”

I look her over again. She’s in a sorority, if the teal and silver letters on her navy sweatshirt mean anything. Her dark blonde hair is tied up into a grubby top knot, her makeup light and natural. She’s pretty in that effortless way, which means she’s bad news for me.

“Trust me, Sister, you’ve got nothing I want.” My stomach rumbles, reminding me I’ve just spent four hours exerting a tremendous amount of energy on the field. “I’m hungry. Can we go now?”

“Of course, honey,” Mom says. “Are you sure your friends don’t want to join us?”

They ask every week, and every week, my friends decline. Barrett’s family situation is complicated—they all live in Boston or in the surrounding suburbs, but they never show up to the games. Tucker, Greg, and Amir all want to give my parents and me some privacy, considering we never get it when I’m home with my sisters, and Wes is just antisocial as fuck. The guys are cool to hang around for a bit, but they never want to encroach upon my family time.

“Where are Mack and Ash?”

Mom sighs. “Mack tweaked her ankle at practice. She’s fine, just resting.” She shakes her head. “Ash has a birthday party, some girl from her squad.”

My sisters couldn’t be more different if they tried. Mackenzie is almost eighteen, a senior in high school and a three sport athlete. Her swim team won state last year, and in her downtime, she plays tennis and basketball, three completely different disciplines. Ashley is fifteen and a high-maintenance drama queen, which is par for the course with cheerleaders. She’s not just the captain of the JV team at her school, she also does competitive club cheer year-round. She’s the world’s cheeriest cheerleader, and I love her for it.

It makes sense. My dad played football in college. My mom was a nationally ranked tennis player. Athleticism is in our blood. Newton is in our blood. It’s where they met close to thirty years ago. They lived in Athlete’s Village, same as I do. It’s our family legacy.

We make idle chit chat during dinner. We come to the pub every week. It’s good, it’s relatively cheap, and it’s packed with people who have been drinking all afternoon. I get a few claps on the back from random strangers as we walk in.

That’s what I hate most about being a football player. People think I belong to them, that they deserve a piece of me. At the end of the day, I receive a partially subsidized education in exchange for my performance on the field. I’m an ambassador for the university, whether I like it or not, a semi-public figure. I don’t get any true privacy. My height, my weight, even my GPA is public information.

Tomorrow morning, everyone will have forgotten about me and my four sacks. I’ll fade back to being a hulking shadow, lurking in the background, a spectacle too big to truly be ignored. But, they will. Ignore me, that is.

I don’t know why perfect strangers feel it’s appropriate to comment on my size. Maybe they’ve never seen someone as big as me. That doesn’t make me a circus animal, a spectacle to be commented on.

My parents have never treated me as anything but normal. My sisters are brats, yeah, but they don’t care about my performance on the football field—they care about me, period.

After dinner, my parents walk me home. Mom offers to come back tomorrow with a pot of chili, which I don’t turn down. My roommates will thank me if nothing else. It’s better than walking to the dining hall for our three meals a day, or across campus to the football training facility for our grab and go snack stations.

Barrett and Tucker are sprawled on the sofa when I get home, playing Madden. Wes is sitting in the corner chair—his favorite—with a Tom Clancy novel. I know for a fact that it’s not the same book he was reading last night when he was sitting in that very same spot. He sits with us so he can pretend he’s being social, so he can pretend to be part of the group. We don’t mind. Occasionally he’ll make a pithy comment or observation and then we’ll all go back to normal. He keeps to himself. I respect that.

“You’re back early,” Greg says, coming out of the kitchen with a banana in one hand and an orange in the other. “Dinner with the parents didn’t go so well?”

“It was fine.”

Greg grunts. “Are you going to the Delta party?”

“Yeah, right.”

He laughs. “Cool. So it’s not just me sitting at home on a Saturday night, then.”

“And how is that different than any other Saturday night?”

I’m perfectly fine to spend a night on the couch, much like we do every Saturday night. Today’s game was a good one. Northeastern’s offensive line are big, hulking dudes. There were a couple of plays where I barely managed to get my man. My body is battered and bruised, sore and aching. My knees and hips are killing me. Tomorrow I’ll need some time in the team’s recovery hot tub for sure.

It drives the rest of the team crazy that the linebackers are content to stay in on a Saturday night. It’s what makes this house such a great fit. None of us are all that into partying or dating. Amir has had this on and off thing with his girl for the last two years, but they’ve been off since the semester started, so I don’t know what’s going on there. Tucker is celibate by choice. Some kind of trauma none of us has dug too deep into. Wes doesn’t talk to people unless they’re on the team, and even then, he communicates mostly in grunts. Greg and Barrett are the two most likely to bring a girl back to our place, and on the rare occasion it actually happens, we politely pretend we don’t hear any middle of the night bed squeaking.

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