“Don’t you back out now,” he said, glancing carefully into the faces of everyone around us.
Our quarterback, a young guy in his third year with a rocket arm, grinned at me, then looked over his shoulder. “You heard Jones. Get him.”
Before I could blink, every rookie on the Washington roster had me pinned, no matter how much I thrashed, threatened, or shouted. The coaches laughed. Even Logan had a wide smile on his face, and if I hadn’t been betrayed by my entire defensive line, who sat back roaring with laughter, I might have thought it was funny too.
“You nice and sweaty, Griffin?” Kareem asked as he approached.
“You asshole.” I tried to pry my arm away from where three rookies held it. I was pinned to the turf, on my knees with my hands behind my back, and I finally gave up.
“I’d close my eyes if I were you.” That was the only warning I was given before they proceeded to dump black and red glitter down the front of my shirt, then snap my shorts away from my waist and dump it down there too. The cleaning crew would hate them, and I’d be planning retribution for the rest of my life, but from the tear-inducing laughter from every person present, it must have been worth it.
Behind the camera, Marty wiped at his face, and as I stood, shaking as much excess glitter as I could from my body, that was the first that I noticed Molly was avoiding me.
If she’d watched what had happened to me, she wasn’t watching the fallout. She wasn’t approaching me with that big, bright smile on her pink lips, trying to suss out how I felt about what they’d done. She wasn’t eyeing me curiously through my anger. She wasn’t eyeing me at all.
It crossed my mind, as I showered off the mess and changed into clean clothes after practice, that I’d forgotten to return her call from the day before. She had invited me to dinner at Logan’s house, a message I hadn’t received until hours later because I often didn’t check my cell while it was charging. By the time I saw it, by the time I’d listened to it, it was well after eleven, and I wasn’t sure what to say.
Thank you, but your brother would sooner poison my dinner than have me show up with you.
I don’t know how to do family dinners, so I’d sit there like a freak.
Their family was big and loud and had probably only gotten bigger and louder in the years since I lived behind them. Not my scene, even if I’d wanted to go.
Molly had made no attempt to hide that she was puzzled by the way I acted with the people around me. That “The Machine” was a moniker she didn’t deem appropriate, even if everyone else thought it was. I’d had glitter down my ass crack to prove how appropriate the rest of my team thought it was.
But Molly wasn’t wrong either.
If I was well and truly a machine, with no pulse or heartbeat or complex emotions, it wouldn’t have bothered me that she wasn’t speaking to me.
Which was why I sent her a text, late on day three.
Me: I apologize for not returning your phone call. It was late when I got the message. Thank you for inviting me, though.
An hour or so later, I received my reply.
Molly Ward: No problem, it’s fine.
A reply like that from a person such as her was telling, and it still didn’t click in my head that something was wrong.
Day four was no better, and that day had been free of pranks, free of tempers, free of anything that could have upset her. Even the fact that I was still pondering what I might have done to inspire this type of reaction in her should have been a warning sign.
I lifted weights, had a meeting with the coaching staff, and watched some film. Between those things, I talked with Rick, giving them something they could use later for voiceover work. And Molly stayed placidly behind the camera, face either pointed at her phone or at the back of the camera screen.
In fact, she was doing such a good job of not looking at me that I was now an expert in the top of Molly’s head.
Rick cleared his throat, and I looked back at him. There was a knowing glint in his eye that made me want to punch him.
“Does glitter make you feel like part of the team?”
“Yeah, it’s really magical that way.”
He smiled. “You weren’t too happy, though?”
The tip of Molly’s pencil slowed as she was writing, and something warm flashed bright inside me. She was still aware; she just didn’t want me to realize it.
“Would you like to be held down by seven football players and have them dump glitter all over your sweat-soaked body?’
“No.”
I rubbed my jaw. “No, I wasn’t happy.” I paused and started thinking about what Molly would have asked me if she wasn’t doing a such a good job of ignoring me. She’d want me to flip up the lid on why I felt that way, why my anger at that moment was so hot and so high, instead of being able to laugh it off like a lot of my teammates would. “It’s probably a control thing,” I admitted slowly. “Why I got so mad.”
Her pencil stopped moving over the surface of the paper. Her whole frame froze, to the point where I wasn’t even sure she was breathing.
“Everything about switching teams reminds you how little is in your control in this league.” I propped my hands on my hips. Trying to unearth the right words for what this reminded me of when I was little and used to dig in the dirt around this bush in our yard. I’d find something that felt small, that I could pull up easily, but inevitably, it was part of a larger, more stubborn root. I’d tug and tug, and only a little bit would give way before I needed to stop. “I can’t control my teammates, no matter where I am. My coaches. My opponents. None of it.”
“What can you control?”
For a second, I stared at the top of Molly’s head, her shiny hair, and willed her to look up at me. But she didn’t, and the pencil in her hand shook for a second before she started writing again.
“I can control how prepared I am,” I said. My eyes moved back to Rick. “I can control how in shape I am. What I eat. How I sleep. What I allow as a distraction.”
“That seems like a pretty good list,” he commented.
I laughed humorlessly. Normally, I’d avoid dwelling on this at all because even that felt like wasted energy. Energy I could harness elsewhere.
It was a trait I inherited from my dad. If it didn’t serve my goal, it was a waste of energy. Keeping the door closed to things I couldn’t control was the best way to protect myself.
Slowly, day by day since I’d gotten here, this ragtag group of people had turned the knob, but I was the one who had to do the rest of the work. Conversations like this were because I was opening that door.
“If I had a normal job, that list would go further. In this league, doing what we do,” I said, “it’s a fraction of the whole picture. There are a million things that are out of my hands.”
“Like your teammates pouring glitter down your shorts.”
“Like that,” I agreed dryly. “Even if it’s meant as a joke, it’s hard to be reminded of the fact that, at the end of the day, the only thing I can control is me.”
“A flawlessly working machine,” he said quietly.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Makes sense.”
“That’s why I almost never stop working on those things,” I told him. “Why going out is less important to me than watching film. Why eating right is more important to me than drinking.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Perfecting my craft is the best way for me to spend my time.”
“You’re good at it, so you’re doing something right.”
The only way I could explain why I shifted the subject, with a camera aimed at my face, was that part of my personality that refused to back down from a challenge. I allowed one side of my mouth to hook up in a quick smile. “Someone smart told me recently that I could be better, though.”
Her pencil froze again.
Rick glanced at her, then back at me.
“So I’m gonna try yoga,” I announced.
The pencil fell out of her hands, and her head snapped up.
For the first time in four days, Molly’s eyes were on mine. How was it possible that I’d forgotten that color already?
Her mouth gaped open, and I saw Marty smile behind the camera.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.