Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

Around nine Coach Z. picks up a bullhorn and tells the world how proud he is of all his guys, the amazing courage and heart they’ve shown, turning the season around after a rocky start, winning seven of their last eight games, earning a well-deserved spot in the playoffs. He says he has nothing but respect for every one of these individuals, nothing but love and admiration. And then he names the whole varsity squad, starting with the sophomores and moving all the way up through the seniors. He speaks solemnly, pausing between each name, giving the crowd a chance to roar its approval. It’s a long, excruciating process. And that whole time I just stand there, waiting in vain to hear my own name rising up through the darkness.

THERE’S A ten o’clock curfew on game nights, so the players make their exit around nine-thirty, when the blaze is at its peak. It hurts to watch them file out, everyone applauding as they make their way across the outfield to the parking lot and board a waiting school bus. They’ll be quiet on the way back to the high school, everybody serious and focused, thinking about the job they need to do tomorrow against Woodbury. It’s a good feeling, riding in the dark with your teammates, knowing the whole town’s behind you.

The crowd thins out after that, but the band keeps playing and a fair number of people stick around. The bonfire usually lasts until midnight, when the Fire Department hoses down the embers. There’s nothing stopping me from joining the stragglers — it’s just a party now, nothing to be embarrassed about — but instead I turn around and leave the way I came.

I don’t feel like going home, so I just walk for a long time, trying to clear my head, zigzagging through the residential streets on the south side of town, turning this way and that, going nowhere in particu­lar. At least it feels that way, right up to the moment when I find myself standing on the corner of Franklin Place, the little dead-end street where the Makowskis live, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve been heading here the whole time.

I’m not surprised to see Megan’s mother’s Camry in Bobby’s driveway, right next to Mr. Makowski’s pickup. Megan used to come to my house on game nights, to keep me company after curfew. Mostly we just watched TV with my mom, but for some reason I felt especially close to her then, sitting on the couch with our fingers intertwined. It makes sense that she’d do the same thing for Bobby, but it pisses me off, too.

I stand across the street, leaning against a tree trunk, looking at the front of Bobby’s house. At least the cheerleaders haven’t decorated it yet. That’ll happen later, after he’s asleep. In the morning, he’ll wake up to toilet-paper streamers on the branches and inspirational messages taped to the door, soaped on the windows of his family’s cars: WE LUV U BOBBY MAK!!! BEAT WOODBURY!!! GO #55!!! I used to get so stoked, stepping outside on Saturday morning, knowing what I’d find, but always pleasantly surprised anyway.

It’s ten-thirty, and I’m hoping Megan won’t stick around much longer. The players are supposed to be in bed by eleven, and with me she always made it a point to leave before then, even when I begged her to stay a little longer, hoping for a little alone time after my mom went up to bed.

You need your rest, she’d tell me. We can stay up late tomorrow.

I’m relieved when the front door opens at ten forty-five, but it’s not Megan who steps out. It’s Mr. Makowski, wearing a Carhartt jacket over his pajama bottoms. He walks across the street with his hands jammed into his pockets. He looks tired and annoyed.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks me.

“Nothing,” I tell him.

“Well, you better go home. Don’t make me call the police.”

“I’m not hurting anyone.”

“You’re scaring people. Standing out here like a stalker.”

That’s not fair. I’m not stalking Megan. I don’t want to talk to her, don’t even want her to know I’m here. I just want to see her leave, to know she’s not giving Bobby those few extra minutes she denied me. I’m not sure why it matters, but it does.

He waits, but I don’t move. Mr. Makowski steps closer and slaps me lightly on both cheeks, the way you do when you’re putting on aftershave.

“Son,” he says, “you better pull yourself together.”

ONE OF the things I learned last year is that it helps sometimes to project yourself into the future, to allow your mind to turn the present into the past. That’s what I try to do on the way home from Bobby’s.

A year from now, I tell myself, none of what I’m feeling right now will even matter. I’ll be in college, living in a dorm, surrounded by people from other towns and other states, kids who don’t know Megan and Bobby and don’t give a crap about the Cougars or the playoffs or our big Thanksgiving rivalry with Woodbury. I’ll lose some more bulk and grow my hair long; none of my new friends will even know that I used to be a football player, or that I got hurt, or that they’re supposed to feel sorry for me. I’ll just be the laid-back dude from down the hall, the guy everybody likes. Maybe I’ll join the Ultimate Frisbee team, just for fun, get myself in shape. I see myself jumping like a hurdler, snatching the disc out of the air, flicking it way downfield before my feet even touch the ground.

Damn, they’ll say. Where’d he come from?

This fantasy keeps me occupied all the way to Grapevine Road, right up to the moment when I turn the corner and see the wall of brown bags arranged in front of Mrs. Scotto’s house. It’s such a strange and upsetting sight, I can’t help crossing the street for a closer look.

There are twenty-eight bags in all, lined up along the curb like headless, limbless soldiers, stretching the entire length of her property. It must’ve taken her all night to drag them out here. They’re not light, either. I give one of them an experimental kick, and my foot barely makes a dent, as if the bag is packed with sand instead of YARD WASTE. I kick it harder the second time, and that does the trick: the toe of my sneaker breaks the skin, leaving a neat little puncture wound that gets bigger with each successive blow until the whole thing just splits open, and all the guts come spilling out, way more leaves than you can imagine from looking at it.

I pause for a second, a little freaked-out by what I’ve done. I don’t know why I’m breathing so hard, why my face feels so hot and my heart so jumpy. I don’t know why I’m still standing here, why I don’t just turn around and run.

Son, I think, right before I go ballistic on the second bag, you better pull yourself together.

IT’S THANKSGIVING Day, and the sun’s barely up, but Mrs. Scotto doesn’t seem all that surprised to see me crossing the street with a rake in my hand. She’s in her robe, standing in the middle of the mess I made, the disaster area that used to be her perfect lawn.

“Clay?” she says. “Did you do this?”

I take a moment to survey the damage, a season’s worth of dead leaves scattered on the grass, along with the carcasses of so many broken bags. Some of the leaves are relatively fresh, bright flashes of red and yellow and orange; others are dark and slimy, fragrant with decay. They’re distributed unevenly across the yard, shallow drifts and rounded clumps marking the spots where bags got overturned, once I got tired of kicking them. I can’t understand why I didn’t get caught, why nobody stopped me or called the police.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I had a really bad night.”

She considers this and gives a little nod, as if she knows this is as good an explanation as she’s ever going to get. Then she bends down and scoops up a handful of leaves, which she deposits in a brand-new YARD WASTE bag. There’s a big stack of them on the front stoop.