question.
“That’s Raffi, right? ‘Big, Beautiful Planet’?”
“Ah, shit.” Larry punched EJECT . “After a while I don’t even know what I’m listening to anymore.”
“I actually like some of his stuff,” Todd volunteered. “You know, just a song here and there. I’m not president of his fan club or anything.”
Larry didn’t respond, and Todd wondered if he’d been more forthcoming on the subject than he needed to be. His discomfort grew more acute at a red light just beyond the center of town, when Larry shifted in the driver’s seat and examined Todd’s body with disconcerting thoroughness, his gaze lingering on the legs and moving slowly upward.
“You look good,” he said. “Been going to the gym?”
Oh shit, thought Todd.
He felt like an idiot, more embarrassed on Larry’s behalf than his own. Because what was the guy supposed to think? He pulls up, calls you a pervert, and invites you into his van, and you climb in without even asking where you’re going. The average five-year-old would have known better.
“I run a lot,” Todd explained. “Lotsa push-ups and crunches and stuff.”
“This is unbelievable.” Larry grinned and gave Todd a hard but not unfriendly sock in the arm. “I’ve been searching for you for months, and when I finally give up, there you are, standing on the corner like some crack whore in the ghetto.”
“Why were you looking?” Todd decided not to make an issue of the crack whore analogy, which did not strike him as auspicious. “Did you want to ask me something?”
“The guys are gonna love this,” Larry said, more to himself than Todd.
The guys? Todd thought unhappily. What guys? But before he could pose the question, the minivan veered unexpectedly across two lanes of traffic, into the parking lot of the high school athletic complex, which was brightly lit and the scene of a reassuring amount of activity—senior citizens shuffling around the track, some teenage boys tossing a lacrosse ball, two Chinese women practicing Tai Chi near an equipment shed. Todd let go of his misgivings, despite the fact that Larry was staring at his legs again.
“Good thing you’re wearing sneakers,” he said.
As successful and satisfying as it had been, Todd’s high school football career had unfolded on a field so incurably dingy that not even the most nostalgic glow of memory could improve it. The grass of Arthur “Biff” Ryan Stadium was coarse and mottled with permanent bald spots between the thirty yard lines that the long-suffering groundskeeper tried to mask with some kind of vegetable-based spray paint for big games and graduation ceremonies. This organic ground cover held up to the rough-and-tumble of twenty-two pairs of stampeding feet about as well as the white powder they used to mark the field, a highly volatile substance that rarely survived the first quarter, rendering the out-of-bounds and goal lines more or less hypothetical for the players, referees, and spectators. On top of everything else, the soil didn’t drain well; an hour of hard rain could transform the field into an evil swamp capable of sucking a shoe right off your foot as you tried to duck out of the grasp of a blitzing linebacker.
How much better it would have been to scramble around on this, Todd thought, the moment he and Larry stepped onto the Bellington Bombers’ state-of-the-art field, the taut blue-green skin of the artificial turf glowing with Caribbean purity beneath the dazzling night game lights, the crisp white lines and numbers marching with precision from one yellow end zone to the other. Even with the bleachers empty and only a half dozen men tossing balls and doing warm-ups at midfield, the stadium communicated a powerful sense of occasion and romance that Todd felt immediately in the pit of his stomach.
“Wow,” he said. “This is something.”
“It’s pretty,” Larry agreed. “But it doesn’t have a lot of give. It’s like playing on
“That’s Raffi, right? ‘Big, Beautiful Planet’?”
“Ah, shit.” Larry punched EJECT . “After a while I don’t even know what I’m listening to anymore.”
“I actually like some of his stuff,” Todd volunteered. “You know, just a song here and there. I’m not president of his fan club or anything.”
Larry didn’t respond, and Todd wondered if he’d been more forthcoming on the subject than he needed to be. His discomfort grew more acute at a red light just beyond the center of town, when Larry shifted in the driver’s seat and examined Todd’s body with disconcerting thoroughness, his gaze lingering on the legs and moving slowly upward.
“You look good,” he said. “Been going to the gym?”
Oh shit, thought Todd.
He felt like an idiot, more embarrassed on Larry’s behalf than his own. Because what was the guy supposed to think? He pulls up, calls you a pervert, and invites you into his van, and you climb in without even asking where you’re going. The average five-year-old would have known better.
“I run a lot,” Todd explained. “Lotsa push-ups and crunches and stuff.”
“This is unbelievable.” Larry grinned and gave Todd a hard but not unfriendly sock in the arm. “I’ve been searching for you for months, and when I finally give up, there you are, standing on the corner like some crack whore in the ghetto.”
“Why were you looking?” Todd decided not to make an issue of the crack whore analogy, which did not strike him as auspicious. “Did you want to ask me something?”
“The guys are gonna love this,” Larry said, more to himself than Todd.
The guys? Todd thought unhappily. What guys? But before he could pose the question, the minivan veered unexpectedly across two lanes of traffic, into the parking lot of the high school athletic complex, which was brightly lit and the scene of a reassuring amount of activity—senior citizens shuffling around the track, some teenage boys tossing a lacrosse ball, two Chinese women practicing Tai Chi near an equipment shed. Todd let go of his misgivings, despite the fact that Larry was staring at his legs again.
“Good thing you’re wearing sneakers,” he said.
As successful and satisfying as it had been, Todd’s high school football career had unfolded on a field so incurably dingy that not even the most nostalgic glow of memory could improve it. The grass of Arthur “Biff” Ryan Stadium was coarse and mottled with permanent bald spots between the thirty yard lines that the long-suffering groundskeeper tried to mask with some kind of vegetable-based spray paint for big games and graduation ceremonies. This organic ground cover held up to the rough-and-tumble of twenty-two pairs of stampeding feet about as well as the white powder they used to mark the field, a highly volatile substance that rarely survived the first quarter, rendering the out-of-bounds and goal lines more or less hypothetical for the players, referees, and spectators. On top of everything else, the soil didn’t drain well; an hour of hard rain could transform the field into an evil swamp capable of sucking a shoe right off your foot as you tried to duck out of the grasp of a blitzing linebacker.
How much better it would have been to scramble around on this, Todd thought, the moment he and Larry stepped onto the Bellington Bombers’ state-of-the-art field, the taut blue-green skin of the artificial turf glowing with Caribbean purity beneath the dazzling night game lights, the crisp white lines and numbers marching with precision from one yellow end zone to the other. Even with the bleachers empty and only a half dozen men tossing balls and doing warm-ups at midfield, the stadium communicated a powerful sense of occasion and romance that Todd felt immediately in the pit of his stomach.
“Wow,” he said. “This is something.”
“It’s pretty,” Larry agreed. “But it doesn’t have a lot of give. It’s like playing on
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