Inexcusable (3 page)

When I got home, at the end of that first quiet day, I got the mail and opened it.

I had quietly received an offer of a football scholarship.

The next day I quietly received two more.

Fate is a bitch, but there you go.

G
igi Boudakian has her head in her hands, and that is all wrong. If you knew Gigi Boudakian you would agree with me that she should never have her head in her hands. She should be happy, like, every minute, because she deserves it. And for Christ's sake, she should not be here with her head in her hands now, here with me, like this.

“This is all wrong, Gigi.”

“You got that right, Keir,” she says, still with her head in her hands, still with her eyes to the floor.

“You are my friend, Gigi, forever. I love you, Gigi.”

“Shut . . . up.”

“Why does Carl have to come, Gigi? I don't understand at all. And your father, and my father, and everybody. There is no reason for this. No reason. Miscommunication
is all that really happened here, that's all. I thought one thing, you thought another thing. Why do you have to make it worse? Carl has been my friend forever, just like you have been my friend forever, so why do we have to make an accident into something else? I love you, Gigi.”

“Shut . . . up.”

“You know I could never do anything to hurt you. You know I am the very last person in the world to ever do anything like that. I am a good guy and you are a smart girl, and we are us, so this could never be wrong the way you say it is. You know that! So why don't you just
know
it, and know that you don't have to say to Carl or to anybody else what you are thinking of saying?”

Finally, for the first time in a while, something in the world goes as it should go. Gigi Boudakian removes her head from her hands and looks up at me.

If she sees me, if she really sees me, everything will be all right. All right like always.

“I
thought
I knew all that, Keir. And you don't understand, that's what makes this even more horrible.”

Gigi Boudakian has her head in her hands again, and it feels like nothing will ever be right ever again.

I
only ever wanted to go to the one school all along, to be honest. So I was lucky. Sure there were other schools, other teams, other weekend visits to campuses, boy oh boy, were there other weekend visits.

But I never wanted to go anywhere else. I never wanted to go to fun-in-the-sun in California or Florida. I don't need the sun for fun. I can have fun in the snow, or in the mud. Or indoors. I didn't want to go to some ivy- choked four-hundred-year-old snot factory, either, even if they'd have me, which they pretty damn well certainly wouldn't. All I ever wanted was to wind up at a place about three hours and one state line from home, not closer, not farther away. A place with a reasonable sports budget, a place where a guy could have some laughs, play
some ball, meet some people, and get himself educated and experienced without an excess of fuss or, especially, muss.

“You big baby,” my sister Fran said, laughing when I finally told her, over the phone, of my decision to follow her and my sister Mary to Norfolk U.

“Cut it out, Fran, it had nothing to do with you guys.”

“Mary,” Fran was yelling away from the phone. “Mary, you have to hear this.”

“Knock it off, Fran,” I said.

But I didn't mind. I didn't mind at all, really. I was looking forward to it, in fact, and would, in further fact, have been disappointed if I didn't catch some grief from them for my news. There was nobody anywhere who gave me grief since they'd been gone. Everyone needs grief.

“Sure, Fran,” I said, “just go ahead, go on, zoo me all you want. Just remember, I'm coming. Be forewarned. Your holiday is over once I get there.”

“Oooh, I'm scared. Mary!” she screamed this practically in my ear. “Mary, Keir is being scary. You want to hear it? It's very cute.”

Everybody involved was very happy to see me going to Norfolk. We were all sweating it out when I was not hearing and not hearing from the school for so many weeks, because we did all want to be together again. We're good together, us. We're good together, and less
good apart, even if they sounded pretty okay. So it was a treat we were getting reunited.

Except for Dad, of course. We were getting de-united from Dad. I didn't like even thinking about that.

But he was the biggest booster of all, once the pressure was off, once the letter came through and my decision was made, no matter what circumstances might have prompted that college to send that letter to this modestly gifted athlete.

“What does Dad think?” Mary asked, now that the two of them were hogging one phone.

“Dad thinks it's the greatest,” Dad said, from his sneaky bastard phone in his bedroom.

“Get off the phone, y'sneaky bastard,” I shouted into the receiver while all three of them laughed at me. “Don't
make
me come in there, old man,” I added when I didn't hear a click.

That was how it was, and I loved how it was, the year with Dad and me, me and Dad, father and son, brothers, roommates, bastards, and buddies in the absence of anybody else in the house. Nobody ever had it like we had it.

And with that letter, with that decision to go to Norfolk, I had to end it. To put a bullet into the beloved beast.

“You still there, Dad?” Fran said into the phone because nobody could tell if he was still listening. No breathing, no laughing, no nothing.

“Dad?” Mary asked. “We didn't really want you to hang up, silly man. Dad?”

He wasn't there. It was just the three of us now.

“Well, really, Keir,” Fran said. “This is just the best news. The best.”

“The best,” Mary agreed. “We are very, very happy for you, Keir. Happy that it worked out, awful as it was.”

“Yes, and at least there's that. It's tragic, the whole thing, that poor kid, but at least you can take something from it, that you learned a hard lesson.”

A thick silence came over the line.

“A lesson, Fran?”

“Well, ya. One would certainly hope so.”

The silence returned.

“I didn't learn any lesson. There was no lesson to be learned.”

“Come on, Keir,” Mary said. “Come on now. You dodged a bullet. Very good for you. But that doesn't mean that what happened wasn't—”

“Should I show you the newspaper, Mary? Huh? The
Chronicle
says it was an accident. It was an accident. What lesson can you learn from an accident, other than be careful? I'm being careful, Mary, if that's what you would like to hear.”

“He's all yours,” Mary said to Fran, with an angry little sigh.

See, the thing with Mary is she's all black and white. I mean, I love her, and she is loyal as they come, true blue. But she is rigid about right and wrong. She is a very hard person, and she can be intolerant. Fran's not like that.

“It's important that you learn, Keir. Life teaches you a lot of lessons and if you won't accept them, then it's like you've completely missed the class.”

The silence again. They were getting longer, and I realized, they were all me.

“Haven't I just been through all this, Fran? Haven't I paid my dues with waiting to find out if I was responsible for what happened? Well, I waited, and I found out, and I'm not. So I'm not going to apologize when I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm not going to let you guys make me feel like hell, because I didn't do anything wrong.”

“Do you think about the other kid?”

“Of course I think about the other kid.”

“You don't sound like you're thinking about him that much. Did you have to hit him exactly that hard?”

“I hit him exactly the way I was taught. I hit him right. If he just stood up again I would have been a goddamn hero, wouldn't I? I did what I was supposed to do. He didn't do what he was supposed to do.”

Big fat silence. Not mine this time.

I waited for it to break. I waited, and I squirmed. Fran didn't do this, you see. Fran talked. Clamming up was
my move. Fran talked through whatever came.

“Fran,” I finally said. “Fran, stop it, you know I can't stand that.”

“I am going to assume,” she said in a sticky drawly voice, like she hated to hand the words over, “that you're still hurting from what happened. That you still need to hold back from this stuff. So I'm going to leave it for now, Keir. For now.”

I would have thought that I would be more than satisfied with her leaving it. I surprised myself.

“Why do I have to feel sorry if I didn't do anything wrong? I don't understand that, and I don't understand how that helps that kid at all.”

“It doesn't. It helps you. And I would figure
that
was a cause you could support.”

“Well, I
don't,”
I snapped without thinking.

We sat there then, the two of us collaborating on a whopping great silence. It gave me a shiver.

I hate it when people I love condemn me.

“Listen,” I said, “I gotta go see where Ray is.”

*  *  *

Things changed. Every obvious thing and a lot of others changed, once I got my acceptance and full scholarship from Norfolk.

Some of those things, you could probably guess. I didn't have to sweat anymore. For anything. Grades came
easy. Not wonderful grades, but my usual, just north of mediocre grades. But they came now without my having to break my neck or crack a book over them. It was made obvious, as it is for most graduating senior athletes, that I was no longer a priority, good or bad, of the education side of the education system. As long as I showed the proper respect, attended classes, stayed awake, answered whatever meatball question was tossed my way, I would do all right for the rest of my high school days.

I could go with that system.

I got along, and got along well. Got along with staff, with teachers and lunch ladies. Got along with guys, with athletes I knew before but knew better now, guys who were studs at basketball, or even guys who played sports that didn't matter, like tennis. I got along with smart kids who did stuff like debate, as well as with guys who sat around glassy-eyed and famously did nothing at all.

And this, I found, pleased me more than I ever would have guessed. Because a lot of guys in my position would have gone all stick-assed about it, noses in the air over the attentions of geeks and stoners and hall monitors. A lot of guys—and I have to criticize a lot of my colleagues in the sports world generally and football specifically here—figure that much of the regular free-range world is beneath us, and that if people want to like you then you might as well spit on them.

But here's what I found out. I
liked
being liked.

I mean, I really, really liked it when people liked me. I didn't necessarily want to be buddies with people, call them up and have them call me up and go to the movies together and all that. That took
involvement,
which, to be honest, I didn't do very well. But to have people think the right side up about me. Felt nice. To come home and recount to my dad, hey Ray, you have a kid who is liked, practically all over the board. That felt pretty okay.

Which is why, now that I had emerged out the other side of all the awfulness of the crippling, I could tell you—that was the worst, the worst hell-on-earth ever, and I'd sooner die than feel like that again. It meant more than a little, then, and if the investigations came down at the end and said I was some kind of beastman, I don't know what I would have done, but I would have done something quite unlovely, I guarantee you that. Because I knew all along I was a good guy, and to be declared otherwise would have been criminal. It would have battered me.

But it didn't, which is why life got so damn, damn good when it didn't. I was just so happy that it was decided officially that I wasn't bad. That it would be okay to like me. I know a guy's not supposed to care overly much about what other people think of him, but I do care a lot.

Even he understood. The guy. The kid. The unlucky
receiver. He knew how important that was. That he understood. He told me so. I received a card, which I kept. I would have framed it, if people wouldn't have gotten the wrong idea about it. It was just so important to me. As it is, I refer to it often. I even sent him a thank-you card for making me feel better.

And he understood everything, which a lot of people might not have.

Like the loosening up. That was one of the first, most surprising differences when things started turning right. Everybody loosened up, almost as soon as I returned to school.

It was as if somebody passed a law or a judgment, threw a switch, or opened a cage, releasing the problem and setting everybody free from it.

“Yo, Killer,” Quarterback Ken said that first day, after word spread that I got my scholarship and had, in fact, turned down two others. Quarterback Ken, himself headed on a full boat to New Mexico State, launched the name, making it official. “Way to go, Killer.”

What? How could that be? Who could that be? How could we have gotten here? Killer? Killer? K-i-l-l-e-r.

Me. Killer, me. How far from home was that word, nesting with me?

Killer Keir.

I was stunned at first, then embarrassed, then scared of
it, what it was, what it said about me, about them, about everything there is.

But before long, it settled. It became like a different thing, like something that had shocked me because of the surprise of it. Like fifty thousand people screaming “happy birthday” at you at once would surprise you if it was not even your birthday.

But it was their surprise, their welcome back, their celebration that no, things were not so scary and hellish after all, and
I
was not so scary and hellish after all, and if they could make fun of it, out-bogey the bogeyman, then we would all be okay.