David Morrell - Black Evening

I tried to calm him down. "Hey, it's just one loss. We're still the winning team in the league."

He spun so fast he scared me. "He didn't even bring out that dumb-ass statue! He wanted us to look like fools out there! He wanted us to lose!"

"I can't believe that."

"Maybe you like being a loser! I don't!"

He surged ahead of me. When I reached the corner where we always talked for a bit before splitting up, he was already heading down his street.

"Joey!" I wasn't sure what I wanted to say to him. It didn't matter. He didn't shout back.

And maybe you've guessed the rest of it too. The next game, everything was back to normal. Or abnormal, depending on how you look at it. Coach Hayes cussed us out before the game. He set Mumbo Jumbo in the middle of the locker room.

"Why didn't you do it the last time?" Joey demanded. "We could've won!"

"You think so?" Coach Hayes squinted. "Maybe you'd have won. Then again maybe not."

"You know we could've! You wanted us to – "

"Joey, it seems to me you've got things turned around. You're supposed to get mad at the other team, not me. I'm on your side, remember."

"Not last time you weren't."

Coach Hayes stood awfully straight then, his eyes blazing. "I'll forget you said that. Listen, I'll explain this only once. Last time I broke the routine to make a point. It doesn't matter what tricks I use in the locker room to prepare you for a game. What counts is how you play. And last time you guys didn't give your best. It's your fault you didn't win, not mine. You got that?"

Joey glared.

"Besides, it's good for you to lose once in a while."

"Bullshit!"

"Don't try my patience. It's good for you to lose because it makes you try harder next time. It makes you hungrier. It makes you appreciate how sweet it is to be a winner. Don't say another word. Believe me, if you want to play tonight, don't say another word."

We walked around Mumbo Jumbo, touched him, and started the game. Of course, I saw things again. And of course we won, finally letting the other team score.

One more week, the final game. And after touching Mumbo Jumbo, we won that too. City High's ninth winning season. Yet another gleaming trophy stood in the glass case in the lobby near the principal's office.

A lot had happened. My parents couldn't get over my B's and A's. They raised my allowance. They let me borrow the family car more often. Rebecca Henderson and I started going steady.

And Joey and I continued drifting apart. He was obsessed with being a star, with having attention directed at him all the time. So when the football season was over, he couldn't get used to being treated the same as everybody else. He tried out for the basketball team – Mr. Emery, the science teacher, coached it – but he didn't make the squad. "So what?" he said, but you could tell how disappointed he was. "They lose more games than they win. Who wants to be a loser?" He hated how everybody crowded around the new student council president. He finally decided to try out for the drama club – it figured, I thought, being on stage, everybody looking at you – and he made it. He didn't get the starring role in the big production they always put on in December, but he did have a half-decent part. He had to fake a German accent and play a maniac doctor called Einstein in a murder comedy called Arsenic and Old Lace . I took Rebecca to it, and I have to say Joey did okay, not great but pretty good. I mean at least he made me laugh at the jokes, and I hoped that now he'd be satisfied, although I heard later how he was always grumbling in rehearsals about not being on stage enough and wanting more lines.

I'll skip to all the trouble – the following year, our last one at City High. Our grades had put Joey and me on the junior honor role. He and I had stayed in shape all summer. Rebecca and I were spending even more time together. Maybe she was the reason I tried out for the football team again, even though I hated the prospect of seeing that ugly statue again, not to mention getting spooked seeing that other stuff on the field. But I knew we wouldn't have gotten together if I hadn't been a football player, and I didn't want things to change between us, so I tried out again and made the team.

Joey did too, and his reasons were obvious – getting attention, being a star.

Coach Hayes did everything the same. I dragged myself home after practice each day. I heard the same old speeches about grades and diet. I listened to him cuss us out before the starting game (but he didn't make me mad anymore), and watched him bring out Mumbo Jumbo. "Our mascot," he explained, swearing us to secrecy, the same routine (but that squat brown ugly thing still made me feel creepy). And on the field, I saw the double images again and felt the chill creep up my spine. If it hadn't been for Rebecca cheering on the sideline, I'd have…

But I didn't, and because of that, sometimes I think I might have caused what happened, partly anyhow.

We won, of course. In fact, it seemed too easy. Maybe that was why the next game Coach Hayes didn't cuss us out and didn't show us Mumbo Jumbo.

As soon as I noticed he was changing the pattern, I said to myself, "It's tonight," only then realizing I'd heard the same thing last year from a kid who'd been on the team the year before that. The kid had graduated now, and I suddenly realized that next year after my own graduation some other kid would repeat what I'd just said. And I wondered how many others had said it before me.

"No!" Joey shouted, furious.

"One more word, and you're benched!" Coach Hayes shouted back.

Joey shut up. But leaving the locker room, I heard him mutter, "God damn him. I'll show him. We don't need that frigging statue. We'll win anyhow."

But we didn't. And I didn't see the double images. And Joey went nearly out of his mind with rage. He didn't go to the aftergame dance, and he didn't say a word in Saturday's game analysis or Sunday's practice. All he did was keep glaring at Coach Hayes.

And me? How did I help cause all the trouble? I got curious is all. I started thinking about patterns. And patterns.

So what do you do when you're curious? What I did, I went to the school newspaper. Your school probably had one just like ours. The student reporters were the same bunch who put together the yearbook and belonged to the creative writing club. A gossip column, a hit parade column, a humor column. Plenty of announcements. A report from the student council.

And a sports column.

All of this stuff was typed on stencils and run off on a mimeograph machine. Three pages, on both sides, orange sheets stapled together. The City High Examiner . Original, huh? It came out every Monday morning. Mostly I think the school administration set aside money for it because of the weekly "Report from the Principal." School spirit and all that.

Anyhow I decided to do some checking, so I went to the newspaper office, which was also the yearbook office. A cluttered room on the third floor between the typing classroom and the janitor's closet. The place smelled sickish-sweet, like that white liquid goop you put on stencils to hide your typing mistakes. The editor was a kid named Albert Webb, and I guess he'd seen too many newspaper movies. He was always talking about the student council beat and the drama club beat and going to press. All of us called him "Scoop," and he took it as a compliment instead of a putdown.

He was sitting at a desk, shoving his glasses back on his nose, glancing back and forth from a handwritten sheet of paper to the stencil he was typing. He had a pen behind his ear and a zit on his chin. He turned as I walked in.