I need someone to believe with me. To believe for me when I can’t believe myself.
“You have to take care of yourself, Mateo, if you want to—”
“You know what?” I say. “Turns out that I am pretty fucking tired.” I gesture to the tunnel walls. “I don’t know why I gave a shit about this anyway.”
I turn back toward the entrance, and I don’t pause to take hold of her hand or let her grab my arm. I need the space.
“Mateo. You can’t just keep deflecting like this. It’s not enough just to rest. You need to tell someone. You need to take precautions against—”
And then I just snap. I whirl around and pin her with the beam of the flashlight. “You know fuck all about what I need, Nell. Jesus, you’ve never even been to a game. You don’t know anything about football, and you don’t know anything about me.”
For a moment she looks small. Too damn small. The black of the tunnel looms around her, threatening to swallow her despite my measly light. Her arms are wrapped around her middle, and in that big sweatshirt she looks like she needs protecting.
From me.
And just when I’m about to go to her, to say something, to take back my harsh words . . . anything . . . she lifts her chin in that familiar proud way of hers.
“I’ve known you from the moment we met, Mateo Torres.”
How could I have forgotten? “A puppet? That’s what you called me, right? Letting other people pull my strings. Sorry, sweetheart, but I pull my own strings.”
“Maybe you do. But you’re still performing for other people. You play class clown for others, thinking it makes them like you or makes you fun. But history has a word for that . . . you’re playing the fool.”
That hits me harder than any tackle, and for all her words about it just taking one hit to knock me out, it’s ironic that she would be the one to deliver the worst blow.
“Fuck this. I don’t need any of this.”
I take off down the tunnel, heading back for the small hole of light I can see in the distance. My feet splash through puddles, and the noise from my movements amplifies in the small space, becomes harsher and distorted as it echoes. Then I hear Nell hurrying along behind me. She calls out, “I’m not saying you are a fool. Mateo, would you stop? Listen to me for a second. You’re smart and kind and wonderful, and I—I . . .” She sucks in a breath, probably from trying to keep pace with me, but I don’t stop. “I’m just saying you don’t need to play that part for other people. Your friends care about you. I care about you. You don’t need to pretend for us.”
I jerk around, and she barely skids to a stop before slamming into me. And my voice is too loud, and she’s too close, everything is too close as I yell, “It’s for me, damn it. It’s not for you. It’s not for my friends. Did you ever think of that while you were dissecting me? My life? The way I am . . . I do that for me.”
My heart thuds in my ears so loud I’m surprised it doesn’t echo in the tunnel, too. Nell swallows, and I can see those big eyes working, studying me, moving around the pieces of me in her head to fit this new development.
“Why?”
One damn word. Just one damn word, and it’s the absolute last thing I want her to say because I know how my answer will sound. Pathetic boy with a broken heart pretending so it doesn’t hurt. It’s so goddamn ridiculous.
“Because it helps. Helped.”
She lifts a hand like she wants to touch me, but then seems to second-guess herself, and it stays hanging in the air between us as she asks, “With what?”
Then I tell her everything about Lina. With my eyes on the ceiling and the walls so that I don’t have to look at her, I tell her how in love I was.
“She was this brilliant, confident girl. The kind of girl that when you look at her, you know she can do anything, be anything. She had the whole fucking world in the palm of her hand, and she had me there, too. From the moment I met her. But you can’t . . . you can’t love someone like that without feeling like you have something to prove. To her. To the world. I needed everyone to know that we belonged together. That even if I wasn’t some genius, even if I had zero hope of going to the Ivy League schools that were practically begging for her attention, I was important. I was going places. So when it looked like football could do that for me, I threw everything into it. I had to play college ball. I had to go pro. There was no other option. She and football were linked in my head, the two great loves of my life, and I would have done anything, given whatever it took, to keep them both.”
I break off, and I realize that my breathing is ragged, that my heart is pounding hard enough to put a dent in my ribs.
“What happened?” she asks.
And finally, I look at her. Only she’s not looking at me; she has her arms wrapped around herself and her gaze on the circle of light my flashlight makes on the ground.
“I got too caught up in it all. I was so focused on proving myself that I didn’t realize I was losing everything in my attempt to gain it. Lina and I started fighting. Every time I brought up football, she would tell me to be realistic, that I needed to have a backup plan in case it didn’t work out. But all I could hear was that she didn’t trust me to be good enough.”
“For football? Or her?” Nell’s voice is small as she asks.
I sigh and drag my hand over my face. “Both. It was always both.”
“Senior year, I narrowed it down to two schools. Rusk, which had the bigger program and was closer to home, and a smaller Division Two school that was not too far from the university that Lina had chosen. I was torn. Rusk was the better place to prove myself, but it was too far away from her. The Division Two school had a good football program, but the chance of getting noticed in Division Two was a lot smaller. I could have possibly swung a transfer to a bigger university eventually, but it was a risk. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. She broke up with me the night before I was going to commit to the Division Two school. She said that we wanted different things out of life. Her exact words were something about her moving on from high school to bigger things. But I was so stuck on football that I didn’t know when it was time to let go. She didn’t want to hang around while I relived my glory days for as long as I could.”