The Hard Count Read online

  “Well?” he prompts.

  “It made me feel ashamed. It made me sick with regret. It’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made, and I took absolutely zero pleasure from it.”

  The chuckles from the back of our classroom are faint, and Mr. Huffman’s warning with the wave of his hand and finger-hush over his lips does little to quiet them. The bell rings, and our teacher begins to recite out page numbers for our next reading. Nico and I don’t bother to write them down. I’m sure, like me, he’s finished his already.

  The rustling of papers and chatter—about the weekend’s party, about tonight’s game, about my quarterback brother and whoever he’s dating—takes over the present, but Nico and I remain in our seats in the very-near past. We’re locked in our duel. My stomach is twitching with the nervous patter of my racing heart. It isn’t because of his eyes or smirk or tight T-shirt and somehow unbelievably-masculine seated position. I notice those things, but I dismiss them. It’s because I’ve been in the ring with him, and I’ve come out victorious. I want to cheer! I want high fives. I want to whisper yes, and clutch my fist to my gut in celebration.

  Neither of us moves or speaks until Mr. Huffman calls our names, stirring us from our locked positions as he kicks down the stop on his door, signaling he has hall duty. I’m the first to break. I tell myself it’s because I have things to do. I need to get to the video room, to gather my equipment and make it to Dad’s coaching office before the football team files in. I have a deadline that Nico doesn’t have. But that’s not why I’m moving. I’m moving because I know he won’t. He’ll just sit there and continue to stare, and no matter how right I believe I am, he’ll make me think I’m wrong.

  “I think I need to ask my question again, Reagan,” he says, and my chest seizes under the rush of numbness pouring through both it and my veins like morphine. He’s tapped into my nerves by just saying my name. He’s trying to make me angry. He wants me to emote. But I won’t. I won this time, and he’s going to have to swallow that pill. I’m not going to play a war of words that doesn’t matter.

  My lips pursed, I raise my brows as I look at him and stand, my bags gathered over my shoulder and my books clutched against my chest. I look away when he doesn’t speak immediately, moving to the opened doorway, ready to disappear into our crowded high school hallway. His voice at my shoulder slows me down.

  “Your confession—just now—that you only admitted, for your own pleasure of beating me in some silly, meaningless, classroom debate over a book that’s older than the bricks that built our school…” he slows, and I turn just enough to catch the dimple. “How did that make you feel?”

  I part my lips to answer, ready to reject him, to refuse to walk down this path, but I can’t. A small breath escapes me, and my heart beat slows into a steady, obnoxious drum. I close my mouth, because there’s really no need for me to answer. Nico doesn’t wait to hear one. He pushes his hair from his eyes and tugs his bag tight against his shoulder, tucking his long board against his side. His lip ticks up just enough to push the dimple even deeper as he takes three or four steps backward before turning away and becoming lost in the crowd before me, always a step ahead.

  I wait for nearly a minute, leaned against the doorway, my mind retracing every word I said, looking for the flaw in his argument, until I realize just how obsessed I’ve become over the last hour, over beating him. I chuckle to myself, glancing at his seat and mine, then shake my head while my teeth saw at my lip.

  I answer his question in my head as I begin my trek to the football locker rooms. Beating Nico in a debate felt great. It felt amazing in those small breaths of a moment where I thought I had. But I hadn’t really.

  Smug asshole was right all along.

  Even worse, he doesn’t care who knows.

  2

  No matter how many times I hear the speech, I still get goosebumps.

  The first time I went to the game early with my dad, I was maybe five or six. I crawled up on a training table in the back of the film room and pulled my legs in to make myself small so nobody would see me, but after a few of my dad’s players mouthed some choice words, he was quick to point out that his baby girl was in attendance and all foul language would result in hours of running up and down the bleachers on Saturday morning. Mouths were glued shut after that, but I believe they would have been anyway, because the moment Chad Prescott turns into Coach Prescott, people are brought to attention.

  It’s always the same, yet somehow, each time, his words are unique, as if being said to virgin ears and being uttered without careful practice and memorization. Maybe it’s the tradition of it all—the tradition he’s at the heart of—that makes those words hit so hard.

  My dad has coached the Cornwall Prep Tigers for twenty-two seasons, and he’s brought them to the state playoffs for seventeen. The five missing years don’t get discussed much. Four were early on, when he first took over the program from the beloved Michael Colson, who was my dad’s coach when he played here. Colson’s health was declining, and the transition of the team from him to my father was assumed to have rough spots. However, the other year—last year—is fresh on everyone’s mind. Lips are sealed on the subject, at least when it’s to my father’s face, but the threat lives in everyone’s eyes.

  As much as Cornwall is built on tradition, it’s also teeming with superstition. We don’t talk about things that are broken. We eliminate them. We’re not a religious institution. We’re a private college prep riding on the wealth that pays for the best. Cornwall is all about the arts, the academics—a miniature college in many ways. And unlike our neighbor, nearby St. Augustine, our school was founded on one principle, and one principle only—we lead. And when we don’t, we crush whatever is keeping us from being on top. Last year, we lost to a new contender—Great Vista High School, a newly-minted Division I public school with six times our population and a football team that decimated us on the field and left graffiti behind on our walls to rub it in.

  The whispers started the moment the clock ticked down to zero and my father led fifty young men back into the locker room with their heads low and their hearts heavy. My father yelled. He threw things. He made boys cry. He blamed my twin brother, Noah, who my dad gave the starting quarterback position to over a senior. Words weren’t spoken, but it’s clear that’s who everyone else blamed as well. My brother played hard, and against any other team, his effort might have been good enough. But Noah also likes to party and cut corners. Those small cracks in his work ethic became gaping chasms during last year’s playoffs, and they’ve born an almost suffocating environment in our home.

  That’s what happens when you fail at Cornwall. You become the target. You become the thing that must be crushed. There aren’t excuses, and my dad has one year to make things right. Noah—maybe less. I know they both will. And right now, their mouths are shut and their eyes unable to blink or look away from the man with graying sideburns and a permanent sunburn around his eyes, from where his sunglasses rest during practice; my father’s team believes they’ll right the ship, too.

  I’m going to capture it all.

  My camera began rolling seconds before my dad started the speech. In the sixty-year history of our school, nobody has ever documented the legacy of the Tiger Football Tradition. We don’t call it a team, because teams are too fluid, rife with change. We’re a tradition, one that once you’re initiated into you have with you forever.

  “This tradition is about your brothers,” my dad says, his voice echoing off the concrete walls and floor. I stand, recognizing this part of the speech. I want to make sure my cameras are in the right position—one framing my father’s face, the other in my hands to see the reaction of the boys who believe in him.

  “Brothers,” he continues, “are lifelong. And though you take that field tonight, you have also taken that field before, just as you will tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. That field is your home—your battlefield—and those other men are intruders. They don’t respe
ct it. They’re trespassing—unwanted guests.”

  I check my arm and smile to myself when I see the small bumps resulting from chills. With my handheld steadied on my raised knee, my foot braced against the wall, I scan the room and capture those faces that look like they feel exactly as I do. My brother Noah is up front, rocking his weight from one foot to the other as he stands at attention. His hands grip at his shoulder pads around his neck, and his lips mutter along with the words he too knows by heart. His eyes crease, accented by the deep black lines smeared underneath.

  Slowly, I pan down the row of familiar faces, and they’re all rapt in the same way, their expression that of belief, of possibility. My brother’s best friend, Travis, has his eyes closed for prayers to God, but in between he whispers the speech along with everyone else.

  “They think they’re better than you,” my father says, mouths follow, pausing to let those words sink in.

  The room pops with shaking heads and shuffling feet. Some of the guys respond with “no sir” and “hell no.”

  “We know they’re not,” my father shouts.

  The room erupts in a deep round of voices that all chant, “Hoorah!”

  “They think they’ve worked harder than you,” my father says, his voice even louder.

  Heads shake, and some of the guys chuckle, rubbing sore arms and bloodied and bandaged body parts that do not hurt in this moment, but rather remind them of what they went through to get here.

  “I can assure you they didn’t,” my father says. Again, the room chants, “Hoorah!”

  I hold my breath because this next part, more than anything that led up to it, is what I’ve been waiting for. I check the camera, my father still centered in my frame and his face as serious as I’ve ever seen it. Our team has won the first two games of the year, but he knows that two is not ten. A loss, at this point, will be unforgiveable.

  “What’s that word on your backs?” His question echoes, and the answer is swift.

  “Honor, sir!” they all shout in unison. They always do. It’s more than memorization, and it’s always made me sit in awe of how it all plays out.

  “Honor! That’s right. There are no individuals in here. We all have one name. It isn’t the mascot. It isn’t your nickname or some fad that will be forgotten the second the yearbook is printed. It’s a word that means heart, that means drive and ambition, that means giving your all and leaving the best of every goddamned thing you’ve got out there on that field. Turn to your right!”

  They all do, seated in a circle on the benches, looking at the helmets and heads of their teammates. My dad should have been a preacher, or perhaps a general. He was born to stand before boys and make them believe that for two and a half hours, they are men.

  “Turn to your left!”

  All heads shift, the sound swift, but mouths quiet.

  “Honor. Brotherhood. Tradition.” He pauses, his team still sitting with heads angled and eyes wide on the dark blue sheen of the helmets and sweat-drenched heads next to them.

  “Again…” he says, and this time they say it with him.

  “Honor. Brotherhood. Tradition.”

  “Whose house is this?” my father asks, quiet and waiting for a roar.

  “Our house!”

  “Whose house is this?” He’s louder now.

  “Our house!”

  “Whose house…” My dad’s face is red and his voice is hoarse by the time he shouts the question painted above the door that the Cornwall Tradition runs through to the field. The final chant back is loud enough that it can be heard through the cinderblock walls. I know, because last week, I filmed the speech from outside.

  With chests full, egos inflated, voices primed and muscles ready for abuse, this packed room of fifty—the number that always takes the field, even though less than half of them will play—stands, each putting a hand on the back of everyone in front of them. Everyone does this except for my brother, because he’s in front.

  I sprint with my camera to the front, kneeling low and turning my focus onto my brother’s loud, clapping hands—the chalk dusting from them and the tape around his wrists tight against his skin, circulation choked just enough so pain is little and blood flow is maximized to his throwing arm. He’s chanting—“honor…win.”

  They all chant with him, and without a sign, they know when it’s time. The run through the tunnel is swift and loud, like inept thieves bursting through glass windows, and the thunderous sound of this year’s Tiger squad is undeniable. Heads turn at the edge of the bleachers, watching the line rush over the track and into the end zone, through satin banners held by beautiful girls who dream of one of these boys taking them away when our time here is all done.

  I set the camera on my tripod to capture the scene in focus, my father’s form passing through my frame as he jogs behind, along with his coaching staff. They all seem like heroes—bigger than life, and juiced with aggression and desire for victory. They’re made this way. My dad makes them this way.

  It’s beautiful.

  It’s also sad.

  My video runs for nineteen minutes, mostly capturing warm-ups and the kickoff before the sun finally sets and I shut my recording off. I wanted to capture the drama of the performance so I could fast-forward it in editing and layer it with music.

  I’m making a documentary on Cornwall. Mostly, it’s on my dad and brother. They only half know that part, but they both like the attention—Noah more than anyone. My film is about the legacy of this program, but also about the pressure it puts on people—on families.

  On my family.

  The storyline is epic, and the potential for a fairytale or tragic ending is equal. This documentary is also my ticket into the film school at Prestige, a private art institution in the Northeast. My family lives football. My mom is queen bee of the social circle that comes with being a major donor and booster; my father is the man four wins away from setting a state record for the most wins ever with a single program. My brother is being courted by The Big Ten, and he’s been interviewed by all of the big press that comes along with it.

  All of that is the fairytale side of the story.

  The dark side is the dysfunction we live with: my dad’s blind eye to the rules my brother breaks. He drove his car into the river last season with six of his teammates packed inside, along with empty bottles and cans that somehow disappeared before any authorities showed up. It’s also the pills my mom takes to keep the grin on her face, to stay in her marriage and not to sob herself to sleep when people write horrible things in chalk on our driveway about my dad losing his job.

  It’s the blood I know my father coughs up from ulcers.

  The price of winning is steep, and sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it. Yet, I adore my dad, and I root for my brother, and want to see my mom happy. I guess it’s like Nico said; people don’t make any decision unless they get some personal pleasure from the outcome. My family’s success gives me pleasure—even when it’s killing us.

  I pull my camera from the tripod and close the screen, my eyes watching the end zone where my brother has just leapt over the Mountain Crest High defensive line to score six. The band kicks in, the drums beating hard and fast, gaining speed with the chants the crowd yells every time we score. They count to six, and fireworks will soon mark the extra point. I smile, because this is the fairytale stuff.

  “Nice keeper,” I fumble the camera and nearly drop it with my startle, but a swift, warm hand covers mine and pushes everything back into a cradle against my chest. I recognize the voice, but the touch is foreign, and it takes my mind a second longer to catch up to what my eyes see. Nico’s shirtless, but still in his dark jeans that he wore to school, his T-shirt tucked into the waistband and his arm damp with sweat.

  “Thanks,” I say, peering at his bare skin, but quickly turning my attention over to my camera that I almost dropped on the asphalt. I’m sweating.

  “For rescuing that fancy lens of yours?” he asks, taking a step or two a
way while he shuffles a football from one hand to the other. “Or for complimenting your brother?”

  “Both, I guess,” I stammer, my eyes unable to look away from the ball now clutched at the center of his chest. I force my gaze up, and I’m greeted by the dimple. That small trait of his kicks in my stubbornness. I open my mouth to speak, hoping something strong and independent will come out, but in a quick flash I recognize that Nico’s not alone. Five or six guys are walking up behind him, all of them shirtless and out of breath, a few with gallons of water in their hands. I don’t know why I’m overcome with nerves now; my brother’s team is at the house swimming and running around half naked all the time.

  “Yo, if you want to hit on baby girl, do it on your own time, Nico. Don’t take the fuckin’ game ball with you,” one of them says.

  His words stun my mouth shut instantly, and my brow pinches in an effort to ward off the red embarrassment I can already feel creeping up my ears as the rest of the guys snicker and call out “ooooh” while they high five. Nico Medina is not hitting on me. That’s not our routine. In fact, talking outside of the one class we share is not part of the routine. He shouldn’t be here, and...

  “I’m nobody’s baby girl,” I say the instant his words truly register. My chest begins to pound, not from nerves, but with that same anger I get when I’m in a debate with Nico or trying to convince my parents that film school is the right place for me after graduation.

  I bend down to set my camera in the bag at my feet, and take the opportunity to squeeze my eyes closed and calm my pounding heart and heavy breath.

  “You’re Coach’s girl. That’s just what we call you,” he laughs out his words. Nico shoots him a hard stare that I catch, and I also notice his friend shrug his shoulders and mouth the word what in question-slash-apology. He rolls his eyes and looks back to me. “Sorry,” he huffs. It’s completely not genuine. “I’m mostly bustin’ my boy because douchebag took the ball. Come on, Nic. We’ve got game,” the guy says, brushing his hand forward until his fingers touch my arm. I fight the instinct to flinch and instead nod. He nods back with a wink, pushing Nico off balance as he runs back to the empty practice field lit only by the spill-off of light from the main field on the other side of the parking lot.