I lean down to kiss her shoulder, but her back straightens, and she shifts to look back at me. Ignoring that last statement, she says, “You’re going to practice?”
“First I’ve gotta go lift.” And I am so not looking forward to the sound of the weight room—all clangs and thuds and scrapes. It’s going to be a nightmare. But a necessary one. “Then practice, yeah.”
Her eyebrows furrow, and I can see her debating about saying something before she finally spits it out. “So, you’re not telling your coach at all? Do you think that’s smart?”
It would be cute that she’s worried, if she weren’t voicing the thoughts I’ve done a lot of work to keep myself from thinking.
“I told you. I’ve had concussions before. This one is so mild I’ll probably feel good as new within the next few hours.”
“Yeah, but if you were to hit your head again shortly after your initial injury, it could cause serious damage. You could die. It could—”
I lower my mouth to hers, cutting her off. For a moment she resists, not quite kissing me back, but not completely immune either. After a few seconds she relaxes and one of her hands travels up to my neck. I get a little lost in her mouth. In the softness of her lips. The taste of her tongue. The quickening of her breath.
I pull back before I get carried away and give in to the urge to toss her computer to the ground and strip her naked.
“I’ll be fine, Nell. I know my limits. I promise I’ll be careful. You’ll see. You’re worrying about nothing. You and me. The tunnels. Tonight.”
Her eyes flick over mine, narrow, but then finally she nods.
DESPITE WHAT I told Nell, I don’t feel good as new in a few hours. I take it easy during my workout. They’re unsupervised—at least technically—so no one will call me out for going at half strength. But even taking it easy, I’m exhausted before I get halfway through my hour. I’m worn out by trying to appear normal while my nerves feel more and more raw by the second.
When practice starts, I very nearly spill to Coach. But then I tell myself that it’s laziness talking. I’m strong enough to power through this. My reasons for staying silent are the same today as they were yesterday. So I stick to my guns and suffer through practice. I think it’s obvious to everyone that I’m not up to par, but I hope they chalk it up to a bad day rather than to the fact that I’m avoiding getting tackled as much as possible.
If you don’t catch the ball, not much point in someone taking you to the grass.
I even take a nap after practice, but it barely takes the edge off, which is why I’m exhausted when I get to Nell’s later.
I can tell by her worried look when she sees me on her porch that this isn’t going to be good.
“You ready?” I ask.
She fixes me with a silent, assessing gaze.
Maybe I should have canceled. I knew she would give me grief over “knowing my limits,” but I wanted to see her. So I figure I can take a little grief.
“Come on.” I hold out a hand to her. “I’m excited about this. Both of our first times, remember?”
“Mateo . . .”
“We’re just walking. It’s nothing strenuous. We’ll walk a ways in, explore a bit, and then we’ll leave.”
“And you’ll sleep?”
I jump at the chance to spend another night with her.
“If you’ll be my nurse again.”
Her eyes lift in a smile even though her mouth doesn’t, and I know I’ve won. In my truck, I flip my heater on to full blast. Some hint of winter is beginning to creep in, and the night air is crisp and there’s a cold breeze. She’s wearing a light jacket, but I can tell as I drive that she’s cold. So I flip the middle console up, and tell her to scoot over, and I drive onto campus with her huddled close to me. We park near the tunnel entrance by the north parking garage, and I find a Rusk sweatshirt in the backseat to pull over her head for extra warmth. It swallows her, falling all the way to her knees, but the dark red looks good against her skin, and I like seeing her in it.
Even with her jacket and my sweatshirt, she loops her arm around mine and snuggles closer. I lead her down to the mouth of the tunnel, which at first glance looks like an oversize drainage pipe. A concrete-covered ditch runs for about fifty yards before the entrance to the tunnels, and a thin line of water runs down the middle. As we stand at the entrance, the tunnel looks dark and dank. Hardly the most romantic place, but it pricks my sense of adventure, and some of my fatigue gives way to anticipation.
“You’re sure this is safe?”
“Now that you mention it, I keep thinking of that disaster movie where one of those underwater tunnels in New York collapses and there’s a huge wave of water coming down the tunnel.”
“Fantastic. Exactly what I wanted to think about.”
I laugh and pull out the flashlight I brought with me. I direct the beam down the tunnel, and it shines far enough to show that it splits into three tunnels a little ways in. As far as I can tell from here, they’re parallel, but that doesn’t mean they don’t branch off somewhere farther down.
“Let’s go, sweetheart.”
Fifty feet in, we find our first piece of graffiti on the concrete wall. In faded black spray paint, it reads “College Is Okay If You,” then the writing gets too faded to read, leaving the secret to making college “okay” forever mysterious.
When we get to the split, I have Nell choose, and she picks the middle.
We stumble upon a zombie horde painted on the wall, and I squeeze her arm. “Good choice.”
She wrinkles her nose, and I laugh. The sound echoes eerily off the walls around us and causes a twinge of pain in my head.
Nell sees it.
“We shouldn’t have done this.”
“I’m fine,” I assure her. “Let’s keep going. Maybe the Batcave is somewhere down here. Or the Chamber of Secrets.”
She doesn’t react to my Harry Potter reference even though I know she’s read the series because I saw them on a shelf in her room. Stubbornly, she says, “You’re not fine. I did some research after you left this morning. You said you’ve had concussions before. And with each one, no matter how mild, your risk for brain trauma increases. The next time you hit your head a little too hard, the symptoms might not go away for months or at all. They could be permanent. I read an article about one football player who not only can’t play anymore, but he has to have a tutor in all of his classes even though he used to be a straight-A student. He can’t concentrate. Can’t retain facts. And it’s been three years since his last concussion. He can’t play football, and football has made it so that he’ll have a hard time doing anything else.”
“I know, Nell.”
She stops abruptly, pulling her arm away from mine. “You . . . know?” She sounds like my knowing this is some kind of betrayal.
“Yeah, I know it’s risky. But I’m a wide receiver. Not a rough-and-tumble tackler. I don’t take frequent hits to the head.”
“Frequent enough,” she says.
“In a good game, I make maybe six catches. A great game could be eight to ten. Some of those don’t even end in a tackle. And yes, I’m tired now. And I’m still showing symptoms, but I’ve got several days before the next game.”
“And what about practice?”
“I’m taking care of that.” Though I’m not sure how long I can get away with underperforming like I did today. One bad practice is fine, but any more and I might jeopardize my chance to play this weekend even if I don’t mention the concussion.
“It only takes one hit, Mateo. Just one. I get that you’re this big, strong athlete and you think you should just tough it out, but you’re wrong. This game can’t possibly be that important.”
“It is.” We’ve both stopped walking and she’s dropped my arm to square off with me in this dark and dreary corridor.
“Football’s your dream, and I get that. And I know your coach mentioning going pro the other week has you excited, but you also have to be realistic. It’s just not smart.”
Her words stir up long-buried memories, and in an instant all the things in her that remind me of Lina come to the surface, similarities that I haven’t thought about in a long time. But I’ve had this fight before. Maybe not about a concussion, but that dig about being realistic is always the same. People think it’s the nice way to help you manage your hopes . . . that they’re doing you a favor by being honest. But that’s fucking ridiculous. It assumes that you’re stupid or naive, that you don’t have reality beating down the door to your thoughts day in and day out. It takes fucking work to dream, and I don’t need anyone else shoving the unlikelihood of success in my face, because I do that to myself enough already.
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.