Hannah Gersen - Home Field

“I guess I’m just excited to have a permanent job — one that actually makes use of my degree.” She smiled nervously, which made him feel better; he was nervous, too. “Tim’s home sick,” she added. “Apparently he always gets the flu at the beginning of the school year. All those little-kid germs.”

Dean wondered if she lived with Tim now, but he couldn’t figure out a way to ask.

“He actually mentioned you before I left,” Laura said. “He says you’re not coaching anymore?”

“It’s better for my kids if I take a season off. I’m a single parent now.” Dean couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice.

Laura nodded without saying anything, and Dean knew he’d made things weird.

“Sorry, this game is making me antsy. The guy who took over for me, he’s changing everything up. .” He stopped himself, realizing that Laura didn’t care what happened in football games. And that was kind of a relief.

“What are you sorry for?” she said. “I’d be bummed if I had to give up the thing I loved best in the world. Anyone would.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean felt embarrassed; he still had the napkin she’d given him at church. It sat on top of his bedroom dresser, next to his dish of loose change. He glanced at it every night when he emptied his pockets.

“Who’s next?” called the teenage girl working at the concessions booth. “Oh, hi, Coach!”

Dean insisted on buying Laura’s pretzel along with his hot dog and then the girl wouldn’t let Dean pay, saying his money was no good. He put five dollars in the tip jar that went straight to the Boosters.

“I should hang around with you more often,” Laura said. “Free snacks!”

“You want to watch the game over there?” Dean pointed to an empty spot at the fence.

“I actually have a friend waiting for me in the bleachers.”

“I should get back to my kids anyway.” He felt like he’d pushed things too far, but he’d thought she seemed flirtatious. Or at least bored.

“Right,” Laura said. “I should tell you, uh, I actually talked with Robbie today. He was sent to my office.”

“Oh,” Dean said. For a couple of treacherous seconds it was all he could think to say. “I guess that makes sense. You’re the counselor now.”

“I’m sorry, I should have said something right away. He’s a great kid, really great.” Laura’s voice had changed, gotten cool and smoothed out, like she’d flipped on the professional switch. “I’m really looking forward to working with him.”

Amid Dean’s confusion and embarrassment, a sense of loss was emerging. He wouldn’t be able to talk with her in the same way anymore, not if Robbie was confiding in her.

“You know, I pack his lunch,” Dean said. “I pack him the same thing I pack for myself. I don’t know why he’s been going to Asaro’s.”

“You don’t have to explain anything.”

“The vice principal says it’s because he doesn’t have friends, but he has friends. He’s a popular kid. Good-looking. I’m trying not to make too much of it, but between you and me, I think it’s odd—”

She interrupted him with that professional voice. “Dean, I shouldn’t be talking with you about Robbie. I mean, not informally.”

“Of course,” Dean said. But he was confused. What about the way she’d touched his arm in the church parking lot, what about giving him her number?

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” Laura said. “They don’t tell you about this scenario in graduate school.”

He wondered what the scenario was in her mind.

The crowd was very loud again, chanting over the cheerleaders and the band. Dean turned to see Smoot barreling down the field. The boy dodged his attackers elegantly, as if he had some foreknowledge of their trajectories. Dean remembered being his age, the exquisite feeling of gaining control of his body, of his mind, of the two forces being braided together in perfect accord.

“Come on!” Dean said, heading toward the empty spot at the fence. “Go, Smoot, go! Bring it home!”

Dean gave himself over to the excitement, clapping and yelling, allowing himself to believe that his claps and yells were bringing the boy closer to the end zone. In the stands, everyone was on their feet, chanting “ GO EAGLES! ” Smoot slowed, ever so slightly, a few yards from the end zone, and a member of the Beech Creek team slammed into him, coming at him from an angle. Dean was exhilarated by the heavy, animal sound of their bodies smashing together beneath the clanking layers of equipment. He remembered getting the wind knocked out of him. The dizzying, disconcerting pain of it.

“God,” Laura said. “It’s like they have a death wish.”

STEPHANIE SCANNED FACES in the darkened basement room, searching for someone who seemed weird. She had a philosophy — one that she sensed was basically adolescent but that she was not yet ready to discard — that there were two types of people in the world, the weirds and the normals, the normals being those who traveled serenely through life, unhindered by extremes of thought or feeling, and the weirds being those deemed “sensitive,” who felt lots of different emotions about lots of different things. All through high school, Stephanie had assumed that she was in the weird category of people (had assumed that anyone who was even aware of there being two categories must automatically be in it), and that her parents were in the normal category. And with this assumption had come the idea that it was somehow better to be in the weird category, that to be normal was to be timid in some essential way, to not live fully.

Now Stephanie thought she had gotten it wrong. Certainly, she had been wrong about her mother. It was possible she’d been wrong about her father, too, though if her mother was in the weird category, it made sense to her that she would be attracted to someone normal, someone who could distract you from life’s big questions.

That was how Stephanie had felt about Julie Ashbaugh, a girl she barely knew: she was distracting. She had graduated with Stephanie, and when she saw Stephanie at the game, she greeted her as if they’d been very friendly in school, even though the only class they’d ever had together was chorus. They gossiped about the handful of friends they had in common and then they’d watched the game, which turned into a close one and ended up a victory, the perfect game for fans. Even Stephanie got into it and cheered herself hoarse.

Julie was a student at the junior college, and after the game, she and Stephanie went to a party with other junior college students, where they drank coconut rum and smoked menthol cigarettes, a combination that reminded Stephanie of fluoride treatments at the dentist. Julie deemed the party lame and so they decided to cruise the dual, except they didn’t do it ironically, as Stephanie and Mitchell would have. They just drove around and around, listening to the radio — country, of course — and looking for something to do, as if a new restaurant or movie theater might magically appear along the strip, or, more likely, a place that had initially seemed boring would begin to seem interesting after true boredom set in. As the ride went on, Stephanie began to feel claustrophobic in Julie’s car, a Mazda Miata that smelled strongly of synthetic banana, emanating from a yellow pine tree that swung merrily from the rearview mirror. Everything that was dull about Julie could be summed up by this particular aesthetic decision, Stephanie thought. And it was in thinking of Mitchell, and what bitchy thing Mitchell might say about this tropical pine tree car freshener, that Stephanie heard herself say aloud that she missed high school.

Which was how they had ended up at a high school football party.